Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

Trafficked, kept prisoner in Saudi Arabia Wanjiku Njoki was lucky to escape unharmed. She has since found work serving tea for a government parastatal. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
Nairobi, Kenya, Jan 14 2022 (IPS)

Distress calls from vulnerable Kenyan women in Saudi Arabia experiencing mistreatment and torture at the hands of their employers went from 88 in 2019/2020 to 1,025 just one year later.

And this fear is all too familiar for 28-year-old Wanjiku Njoki. The young woman’s whose search for greener pastures in the Gulf landed her in the hands of a physically, mentally, and verbally abusive employer.

In 2018, she travelled to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.

That year, Wanjiku was one of an estimated 57,000 to 100,000 Kenyans who travel to Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain annually, for unskilled and semi-skilled work, according to the Ministry of Labour, Social Security and Services.

“I heard stories of suffering and death, especially from Saudi Arabia, but the recruiting agent told us they only work with employers who have no history of abuse,” she tells IPS.

“They also lied about the salary. I received $180 per month and not the $700 promised. My employer would pay me, make me sign a document confirming the payment and then steal the money back. When I told them about the missing money, the man and his wife would slap me and refuse to feed me.”

Her life as a shagala, which she says is Arabic for house helper or servant, became a year-long nightmare. With her passport and mobile phone confiscated by her employer, cutting her off from the rest of the world, she saw no way out.

“I worked from 5 am to midnight every day. I spoke only when spoken to and was very depressed. With time, I befriended the gardener who allowed me to secretly use his mobile phone,” she says.

Eventually, she connected with Kenyans in Saudi Arabia through social media, who told her how to escape, get arrested and deported. In 2020, Wanjiku returned to her village in Kagongo, Kiambu County, empty-handed but alive.

Saudi Arabia has a modern slavery prevalence rank index of 138 out of 167 countries as per the Global Slavery Index. The index also estimates that 61,000 people live in modern slavery and that 46 out of every 100 people are vulnerable to modern slavery.

Confronted by unemployment rates that are among the highest in the world as per the UN’s International Labour Organization (ILO), hundreds of vulnerable women like Wanjiku continue to take, more often than not, a doomed voyage to the Gulf.

The parliamentary committee on labour and social welfare indicate the number of Kenyans working in Saudi Arabia has risen from 55,000 in 2019 to 97,000. The number of deaths and distress incidences has also increased.

In 2019, three deaths were reported to the Kenya embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, rising to 48 deaths in 2020 and, as of September 2021, 41 deaths.

Thus far in 2021, three deaths have been reported in Qatar, one in the United Arab Emirates, two in Kuwait, nine in Oman and two in Bahrain.

“There are at least a hundred backstreet agencies linking workers to the Middle East. Only 29 agencies are government approved and licensed. Many agencies are very greedy and are least concerned with the safety and security of their recruits,” says Suzanne Karanja, a Nairobi-based recruitment agent.

“There is money to be made because a prospective employer will pay me $1,800 to $2,000 per head to facilitate travel to their country. Most agents do not intervene when trouble comes. Their work is done once they receive the commission.”

Karanja says the slave and master scenario presents itself among female domestic workers and employers in the Middle East mainly because employers incur the entire cost of processing travel documents, training, and travel.

She tells IPS that a potential employer pays at least $2500, split between a recruitment agent in the country of origin and the destination country.

If the recruited domestic worker leaves before the contract is completed, employers insist on a refund.

She says the government must step up and crack down on backstreet agents for violating terms of operation, not registering their businesses at a cost of $5000 or paying the $5000 to $10 000 once-off bond.

The $5,000, she says, is supposed to be used to rescue distressed women who, so far, are rescued by Kenyans of goodwill when their distress stories circulate on social media.

Additionally, Karanja speaks of Kenyans illegally detained in the Middle East for challenging poor working conditions and others stranded and living on the streets hoping to be arrested and deported.

“All the deaths are among young women, and their employers say they died of cardiac arrest. How is this possible? Young, energetic women who went through and passed mandatory medical tests dying within one to four years of being in the Middle East?” Karanja questions.

Wanjiku says that the Kenya Embassy in Saudi Arabia should be scrapped because it is notorious for turning a blind eye.

“Families of women who died in the Middle East have video and text message evidence of their loved ones crying for help, but the embassy and agents did nothing to rescue them. The women record themselves on mobile phones and send these videos to their families and social media but help only comes through ordinary Kenyans.”

Parliament’s Standing Committee on Labour and Social Welfare travelled to the Gulf region in April 2021 to find solutions to the crisis.

Karanja stresses that the situation is dire, prompting the Foreign Affairs Principal Secretary Macharia Kamau to write to the Ministry of Labour in July 2021, strongly recommending a temporary ban on recruitment and export of domestic workers to Saudi Arabia until protection measures are in place.

Thus far, no concrete actions have come from the recommendation or others made by politicians after the Gulf visit. Meanwhile, blinded by poverty and desperation, vulnerable women continue to make their way to the Gulf.

 

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Credit: Albert Gonzalez Farran / UNAMID

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Jan 14 2022 (IPS)

While absolutely ready to kill, with the biggest military powers spending in 2020 nearly two trillion US dollars on weapons, the world is shockingly unprepared to save the lives of millions of unarmed, innocent civilian victims of wars… and other man-made catastrophes.

The military spending data come from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), which also reports that global nuclear arsenals grow as states continue to modernise, thus sharply increasing the dangers of an unimaginable number of victims of the most devastating death machinery.

"As fighting continues to displace tens of thousands while disrupting access to nutritious food for millions of people, over half the population – 16.2 million people – are facing acute hunger, with 5.1 million people at risk of famine. Half of all children under 5 – 2.3 million – are at risk of malnutrition this year."

Parallelly, the world’s politicians continue to subsidise fossil fuel with six trillion dollars in just one year, being fully aware that such fuels harvest the lives of millions of humans, while devoting a tiny portion of such huge amounts to public health care systems.

In fact, 27 December 2021 marked the International Day of Epidemic Preparedness.

According to the United Nations, “global health crises threaten to overwhelm already overstretched health systems, disrupt global supply chains and cause disproportionate devastation of the livelihoods of people, including women and children, and the economies of the poorest and most vulnerable countries.”

 

Otherwise, more epidemics to come

“In the event of the absence of international attention, future epidemics could surpass previous outbreaks in terms of intensity and gravity.”

The UN adds that “we need to recognise the primary role and responsibility of Governments and the indispensable contribution of relevant stakeholders in tackling global health challenges, especially women, who make up the majority of the world’s health workers.”

 

The poorest, hit hardest

For his part, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO), said “While we have all undoubtedly been impacted by the pandemic, the poorest and most marginalised have been hit hardest – both in terms of lives and livelihoods lost.”

Tedros said scaling up production and equitable distribution remains the major barrier to ending the acute stage of the pandemic. “It is a travesty that in some countries health workers and those at-risk groups remain completely unvaccinated.”

As countries move forward post-COVID-19, it will be vital to avoid cuts in public spending on health and other social sectors. Such cuts are likely to increase hardship among already disadvantaged groups, said the WHO chief.

“Instead, governments should target spending an additional 1% of GDP on primary health care, while also working to address the shortfall of 18 million health workers needed globally to achieve universal health coverage by 2030.”

 

An appeal to the world’s billionaires

“A perfect storm of conflict, climate crises, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and rising costs for reaching people in need is causing a seismic hunger crisis,” the Nobel Peace Laureate World Food Programme (WFP) for its part announced.

And launched a one-time appeal for the world’s billionaires: 6.6 billion US dollars would help stave off starvation for 42 million people across 43 countries.”

 

A breakdown

Of this required funding, 3.5 billion US dollars are needed for food and its delivery, including the cost of shipping and transport to the country, plus warehousing and “last mile” delivery of food using air, land and river transport, contracted truck drivers and required security escorts in conflict-affected zones –fuelled by warlords– to distribute food to those who need it most.

Another 2 billion US dollars are required for cash and food vouchers (including transaction fees) in places where markets can function. This type of assistance enables those most in need to buy the food of their choice and supports local economies.

As well, 700 million US dollars would be devoted to country-specific costs to design, scale up and manage the implementation of efficient and effective programmes for millions of tonnes more food and cash transfers and vouchers – adapted to the in-country conditions and operational risks in 43 countries.

 

The case of Yemen

For its part, UNICEF’s Humanitarian Action for Children has launched an appeal to help support the agency’s work in war-torn Yemen as it provides conflict and disaster-affected children with “access to water, sanitation, nutrition, education, health and protection services.”

Specifically, UNICEF requires 484.4 million US dollars to reach 8 million children among 11.3 million infants in need.

Meantime, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has appealed  for 170 million US dollars in 2021 to meet the increasing needs of displaced, conflict-affected and migrant communities in Yemen.

As of today, only half of these funds have been received. The 3.85 billion US dollars Humanitarian Response Plan for Yemen is also only funded at 50 percent.

Yemen’s grim picture takes place in a moment in which the World Food Programme (WFP) warns that seven years of conflict show no sign of abating, nor does rising hunger.

“As fighting continues to displace tens of thousands while disrupting access to nutritious food for millions of people, over half the population – 16.2 million people – are facing acute hunger, with 5.1 million people at risk of famine. Half of all children under 5 – 2.3 million – are at risk of malnutrition this year.”

 

Infectious diseases: not only COVID

COVID-19 continues to demonstrate how quickly “an infectious disease can sweep across the world”, pushing health systems to the brink and upending daily life for all of humanity, the UN chief said on Monday, marking the International Day of Epidemic Preparedness.

“It also revealed our failure to learn the lessons of recent health emergencies like SARS, avian influenza, Zika, Ebola and others”, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in his message on the World Day.

“And it reminded us that the world remains woefully unprepared to stop localised outbreaks from spilling across borders, and spiralling into a global pandemic”.

 

Halting infectious diseases

Noting that infectious diseases remain “a clear and present danger to every country”, Guterres maintained COVID-19 would not be the last pandemic for humanity.

“Even as the world responds to this health crisis, he spelled out the need to prepare for the next one.”

This means scaling-up investments in better monitoring, early detection and rapid response plans in every country — especially the most vulnerable, he said.

“It means strengthening primary health care at the local level to prevent collapse… ensuring equitable access to lifesaving interventions, like vaccines for all people and…achieving Universal Health Coverage.”

 

Spreading like wildfire

Meanwhile, as cases of the new Omicron variant continue to spread like wildfire, 70% of COVID vaccines have been distributed to the world’s ten largest economies, while the poorest countries have received just 0.8%, according to the UN, calling it “not only unjust, but also a threat to the entire planet.”

To end this cycle, the United Nations underscored that at least 70% of the population in every country must be inoculated, which the UN vaccine strategy aims to achieve by mid-2022.

 

Deaf ears… again

Although this will require at least 11 billion vaccine doses, it is doable so long as sufficient resources are put into distribution.

In short, the three above-mentioned funding appeals represent an astonishingly irrelevant fraction of the giant amount of 2,000,000,000,000 US dollars of the world’s spending on killing machines.

In spite of that, such appeals for saving lives fall, once again, on deaf ears.

 

A woman, accompanied by a child, casts her vote during the general elections in Mozambique. Meanwhile, the United Nations marked the annual International Day of Democracy last September calling on world leaders to build a more equal, inclusive and sustainable world, with full respect for human rights. Credit: UNDP/Rochan Kadariya

By Simone Galimberti
KATHMANDU, Nepal, Jan 14 2022 (IPS)

There is no doubt that the building the magnificent Women’s Pavilion at the Dubai World Expo 2020 deserves unconditional praise and admiration, a bold landmark that projects the concept of gender empowerment and gender equality.

Yet at the same time I am wondering why the organizers of the World Expo didn’t come up with a different kind of pavilion, one focused on democracy and people’s participation in policy affairs.

On many ways, celebrating women but overlooking democracy and with it, one of its prerequisites and at the same time, byproducts, human rights, is a contradiction that, unfortunately should not shock us considering the overall state of democracy and human rights around the world.

In this context the Summit for Democracy organized by President Biden in December was an important undertaking.

It wasn’t because United States of America was behind it, a country that, as we know, it is dealing with some deep fractures in terms of in issues related to voting rights and universal franchise.

It was but because the Summit was a symbolic gesture, a statement about, on the one hand, the relevance and resilience democracy still has for millions of people around the world and, on the other hand, almost paradoxically, about its vulnerability and fragility.

If many people still can exercise their franchise and freely express their opinion, global reports like the Global State of Democracy 2021 Report published by the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, IDEA, it is clear that democracy is under assault both in traditional liberal democratic settings as well as in regions with emerging democratic practices.

Unfortunately, the ongoing geopolitical dynamics are preventing a neutral debate about the future of democracy and instead a clash of perspectives and with it, different political systems, is prevailing, hampering an important conversation.

On the one hand, there is the liberal democracy model based on periodic elections and on the other side of the spectrum, we find the one-party ruling system.

In the between, a mix of hybrid models that, while formally embracing electoral democracy, act more like authoritarian regimes.

Yet perhaps there is another way to look at this equation, a possibility that would put universal human rights at the center of any political system being embraced, regardless its voting practices.

“The response to the pandemic, and to the widespread discontent that preceded it, must be based on a New Social Contract and a New Global Deal that create equal opportunities for all and respect the rights and freedoms of all.” – UN Secretary-General António Guterres. Credit: United Nations

You might not be able to periodically elect your representatives but still in practice, you could enjoy freedom of opinion, the liberty to express your judgement on the current status of affairs in your country.

It is unclear how criticism and divergent opinions are continuously seen as such a lethal arms that can put at risk the survival of nations but this is what is happening almost on daily basis.

For example, while Dubai is celebrating its mesmerizing Expo, the U.A.E. are still jailing human rights defender Ahmed Mansoor detained since March 2017.

Whatever the charges against him, the authorities are showing contempt for the most basic human rights and this is not just an isolated episode but rather a consistent pattern of abuses.

Undoubtedly, it can be certainly be better in relation to basic human rights and that’s why the Summit for Democracy could become an opportunity to press nations like the U.A.E. to show leadership rather than fear and insecurity in matter of democracy and human rights.

The U.A.E. like many other authoritarian or totalitarian regimes are a success stories in so many extents.
Events like the Expo or the upcoming World Cup in Qatar, another democratic outcast despite the recent election of the Shura Council or the soon to happen Winter Olympics and Paralympics Games in China, are showing how such countries have found their own path to excellence and prosperity.

There are risks associated with a nation like the USA pushing the democracy agenda but still the follow up summit that will be organized by the Biden Administration in 2022 could offer a way for more nations to step up and show some commitment at least to human rights.

Will those nations who did not get invited to the summit this year, nations like the U.A.E. and Qatar do more in this area or simply will they carry on with business with a “business as usual” approach?

To be clear, there is no doubt that it would be a mistake to just promote the liberal democratic model based on elections and representation as the only blue print to be followed universally.

There are, indeed, other ways to reinvigorate democracy and human rights and for example, the ongoing conversation on the New Social Contract being promoted by the United Nations could offer such venue to rethink the relationships between people and their governments.

That’s why it is so relevant to be as inclusive as possible in building on the momentum opened by the UN Secretary General with its push for a New Social Contract because such discussions could enable nations like the U.A.E. to also join and contribute, on their own ways, to the formulation of a better and just, not just more efficient, governance models.

Involving youth is going to be paramount.

Recently during the World Youth Forum organized by the Egyptian Government, another nation falling well behind in human right standards and practices, Secretary General Guterres, invited youth to “keeping speaking out”.

I am not entirely sure how such invite would be digested by President El-Sisi, the convener of the Forum but Guterres is right in asserting youth’s right to speak up and share their voice.

More than ever, the United Nations have an enormous responsibility to keep focusing on human rights and freedom of expression and such an effort can help move forward, even indirectly, the global agenda being embraced by President Biden.

While Guterres might not be able to explicitly talk about democracy and elections, he is well positioned to further enhance the debate around the New Social Contract and with it, bring up inconvenient topics to those leaders uncomfortable to talk about democracy and human rights.

And such leaders from states like U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Brunei, China or Nicaragua, just to mention few nations certainly not trailblazers in human rights, should not only listen to but also get engaged with such issues.

Will Biden tactically find a way to allow the United Nations, with its proclaimed neutrality, to be involved in such difficult conversations?

Human rights abused cannot be condoned anywhere and this is also a standard applicable to everyone, including to those states who proudly burnish strong democratic credentials, for example, nations of the E.U. or the U.S.A. itself.

We hope that one day not too far from today, the U.A.E. and other likeminded nations might be able to tell their own success stories in terms of human rights protection and people’s participation to local affairs.

They do not lack the creativity and resources to find their own solutions that, while meeting the highest human rights standards, at the same time, can be localized enough to offer novel ideas to make their societies more inclusive, more open and just.

After all, a social contract just based on economic prosperity, while doing the job now, won’t go too far nor will be resilient enough to navigate future crises.

Simone Galimberti is the Co-Founder of ENGAGE, an NGO partnering with youths living with disabilities. The opinions expressed here are personal.

 

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By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM, Jan 13 2022 (IPS)

In several countries around the globe, telling the truth is according to its rulers and other influential, generally wealthy, persons a serious crime that might be punished by muzzling the truth-tellers, slandering and humiliating them, and threatening their families and friends. If that does not make them shut up and repent they might be tortured, imprisoned and even killed.

George Grosz: “A Writer, Is He?” (1936)

Novaya Gazeta was founded in 1993 with the self-imposed task of acting as “an honest, independent, and rich source of information benefiting Russian citizens.” However, to provide a critical and investigative coverage of Russian political and social affairs is a precarious venture and Novaya Gazeta’s 60 journalists, divided between ten major Russian cities, are all living dangerously.

In 2000, Igor Domnikov, who in Novaya Gazeta wrote witty essays about business corruption, had by the door to his apartment his skull crushed by a hammer blow. In 2001,Victor Popkov died after being wounded in a gunfight while on Novaya Gazeta’s behalf reporting about the Chechnyan war. In 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, human rights activist and Novaya Gazeta reporter, was in the elevator of her block of flats shot twice at point-blank range, in the chest and the head. In 2009, a human rights lawyer, Stanislav Markelov, was shot to death while leaving a news conference in Moscow, less than 800 metres from the Kremlin, while Anastasia Baburova, a journalist from Novaya Gazeta who tried to come to his assistance was shot and killed as well. The same year, the Novaya Gazeta reporter Natalia Estemitrova had been seen screaming while she was forced into a car just outside her house in the Chechnyan capital Grozny. Two hours later she was found dead from one shot to the head and one to the chest.

Shchekochikin, a member of the Parliament, was in Novaya Gazeta writing articles about criminal activities and corruption among officers of FSB RF, Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, the main successor agency to KGB. Shchekochikin died suddenly on 3 July 2003 from a mysterious illness, a few days before his scheduled departure to the U.S., where he was going to meet with FBI agents investigating U.S. contacts with Russian oligarchs and FSB agents. Shchekochikin’s medical records were lost, though physicians who had treated him explained that their patient’s symptoms indicated poisoning from “radioactive materials”.

It was not the first time KGB/FSB used radioactive substances to poison defectors and detractors. The first recorded incident was in 1957 when Nikolai Khoklov was poisoned by radioactive Thallium-201, suffering symptoms similar to those of Roman Tsepov, a corrupt businessman who in 2004 after drinking a cup of tea at a local FSB office experienced a sudden drop of white blood cells and died after two weeks. In 2006, Alexander Litvinenkov, a defector and former FSB agent died in London after being poisoned with polonium-210. In 2018, another defector and former military intelligence officer, Sergei Skripal, was in Salisbury with his daughter poisoned by a Novichok Nerve Agent and in 2020, anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny was poisoned by a similar substance.

When Novaya Gazeta’s editor-in-chief, Dmitry Muratov, in Oslo was awarded the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize he lamented Russian limitations to free speech, adding that he was not the rightful receiver of the prestigious prize. Worthier men and women had lost their lives while defending the truth: “It’s just that the Nobel Peace Prize isn’t awarded posthumously, it’s awarded to living people.” Accordingly, in his Nobel speech Muratov stated that:

“…this award is for all true journalism. This award is to my colleagues from Novaya Gazeta, who have lost their lives – Igor Domnikov, Yuri Shchekotschikhin, Anna Politkovskaya, Anastasija Baburova, Stas Markelov and Natasha Estemirova. This award is also to the colleagues who are alive, to the professional community who perform their professional duty.”

The Philippine journalist Maria Angelita Ressa shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Dmitry Muratov. The prize was awarded for “their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.”

In her speech, Maria Ressa mentioned that “in the Philippines, more lawyers have been killed – at least 63 compared to the 22 journalists murdered after President Rodrigo Duterte took office in 2016.” Just the day before she was giving her Nobel speech, Maria Ressa’s colleague, Jesus “Jess” Malabanan, was killed in a street in Manila.

Rodrigo Duterte remains popular among the majority of the Philippine population. After his election victory in 2016 something called DuterteNomics was introduced, including tax reforms, infrastructure development, social protection programs, a shift to a federal system of Government and strengthened relations with China and Russia. The infrastructure initiative was promoted through the slogan: “Build! Build! Build!” In 2021, 214 airport projects, 451 commercial social and tourism port projects, 29,264 kilometres of roads, 5,950 bridges, 11,340 flood control projects, 11,340 evacuation centres, and 150,149 classrooms were completed under the infrastructure program.

In spite of this progress Duterte has from some quarters been severely criticized for his obvious authoritarianism, self-glorification, and rampant populism, expressed through callous and vulgar rethorics, for example his trivialization of rape and the murderous activities of vigilante groups. Duterte has repeatedly confirmed to personally having killed suspected criminals during his term as mayor of Davao and he is the only Philippine president who has refused to declare his assets and liabilities. Furthermore, he has by human rights groups, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, been directly linked to extrajudicial killings of over 1,400 alleged criminals and street children, while the International Criminal Court in The Hague currently is investigating his administration’s crackdown on narcotics, said to have left as many as 30,000 dead, while the administration listed the toll at around 8,000.

Duterte’s image of being a strong-willed, controversial but highly efficient leader has been actively supported by a docile propaganda machinery which, among other means, allegedly is supported by a pro-Duterte online “troll army” that is pushing out fake news stories and manipulating the narrative around his presidency. Such misuse of the web was lamented by both Markelov and Ressa, who emphasized that one of the main tasks of journalism is to distinguish between facts and fiction, meaning that a reporter must patiently and objectively investigate as many angles as possible of an issue at large. Markelov quoted the famous war photographer Robert Capa: “If your picture isn’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.”

Both Markelov and Ressa declared that the immense power of a constantly and increasingly advanced communication technology is both beneficiary and harmful for upholding the truth. It connects people from all over the world, allows for sharing ideas and the spreading of awareness about human rights abuses. However, the web also spreads a virus of lies that incites us against each other, brings out our fears, anger and hate, and sets the stage for the rise of authoritarians and dictators all over the world. Journalists have to contradict that kind of hate and violence, which by Ressa is defined as:

“the toxic sludge that’s coursing through our information ecosystem, prioritized by American internet companies that make more money by spreading that hate and triggering the worst in us. […] What happens on social media doesn’t stay on social media. Online violence is real world violence. Social media is a deadly game for power and money. […] Our personal experiences are sucked into a database, organized by Artificial Intelligence, then sold to the highest bidder. Highly profitable micro-targeting operations are engineered to structurally undermine human will – a behavior modification system in which we are Pavlov’s dogs, experimented on in real time with disastrous consequences in countries like mine,”

Markelov stated that much of the unfounded and manipulated information that spreads its poison through the web have dimmed our conscience and even worse, making people believe that:

“… politicians who avoid bloodshed are weak. While threatening the world with violence and war is the duty of true patriots. Aggressive marketing of war affects people and they start thinking that war is acceptable.”

In such a poisoned environment truth-telling journalists are suffering. In may countries they live under a real threat of being slandered and tortured, of spending the rest of their lives in jail, or being brutally murdered. They have no idea what the future holds for them. Nevertheless, these heroes of the free word assume that their sacrifices are worth the risks they are taking. They believe in their mission to bring the truth to people and thus support empathy, peace and critical thinking. In the words of Markelov:

“Yes, we growl and bite. Yes, we have sharp teeth and strong grip. But we are the prerequisite for progress. We are the antidote against tyranny. […] I want journalists to die old.”

Source: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2021/ceremony-speech/

 

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Credit: Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament/Henry Kenyon

By Daryl G. Kimball
WASHINGTON DC, Jan 13 2022 (IPS)

On Jan. 3, the leaders of the five nuclear-armed members of the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) issued a rare joint statement on preventing nuclear war in which they affirmed, for the first time, the 1985 Reagan-Gorbachev maxim that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

The U.S., Chinese, French, Russian, and UK effort was designed in part to create a positive atmosphere for the 10th NPT review conference, which has been delayed again by the pandemic. It also clearly aims to address global concerns about the rising danger of nuclear conflict among states and signals a potential for further cooperation to address this existential threat.

The question now is, do they have the will and the skill to translate their laudable intentions into action before it is too late?

U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price hailed the statement as “extraordinary.” A more sober reading shows that it falls woefully short of committing the five to the policies and actions necessary to prevent nuclear war.

In fact, the statement illustrates how their blind faith in deterrence theories, which hinge on a credible threat of using nuclear weapons, perpetuates conditions that could lead to nuclear catastrophe.

The statement asserts that “nuclear weapons—for as long as they continue to exist—should serve defensive purposes, deter aggression, and prevent war.” Yet, such broad language suggests they might use nuclear weapons to “defend” themselves against a wide range of threats, including non-nuclear threats.

Given the indiscriminate and horrific effects of nuclear weapons use, such policies are dangerous, immoral, and legally unjustifiable.

At the very least, if the leaders of these states are serious about averting nuclear war, they should formally adopt no-first-use policies or, as U.S. President Joe Biden promised in 2020, declare that the sole purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter or possibly respond to a nuclear attack.

Even this approach perpetuates circumstances that could lead to nuclear war by accident or miscalculation. The only way to ensure nuclear weapons are never used is “to do away with them entirely,” as President Ronald Reagan argued in 1984, and sooner rather than later.

But on disarmament, the statement only expressed a “desire to work with all states to create a security environment more conducive to progress on disarmament with the ultimate goal of a world without nuclear weapons with undiminished security for all.” This vague, caveated promise rings hollow after years of stalled disarmament progress and an accelerating global nuclear arms race.

A year ago, Russia and the United States extended the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, but they have not begun negotiations on a follow-on agreement. Meanwhile, both spend billions of dollars annually to maintain and upgrade their nuclear forces, which far exceed any rational concept of what it takes to deter a nuclear attack.

China is on pace to double or triple the size of its land-based strategic missile force in the coming years. Worse still, despite past promises “to engage in the process leading to the total elimination of nuclear weapons,” Chinese leaders are rebuffing calls to engage in arms control talks with the United States and others. The United Kingdom, meanwhile, announced last year it would increase its deployed strategic warhead ceiling.

Fresh statements by the five NPT nuclear-armed states reaffirming their “intention” to fulfill their NPT disarmament obligations are hardly credible in the absence of time-bound commitments to specific disarmament actions.

At the same time, the five, led by France, have criticized the good faith efforts by the majority of NPT non-nuclear-weapon states-parties to advance the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Contrary to claims by the nuclear-armed states, the TPNW reinforces the NPT and the norm against possessing, testing, and using nuclear weapons.

Rather than engage TPNW leaders on their substantive concerns, U.S. officials are pressuring influential states, including Sweden, Germany, and Japan, not to attend the first meeting of TPNW states-parties as observers. Such bullying will only reinforce enthusiasm for the TPNW and undermine U.S. credibility on nuclear matters.

The leaders of the nuclear five, especially Biden, can and must do better. Before the NPT review conference later this year, Russia and the United States should commit to conclude by 2025 negotiations on further verifiable cuts in strategic and nonstrategic nuclear forces and on constraints on long-range missile defenses.

China, France, and the UK should agree to join nuclear arms control talks no later than 2025 and to freeze their stockpiles as Washington and Moscow negotiate deeper cuts in theirs.

Instead of belittling the TPNW, the five states need to get their own houses in order. Concrete action on disarmament is overdue. It will help create a more stable and peaceful international security environment and facilitate the transformative move from unsustainable and dangerous deterrence doctrines toward a world free of the fear of nuclear Armageddon.

Source: Arms Control Today

Daryl G. Kimball is Executive Director of the Arms Control Association, Washington DC.

 

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The UN’s empty corridors. Credit: United Nations

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 13 2022 (IPS)

The 22-month-old coronavirus pandemic – which has claimed over 5.4 million lives worldwide, devastated economies and reduced an additional 100 million people to poverty—has also disrupted the work of a partially locked-down United Nations triggering a potential cash crisis in the world body.

Addressing the UN’s Administrative and Budgetary Committee late last year, a spokesperson for the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) said for “any organisation to succeed, it must be given adequate financial resources to implement its mandates. However, COVID-19 has disrupted not just the UN’s work, but many of our economies”.

“It is understandable that countries whose economies have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19 may face difficulties in paying their assessments (namely UN’s membership dues). It is therefore all the more important for Member States that have the capacity to pay their assessed contributions to do so in full, on time, and without conditions”.

“Otherwise, the UN faces a real risk of not having the resources it needs to carry out its mandates,” said the spokesman for ASEAN, a group which comprises Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

Last year, 11 countries were in arrears under the terms of the UN charter, including Antigua and Barbuda, Comoros, the Republic of Congo, Guinea, Iran, Papua New Guinea, Sao Tome and Principe, Somalia, Sudan, Vanuatu and Venezuela.

Article 19 of the UN charter says “A Member of the United Nations which is in arrears in the payment of its financial contributions to the Organization shall have no vote in the General Assembly, if the amount of its arrears equals or exceeds the amount of the contributions due from it for the preceding two full years. The General Assembly may, nevertheless, permit such a member to vote if it is satisfied that the failure to pay is due to conditions beyond the control of the Member.”

Asked about the defaulting member states, Paulina Kubiak, Spokesperson for the President of the UN General Assembly, told reporters January 12 there were 11 Member States on the list, which is similar to the numbers in previous years.

She said these Member States are unable to vote in the General Assembly until they make the minimum payment. But there are a few exceptions.

In A/Res/76/2, the General Assembly decided that Comoros, Sao Tome and Principe, and Somalia shall be permitted to vote in the GA until the end of the current 76th session, leaving 8 countries still in default.

The exceptions are made by the General Assembly at the start of the session on the recommendation of the Committee on Contributions. These exceptions are based largely on the state of a country’s faltering economy.

On December 24, the 193-member UN General Assembly adopted a regular budget of $3.12 billion for 2022 while the annual peacekeeping budget is around $6.5 billion.

The off-and-on lock down of the United Nations since March 2020– with the overwhelming majority of its 9,900 staffers working from home—is beginning to have an impact on the operational services of the world body.

The lockdown, which was partially lifted last month, has been reinstated twice. In a message to New York-based UN staff sent out on January 10, Gilles Michaud, chair of the UN’s Occupational Safety and Health Committee, says after consultation with UN’s senior leadership, it has been decided staffers will continue to work from home (WFH) and not return to office (RTO)— through 28 January “at which point the situation will be reviewed once again.”

The decision to extend WFH has been prompted largely by the fast-spreading Omicron variant which last week averaged about 37,000 cases daily and overwhelmed New York city hospitals. But there is no official breakdown of the number of virus cases among UN staffers.

Ambassador Boubacar Diallo of Guinea, the outgoing chairman of the Group of 77 plus China, the largest single coalition of developing countries at the UN, warned late last year that the Group continues to be disappointed that due to security concerns, the Administrative and Budgetary Committee is being deprived of interpretation services (in the UN’s six official languages) during informal consultations.

This is primarily due to the absence of staff from the UN premises.

“We look forward to the day that multilingualism is fully restored, and we can enjoy interpretation services as we are doing here today. We are committed to a thorough consideration of the agenda items allocated to the Committee, and in this regard, note with disappointment that several reports are still outstanding,” he added.

This endemic situation, he pointed out, significantly compromises the Committee’s work.

“The global challenges that we face today are becoming far more complex and interconnected, and the solutions require a collective global response. As we have heard from many of our leaders (during the UN General Assembly sessions in September), this is the time for us to double down on multilateralism and reaffirm our commitment to a rules-based multilateral system,” said Ambassador Diallo.

With a resolution being adopted by consensus, including the 134 members of the G77, he said, “It is not possible to turn a blind eye to a General Assembly resolution and a deaf ear to the two-thirds majority of the General Membership.”

Speaking on behalf of the 27-member European Union (EU), Thibault Camelli, Counsellor to the delegation of the EU to the United Nations, said: “We call upon all Member States to pay their contributions in full and on time. We remain deeply concerned that the liquidity situation of the United Nations continues to undermine delivery of mandates.”

The temporary solutions introduced so far, he warned, have only alleviated the consequences of this crisis, and they corner the Organization into systemic underperformance. The Member States of the European Union call upon the Committee to rise up to this challenge. We will continue to advocate for sustainable solutions to this crisis”, he declared.

Joseph Chamie, an international demographer and a former director of the United Nations Population Division, told IPS the current crisis should not come as a surprise to Member States as the coronavirus pandemic has greatly impacted the work of the United Nations.

In addition to the large majority of UN staff members working from home, the normal day-to-day operations of the Organization have been greatly reduced and restricted, he said.

“It’s understandable that many Member States are disappointed with the lack of interpretation services. However, with the available technology, interpretation services for the UN languages should be able to be provided without difficulties”.

It is also not surprising, said Chamie, that many Member States, especially the poor less developed countries, are calling on wealthy, more developed nations to increase their financial contributions to the United Nations.

“However, it strikes me as somewhat ironic that many Member States, including less developed countries, say that have difficulties paying their UN assessments, but they have few difficulties in paying for their military expenditures.”

The UN budget for 2021 was only U.S. $3 billion, a relatively small cost for the international body. In comparison, he pointed out, the UN annual budget amounts to:

— a small percentage of the military expenditures of many countries, including China, India, Russia, the United States and the European Union; 4 percent of the worldwide pet food market; 3 percent of U.S. annual spending on soft drinks; and 1 percent of the wealth of the two richest Americans.

Regarding possible reductions in the numbers, salaries and benefits of UN staff members, it makes little sense and appears to be largely for domestic political consumption. Hopefully, Member States, and the General Assembly, will focus on those critical global issues facing the world’s nearly 8 billion inhabitants.

The relatively small budget of the United Nations is a real bargain for Member States and the world.
In terms of cost, deaths and injuries, the price of peace is far less than the price of war, Chamie declared.

Meanwhile, US Ambassador Patrick Kennedy, Senior Advisor for UN Management and Reform, told delegates the United States urges budget discipline across the UN system and will closely examine the increasing demands for assessed contributions.

This includes ensuring that only necessary construction is undertaken and that major projects avoid cost over-runs. The UN should also seek to contain increased spending in response to new and expanded mandates by eliminating outdated ones, consolidating duplicative areas of work, and repurposing existing resources.

He said staff entitlements and conditions of service comprise nearly two-thirds of the UN’s costs. Reestablishment of a unified salary scale remains a priority for the United States, including through addressing divergent decisions by different administrative tribunals across the UN common system, enhancing transparency on compensation costs including by use of commercially available data, and reaffirming the authority of the ICSC, while improving its methodology.

Speaking on behalf of the African Group, Ambassador Harold Adlai Agyeman of Ghana said: “We insist that, as much as possible, all in-person meetings be held with interpretation services as required by the relevant rules of procedure of the General Assembly and agreed resolutions on multilingualism that is at the core of this organization”.

He said Members of the African Group use, as working languages, four of the six official languages of the United Nations. The Group therefore considers it of utmost importance that Member States should be able to contribute to the deliberations of the Committee in the official language they are optimally effective in.

The UN’s six official languages are: Arabic; Chinese; English; French; Russian; and Spanish.

 

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Barter opens up avenues for rural women who often do not have access to cash and markets. | Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

By External Source
MUMBAI, India, Jan 12 2022 (IPS)

When COVID-19 hit in early 2020, it affected every aspect of people’s lives. For many from the most marginalised sections of society, it meant loss of employment and lack of access to education, food, and the market, among other things.

Farmers in rural India were dealing with a peculiar problem. They had their produce, but since markets were shut during the lockdown there was no place to sell. Further, many bank branches were closed and ATMs were far away. With restrictions on travel, cash was practically out of reach, which curtailed people’s buying power.

Communities had to look for alternate modes of survival. One approach that some of them took was a return to the barter system—a solution they were familiar with. People bartered perishable goods such as vegetables, kirana stores in villages provided essentials in exchange for wheat, and food grains became a currency to pay children’s tuition fees. Those who did not have goods offered physical labour in exchange.

 

How did the transition happen?

Communities in rural India have been practising barter for centuries. In states such as Assam, where barter was extremely popular during the pandemic, it has been celebrated in the form of a fair called Jonbeel Mela for more than five centuries now.

Markets have evolved, and there have been many changes in the way business transactions work, but barter continues to thrive in the close-knit communities of the villages. This is because villages unlike cities are driven by producers as much as consumers and the rural societies survive on trust.

Amid a cash crunch and market shutdowns during COVID-19 many rural communities in India used barter to meet their needs—showing us why this form of exchange still works

The close relationships that people share also allow for easier collectivisation and mobilisation. This was evident during the pandemic when people navigated various COVID-19 safety norms to meet individual and community needs.

Beauty Dutta Borah, a farmer and a grocery store owner in Kawoimari, Sivasagar district, Assam, says that during the pandemic she bartered not only goods, but also services such as getting people to reap and thresh the rice crop. “In most instances I had to just call out to a neighbour for this,” she explains. Dutta Borah adds that goods from various wholesale stores like hers moved across districts often in a single transport vehicle from the village. “A car goes from our village across Sivasagar district twice a week. It can be my car or anyone else’s from the locality. We collect goods from the various local stores and sell it to people at once,” she adds.

A resident of Chetti Thirukonam in Ariyalur district of Tamil Nadu, R Raja compares barter to debit and credit card payments that people in the cities use. He calls it an ‘older form of cashless payment’ that rural communities returned to.

 

New meanings of an old concept

Nonprofits working in the livelihoods sector in rural India are aware of this well-oiled barter machinery. This has allowed them to work with communities for their sustenance—especially in spaces where income alone is not enough for survival. However, since barter is a localised form of exchange, the organisations have also had to develop a nuanced understanding of cultural contexts and histories.

When Drishtee, a nonprofit that works with rural entrepreneurs, developed a mobile barter application during the pandemic, they chose Sivasagar district to start with. The nonprofit’s regional head of the Northeast, Paragdhar Konwar, said that it was a conscious decision considering the region’s history. “Sivasagar was the capital of the Ahom dynasty, which ruled Assam for six centuries. People here have followed the same age-old practices, including that of barter, for a long time now.”

As a result, there was pre-existing community knowledge waiting to be harvested. Konwar adds, “We told people that you will be continuing with the binimoy protha (exchange tradition) before explaining the renewed importance of barter during the pandemic.” The mobile application was used by people in Assam to exchange rice for oil and ducks for chicken eggs and to avail tractor-operated-rice-mill services when mills nearby were shutting down.

For Goonj, a nonprofit that works on community development, barter is core to their work, and a philosophy it embraced even before the pandemic. The names of its initiatives such as Vaapsi (giving back) and ideas such as ‘cloth for work’—aimed at building sustainable livelihoods—are borrowed from the cultural vocabulary of India. Thus, in times of crisis when Goonj mobilises people, it does so from a place of wanting to revive extant concepts rather than introducing jargon that communities might find difficult to comprehend.

Anshu Gupta, founder director at Goonj, says, “I believe we aren’t doing anything new. We are valuing what already exists. Village wisdom has always been valued in the villages, perhaps it wasn’t by people like us. We are just working with that community knowledge and recognising it.”

 

What does barter do for the communities?

Apart from facilitating hyperlocal markets during emergencies, barter also has other advantages for communities. Nonprofits using barter during the pandemic found that it was particularly popular among low-income households and women in rural India.

In cash-poor regions, barter helps people meet their needs locally—be it for immediate necessities, such as food grains, or a used smartphone. Additionally, barter is a viable way for local producers to sell their products. These are producers who cannot avail the benefits of e-commerce platforms or access urban markets, which are driven by large production volumes, standardised packaging, and homogenised aesthetics.

People have also used barter to work on community issues such as lack of water, sanitation, and infrastructure. Goonj, for instance, has used barter as a reward for labour. Villagers work on solving local problems on their own, and are rewarded in the form of goods that often travel from cities to them. Gupta says, “Typically people wait for access to a government scheme to address their local-level problems. Meanwhile, there are unused materials in the city, for which there is demand in villages.”

The nonprofit connects these two. Gupta adds, “Just imagine a situation: You give a person a shirt and the next day you say, ‘This is mine,’ he will say, ‘Yes, it is yours.’ But if a person is building a road or working on a water body for his village and you give him a shirt as a reward, he will say, ‘It might be yours, but I have earned it.’”

Barter opens up avenues for rural women who often do not have access to cash and markets. Satyan Mishra, co-founder and managing director at Drishtee, says, “Women who were earlier making things just for themselves saw barter as a big opportunity.” They started exchanging hand-made products for goods that they or their families wanted.

In Varanasi, women were found bartering hair for goods. Monixa Bordoloi, a resident of Dhekeria Gaon, Sonitpur district, Assam, asserts that she will continue to barter whether or not there is a pandemic. She says, “Women barter things they need, not what they already have.”

 

Can barter replace cash?

Despite the many innovative ways in which people have used barter, cash remains a necessity for many of people’s needs. For instance, while parents of students in Begusarai district, Bihar, have been able to use barter for their children’s education, they have not been able to pay their medical bills using the same method.

The world is therefore unlikely to shift overnight to a system of social exchange. Most aspects of our lives will continue to be defined by abstract monetary currencies. There will also be people’s aspirations that can only be met with money.

For this we will need jobs, job securities, equal opportunities for education, affordable health care, and more. But as many rural communities using barter confirm, it will coexist as a parallel economy embodying the many intangibles of a human society, such as trust, goodwill, and resistance.

 

Debojit Dutta is an editorial associate at India Development Review

 

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

Women make up 75 percent of the agricultural labour force in Kenya. Women are increasingly exposed to the effects of climate change, and a Commonwealth report shows that without their inputs, climate action policies compound inequality. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
Nairobi, Kenya, Jan 12 2022 (IPS)

Judy Wangari is one of an estimated 800,000 smallholder potato farmers who, according to the National Potato Council of Kenya, contribute at least 83 percent of the total potato production.

In a good season, her two acres in Molo in Kenya’s Rift Valley region produce between 60 to 80 90kg bags of potato per acre. Due to drastic and erratic weather patterns, Wangari tells IPS that a good season is often not guaranteed.

“We have two potato planting seasons, and we plant before the rains begin. Sometimes we plant too early and other times too late because we are not able to properly read the weather.”

“The rains come too early or too late. Two years after I started potato farming back in 2018, I lost all my potatoes to heavy rainfall,” she says.

Women make up 75 percent of the agricultural labour force in this East African nation.

Overall, women also manage approximately 40 percent of the smallholder farms. As pillars of food production and largely lacking in financial and technical support, women are increasingly exposed to the effects of climate change and consequent land degradation.

“We may be in the same storm, but we are definitely not in the same boat. Nowhere is this truer than for women in the face of climate change,” says Patricia Scotland, the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth.

A Commonwealth report titled Gender Integration for Climate Action: A Review of Commonwealth Member Country Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), presented at the recent UN climate summit COP26, shows how underrepresentation of women in climate policies and plans, poor access to climate finance, technologies, and lack of capacity for effective decision-making compounds inequality.

The lack of representation also creates a barrier to women fully contributing to climate action, reinforcing the circle, and continuing vulnerability.

However, the report also showed that countries are increasingly acknowledging the vulnerability and inequality of women in climate action, taking concrete steps to address it.

At the heart of the review is a macro-level overview of the extent of gender integration in NDCs – the technical term for national climate action plans under the Paris Agreement – in Commonwealth member countries. The study covered both ‘intended’ NDCs, and new or revised NDCs submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) before 26 July 2021.

Overall, 65 percent of Commonwealth countries included gender as a cross-cutting or mainstreaming priority in new or updated NDCs.

“Without women, these commitments to limit global warming won’t be reached,” says Scotland, adding that the Commonwealth Secretariat has undertaken to strengthen gender engagement within the respective NDCs of its 54 member states.

Countries have also identified challenges, particularly in finance, where international support is urgently needed.

“The Kingdom of Eswatini recognises gender as a cross-cutting issue with the National Development Strategy and National Development Policy calling for the mainstreaming of gender equity,” says Duduzile Nhlengethwa-Masina, Director of the Eswatini Meteorological Service in the Ministry of Tourism and Environmental Affairs.

“In developing the NDC, we specifically engaged gender and women groups. This included having a session with Women in Parliament in October 2020 and another on Climate Change and Gender in November 2020.”

These activities encouraged women politicians to plant trees in the country’s capital. They also initiated the idea of a women’s group to increase women’s involvement in climate action and ensure it is gender sensitive.

Furthermore, Nhlengethwa-Masina tells IPS that a gender assessment of policies was undertaken and baselines and indicators for gender-sensitive mitigation and adaptation developed.

“A National Gender Policy was developed in 2021, and climate change was incorporated into this, through support from the Commonwealth Climate Finance Access Hub,” Nhlengethwa-Masina confirms.

Similarly, small island nations such as Saint Lucia recognise the crucial link between climate action, gender, and women’s empowerment.

Saint Lucia’s Chief Sustainable Development and Environment Officer, Annette Rattigan-Leo, says that “gender and women feature more prominently in climate action interventions and strategies.”

Country-wide policies, including the NDC, the National Adaptation Plan and sectoral strategies, clearly state the need to consider gender-related factors. At the same time, the Department of Gender has drafted a National Gender Equality Policy and Strategy to mainstream the issue across various sectors.

Saint Lucia is currently implementing a project to mainstream gender in disaster recovery and climate resilience while improving women’s economic autonomy, supported by Canada and the UK.

The role of women in smart agriculture practices, including agro-processing, is now embraced nationally. While not the main economic stay, agriculture contributes significantly to the country’s revenue.

“Noteworthy, women have assumed entrepreneurial roles over regular farming skills, in women-only farming groups. Consequently, as entrepreneurs, women can actively influence the strategic decision-making requirements necessary for the agriculture sector to become more climate-resilient,” says Rattigan-Leo.

In Namibia, the head of the Monitoring and Evaluation Unit at the Environmental Investment Fund, Aina-Maria Iteta, hopes to strengthen ongoing efforts to emphasise gender inclusivity in the country’s National Climate Change Policy and implementation strategy.

Namibia’s Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism has appointed a UNFCCC National Focal Point on Gender. However, “a lot still needs to be done from creating awareness, developing an action plan, and ensuring a budget to support such initiatives is in place,” she tells IPS.

Experts such as Iteta are quick to point out that even though the review finds considerable progress towards gender representation in policies, plans and strategies, additional financial and technical support is needed.

“There is a gap on the budgeting of climate action on gender, overall. Gender initiatives or actions are always planned and funded on an ad hoc basis making it difficult to ensure this goal of gender mainstreaming in climate action is achieved,” Iteta says. “The Commonwealth can facilitate access to financing gender climate-action initiatives.”

Rattigan-Leo adds that St Lucia is looking to adopt “gender budgeting” into the development of the annual national budget/estimates.

“Capacity building specific to strategic gender budget approaches is an area that can benefit from the Commonwealth Climate Finance Access Hub’s expertise. With the country’s existing financial constraints, especially in the face of COVID-19 related recovery efforts, it would help to determine the best entry points,” she says.

Nhlengethwa-Masina also welcomed more technical assistance in line with the specific needs of relevant agencies and women groups in Eswatini.

For local farmers such as Wangari, the help cannot come soon enough because they continue to struggle to survive and provide for their families on the front lines of climate change.

“If we do not tackle climate change with sufficient urgency and success, those on the wrong end of inequalities, especially women, will bear the hardest burden,” Secretary-General Scotland concluded.

“Climate action is, therefore, incomplete without the contribution of women.”

 

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Tents and makeshift shelters at an IDP camp in Yemen. Credit: UNICEF/Alessio Romenzi

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Jan 12 2022 (IPS)

The panorama is bleak: hunger in the Arab region continues to rise, with more than 90% increase since 2000, while indebtedness is growing, and the economic recovery is tenuous and uneven.

The 2021 Near East and North Africa Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition shows that the number of hungry people in the region reached 69 million people in 2020, “triggered by protracted crises, social unrests and exposure to multiple shocks and stresses such as conflicts, poverty, inequality, climate change, scarce natural resources and the economic repercussions associated with the recent COVID-19 pandemic.”

According to the report, nearly one-third of the Arab region’s population, – or 141 million people – experienced “moderate or severe food insecurity” in 2020, a more than 10 million increase from the previous year.

Barely four out of the major Arab oil producers (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait), enjoy an income that allows them to overcome the worsening hunger crisis in the region.

The other 18 Arab countries –some of them are also oil and gas producers, like Algeria, Iraq, and Libya– are facing "health, food and nutritional insecurities."


The Arab Region includes: Algeria; Bahrain; the Comoros; Djibouti; Egypt; Iraq; Jordan; Kuwait; Lebanon; Libya; Mauritania; Morocco; Oman; Qatar; Saudi Arabia; Somalia; Sudan; Syria; Tunisia; the United Arab Emirates; Yemen, as well as Palestine. Their combined population totals nearly 450 million inhabitants.

Barely four out of the major Arab oil producers (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait), enjoy an income that allows them to overcome the worsening hunger crisis in the region.

The other 18 Arab countries –some of them are also oil and gas producers, like Algeria, Iraq, and Libya– are facing “health, food and nutritional insecurities.”

 

Sharp contrasts

In the case of Yemen, for example, with 30 million inhabitants, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is as low as 19 billion US dollars, compared to the United Arab Emirates (10 million inhabitants), with its GDP amounting to 100 billion US dollars, that’s over five folds that of Yemen with just a third of population.

Another example is the case of Saudi Arabia (33 million inhabitants), with its GDP reaching 700 billion US dollars, compared to Egypt (102 million inhabitants), whose population tripling that of Saudi Arabia, but with just one third of its GDP amounting to less than half of it: to 280 billion US dollars.

 

Conflicts cause hunger for 53 million-plus people

Conflicts continue to be one of the leading causes of hunger in the region, with approximately 53.4 million people facing hunger in countries and areas affected by conflict, which is more than six times higher than in non-conflict countries, says Abdulhakim Elwaer, FAO’s Assistant Director-General and Regional Representative for the Near East and North Africa.

“There may be no visible improvement in the situation this year since hunger’s primary drivers will continue to drag the situation further down the road.”

 

Under-nutrition; over-nutrition

The coexistence of under and over-nutrition is a double burden that many families, communities and countries in the Arab region have to shoulder, especially for children under the age of five, according to the report, which informs that in 2020, 20.5% of children under the age of five are stunted and 7.8% are wasted in 2020.

“Childhood overweight remains a high public health problem in the region, exceeding the global average of 5.7% and reaching 10.7% in the region,” Elwaer adds.

 

Child malnutrition; adult obesity

According to the FAO’s Regional Representative for the Near East and North Africa, the Arab Region is not only struggling with child malnutrition but also with adult obesity.

The prevalence of obesity among adults has been increasing steadily in the region since 2000, reaching 28.8% in 2020, which is more than double the global average of 13.1% and ranks the region as the third most obese in the world, following Northern America with 36.7%, and Australia and New Zealand with 30.7%.

 

Uneven economic recovery

Meanwhile, a World Bank study reports that almost two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, economic recovery in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is tenuous and uneven.

“The performance of each of the region’s 20 economies depends on its individual exposure to oil-price fluctuations and how well it is managing the pandemic. Thus, forecasts for an average regional GDP growth rate of 2.8% in 2021 and a brighter 4.2% in 2022 if the pandemic recedes mask individual country differences.”

The study goes on saying that on top of its tragic human toll, the global health crisis of 2020/21 has shown the extent to which economic performance depends on pandemic control, “with MENA economies among those paying the price for decades of under-investment in public health.”

“Indeed, most MENA countries entered the pandemic overconfident and ill-prepared to cope and vaccination rates too will affect their economic recovery. Again, the outlook is uneven, with richer nations ahead of the field.”

 

Vaccine inequality

By early December, the United Arab Emirates had the world’s highest fully vaccinated population at 90%, while Yemen only fully vaccinated 1% of its population, according to the study, which adds that a more equitable rollout of vaccines across the region is “essential” for recovery.

“In parts of MENA, political instability, fragility, and conflict compound the challenges faced as governments try to handle the pandemic. In Lebanon, economic collapse has had a catastrophic impact on public utilities and people’s livelihoods. In Yemen and Syria, continued armed conflict has combined with the pandemic to plunge the countries deeper into crisis”.

 

Much Uncertainty

MENA’s modest economic recovery follows a contraction of 3.8% in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2020, 0.6 of a percentage point higher than predicted in April that year.
“Overall, the region is facing a tenuous recovery, and one with much uncertainty, with the estimated cumulative cost of the pandemic in terms of GDP losses amounting to almost 200 US billion dollars by the end of the year.”

According to the World Bank, GDP per capita—often considered a more precise measure of the standard of living—conveys an even more sobering message. A projected increase of 1.1% in 2021, after a drop of about 5.4% in 2020, has left real GDP per capita 4.3% below its 2019 level.
Substantial Borrowing

The substantial borrowing that MENA governments have had to incur to finance emergency expenditure on health and social welfare has increased government debt dramatically.

“Average public debt in MENA countries is forecast to decline from 56.3% to 53.6%, while in the developing oil-importing countries, public debt-to-GDP is forecast to rise from 90.4% to 92.3% in 2021, as fiscal deficits remain large” concludes the World Bank.

 

Rapid accumulation of public debt

Parallelly, the accumulated cost of the pandemic is estimated to top 227 billion US dollars by end of 2021, according to another World Bank’s report.

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated long-standing development challenges in the Middle East and North Africa region, “contributing to a rise in poverty, a deterioration of public finances, an increase in debt vulnerabilities, and a further erosion of trust in government,” warns the report.

The World Bank’s latest regional economic update report details the “economic devastation” of the COVID-19 pandemic to date, the long-term ramifications of the resulting explosion in public debt, and the difficult choices governments will face, even as the public health crisis abates.

 

More spending, more indebtedness

The need to keep spending — and keep borrowing — will remain strong for the immediate future. MENA countries will have no choice but to continue spending on healthcare and social protection as long as the pandemic continues, according to the World Bank.

“Consequently, in a post-pandemic world, most MENA countries may find themselves stuck with debt service bills requiring resources that otherwise could be used for economic development.”

View of downtown Nur-Sultan, the capital of Kazakhstan. Credit: World Bank/Shynar Jetpissova

By Paolo Sorbello
ALMATY, Kazakhstan, Jan 12 2022 (IPS)

The most violent protests of the past 30 years have erupted across Kazakhstan — exposing decades of inequality, injustice, and corruption. The protests of an unprecedented scale have rocked cities across Kazakhstan for days, as the population grew increasingly dissatisfied with the country’s leadership.

The government initially tried a carrot-and-stick approach to the unrest, but later was pushed to call a state of emergency and ultimately to request military help from former Soviet allies.

On 6 January, foreign troops landed in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, with a mandate from the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), a NATO-like military alliance that includes Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan. This marked the first official deployment of CSTO forces in the organisation’s so-far unassertive existence.

Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev called for CSTO countries to send in military help and aid the country’s army and special forces in restoring public order. Although temporary and limited in its remit, the CSTO operation could be a cautionary tale regarding the capacity of the Kazakhstani leadership to maintain law and order in the country.

So far, official sources say there are hundreds of casualties, both among law enforcement agents and protesters, thousands were injured in clashes resulting in up to 164 deaths (the number of deaths is currently disputed by the authorities), that lasted multiple days in several cities. More than 6,044 were arrested during the violent confrontation.

The explosive mix of inflation and poverty

The spark that generated such a massive wave of protest originated in the sharp increase of the price of liquified petroleum gas (LPG), a type of fuel that is commonly used in the western regions of the vast Central Asian country.

Paolo Sorbello

Initially justified by the government as the unintended consequence of a decision to enhance competition in the fuel market, the price inflation was met with street protests in Aktau and Zhanaozen, major cities in the Mangistau region, on 2 and 3 January.

Importantly, Mangistau is also one of the main hydrocarbon-producing regions in the country and oil workers often take to the streets when they feel wronged by the companies or the government.

In 2011, for example, an eight-month strike in Zhanaozen was dispersed violently by special forces and police. Unarmed oil workers were shot and the government declared a state of emergency. In the aftermath, the regime did not allow an independent investigation of the matter and jailed three-dozen civilians, calling them guilty for the clashes that officially resulted in 16 deaths.

Up until the first days of January, ‘Zhanaozen’ was synonymous with ‘tragedy’ in Kazakhstan. And it is one of the darkest pages in the country’s three decades since independence. Afraid of even uttering the word, most people referred to the killing of oil workers as ‘the events’.

This time, however, the protests quickly spread to other urban centres across the country, reaching a peak on 4 January in Almaty, where thousands gathered near a sports arena before moving to the main square. Unsurprisingly, the protesters were met by a mass of special police forces that used tear gas, stun grenades, and rubber bullets to disperse the crowd.

The protest continued the next morning with a more belligerent crowd, which set ablaze the city government building and the presidential residence. Fires were reported in other cities as well.

Blind eye towards long-lasting discontent

Drivers in Almaty or the capital Nur-Sultan, however, do not use LPG to fuel their cars, which begs the question: Why did they protest? The answer is political dissatisfaction, which can be summarised in three words: inequality, injustice, and corruption.

After two years of hardship also caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Kazakhstan’s socio-economic texture was damaged beyond repair. Inflation and a weak currency accompanied by worsening employment statistics is a recipe for disaster.

Four million people lost their jobs during the pandemic, a weaker oil price negatively influenced the Kazakh tenge/US dollar exchange rate, which saw the tenge weaken by 16 per cent in two years.

While the poor were getting poorer, the rich were getting richer. The Forbes list of billionaires grew from four to seven in 2021. And this does not include the riches accumulated by Tokayev’s predecessor, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who ruled the country from its independence until his resignation in 2019.

Under Nazarbayev and Tokayev, political reforms lagged behind the people’s demands. Rule of law was an arbitrary concept and was considered a systemic cost by trans-national companies who were willing to invest.

A weak set of rules opened a significant space for corruption. The Kazakhstani elite is known for having used offshore vehicles to launder money, for having taking bribes, and for curbing competition in certain market sectors. The LPG market in the west of the country, for example, was rigged, and this was well known.

In 2019 and 2020, the promise of reform that came with the new leader was disattended, and the population reacted with a wave of protests that were once again brutally repressed. Already in 2021, an incessant wave of labour protests demonstrated how the government was unable to keep most sectors of the population satisfied.

The geopolitical angle

On 5 January, as tensions grew into urban violence in Almaty, to the south, and Aktobe, in the north of the country, Tokayev sacked and arrested long-time Nazarbayev loyalist Karim Massimov from his post as the chief of the KNB, the successor of the KGB. Tokayev also took charge of the position of head of the National Security Council, a post previously held by Nazarbayev.

In the meantime, the world had turned its eyes to Central Asia. When Tokayev asked for a deployment of CSTO troops, his legitimacy within the domestic power apparatus fell. It became clear that he needed both the material help and the approval of his neighbours and allies to stay in power.

This scenario seemed to be reasonable for Russia, which sent the first military contingent and equipment to the south of the border. After taking control of strategic logistics assets, such as the Almaty airport, which had been previously seized by protesters, the CSTO soldiers moved into the city and took part in the local army’s ‘special operation’ to quell the protests.

While the official explanation rests on the infiltration of ‘foreign-trained terrorists’, it is more likely that Russia decided to nudge the CSTO towards an intervention given the weakness of the Tokayev regime.
Speculations of a confrontation between great powers, with Russia and China as the neighbouring interested parties, and the West as the herald of democracy and business interests, seem to be premature.

It is yet unclear if and how Tokayev would retain power, what kind of concession will he or his successor be willing to make for the people – who still feel dissatisfied, marginalised, and betrayed – and what long-term reforms would be planned to make sure that the violence of January 2022 does not repeat.

Source: International Politics and Society which is published by the Global and European Policy Unit of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Hiroshimastrasse 28, D-10785 Berlin.

Dr Paolo Sorbello is a Research Fellow at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy) and holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow (UK). He also works as a freelance journalist in Kazakhstan covering labour topics and the political economy for several news outlets.

 

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Gul Khan*, 53, alongside his children and grandchildren, adds a handful of plastic to the stove in their home in Kabul. Gul Khan* has five sons and two daughters, and two grandchildren. They fled their home in Nangarhar province three years ago. All the children are now in school and Gul Khan and his 26-year-old son work as day laborers. Life is a struggle and winter is the hardest time. “In summer we only have to worry about food,” said Gul Khan. “But in winter we have to worry about finding fuel to burn, fixing the heating system, falling down on the ice when collecting water.” *Names changed for protection reasons. Credit: UNHCR

By Naureen Hossain
Geneva, Jan 11 2022 (IPS)

UN agencies have asked for a record USD 4.4 billion in aid for Afghanistan to avert a full-blown humanitarian crisis that could see hunger, distress, and death and a mass exodus of people from the country.

The agencies OCHA, UNHCR, and their non-governmental organization partners launched their 2022 Humanitarian Response Plans to provide relief for Afghanistan and the region on Tuesday, January 11, 2022.

Speaking at a press conference in Geneva to launch the relief plans, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths stated that this is the “largest-ever appeal for a single country for humanitarian aid”.

Mullah Ahmed* and his children unload firewood that he bought after receiving a cash payment from UNHCR to help his family meet their winter needs. One thousand vulnerable families in the Afghan capital have received cash assistance. Mullah Ahmed, his wife, and their nine children fled their home in Jalalabad four months ago and now live in a house in Kabul that was abandoned by its owner who fled the country during the Taliban takeover. “The cash assistance is very important because my work stops in winter as there is no construction,” he said. “So we need it to buy food and also warm clothes for the children.” *Name changed for protection reasons. Credit: UNHCR

“Events in Afghanistan over the past year have unfolded with dizzying speed and with profound consequences for the Afghan people,” said Griffiths. The world is perplexed and looking for the right way to react. Meanwhile, a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe looms.”

These humanitarian and refugee response plans aim to provide vital humanitarian relief to 23 million people in Afghanistan. They will also be provided to 5.7 million Afghans displaced in local communities in five neighboring countries: Iran, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

Funding will be required from donors. The Afghanistan Humanitarian Response Plan has requested USD 4.4 billion. If funded, this is expected to support aid organizations to ramp up the delivery and output of health services, education, protection services, food and agriculture support, and access to clean water and sanitation.

The Afghanistan Situation Regional Refugee Response Plan alone will require USD 623 million in funding for 40 organizations that provide protection, health and nutrition, shelter and non-food items, livelihoods and resilience, and logistics and telecoms, among other necessary services.

Griffiths was describing the ongoing humanitarian crisis overwhelming Afghanistan. In 2021, it faced increased disruptions to services and struggled to meet its population’s needs.

Its economy has suffered dramatically due to the freezing of assets in central bank reserves, the disruptions in markets, not to mention the sudden pause in international development assistance, upon which many basic social services are dependent. Severe climate-induced problems such as the harsh winter season and one of the worst recorded droughts in the country’s history have only exacerbated poverty among its citizens. Twenty-three million people are at risk of acute hunger.

This also accounts for those Afghans who have been internally displaced – 700,000. OCHA’s relief aid plan accounts for these displaced citizens.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi remarked that the international community must take the steps needed to “prevent a catastrophe in Afghanistan, which could not only compound suffering but would drive further displacement both within the country and throughout the region.”

“It is key not to forget that there is a regional dimension to this crisis,” he said. “Not only Afghan refugees but the people who have been involved in hosting.”

Girls scavenge for fallen olives in an orchard on the edge of Jalalabad. The city is the capital of Nangarhar Province, which hosts internally displaced people from 17 of the country’s 34 provinces – up to 52 percent of the country’s total displaced population — and 72 percent of the country’s returnees live there. Credit: UNHCR

Neighboring countries currently host 5.7 million registered refugees from earlier waves of forced displacement. Iran and Pakistan account for 2.2 million Afghan refugees. While they have implemented inclusive policies in education and healthcare, the COVID-19 pandemic has compounded the countries’ own needs, which presented challenges to these governments to continue their policy of inclusion.

The UNHCR Plan will directly support 40 partner organizations working in the region to provide emergency relief, health and social services, education, and protection to refugees and host communities. It is also estimated to work closely to improve the livelihood and resilience of the Afghans, particularly to those who are more susceptible to exploitation or abuse when crossing borders.

One of the target goals addressed in the press conference was to ensure the country’s stability by supporting efforts to rebuild the economic and social structures.

“The key here is to stabilize the situation inside Afghanistan, which includes the people who are displaced,” Grandi said.

Griffiths also remarked it was crucial to invest in services and structures so that the country is eventually “secure for those [Afghans] who have been displaced to return to their homes”.

The UN leaders expressed hope that the relief plans would accomplish their target goals with the requested funding.

“With continuing adaptation, continuing adjustment, the plans can improve, and access to services can improve,” said Griffiths.

The Taliban’s takeover in August 2021 contributed to the decline in the economy and the freeze in international development assistance. It has threatened to undermine services, further undermining the development gains made in the last two decades. Education has been used as the prime example, with the concern over girls being allowed to return to schools or return to mixed classes with boys.

There is concern about the Taliban’s involvement with the relief plans. However, Griffiths stated that the partner organizations in Afghanistan, almost all NGOs, would “receive the money directly”, including programs that would directly pay frontline workers in the health and education sector.

Grandi remarked that their UN colleagues in the field were in talks every day with the Taliban, who have been open to discussing the scope of these programs, stating: “Humanitarian assistance… has created a space for dialogue.

“It’s that space we need to preserve… that then can be developed and make room for stabilization.”

Open dialogue between the international community and the Taliban would be needed to provide immediate relief to Afghanistan and the region, eventually paving the way for stabilizing the region and alleviating its dependence on donors. In this spirit and the palpable urgency to protect the people of Afghanistan, UNCHR and OCHA are launching their plans for 2022.

When asked at the conference what would happen to Afghans if they did not receive the required funds, Grandi said that if the country’s humanitarian system collapsed, it would likely result in a mass exodus of peoples into the neighboring states and beyond. “We will need that solidarity in those neighboring countries because they will be the first ones hit.”

Griffiths added apart from seeing “hunger, distress, death, despair, at the family level… we would be robbing the people of Afghanistan of the hope that their home is secure and that they can spend the rest of their lives here.”

 

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• As a Humanitarian Crisis Engulfs Afghanistan, Education Cannot Wait Makes Urgent Appeal for Access to Quality Learning for All Children

Jan André overcame violence and adversity to become an outstanding university student. Credit: UN Costa Rica 2030 Agenda and the SDGs

By Allegra María del Pilar Baiocchi
SAN JOSÉ, Costa Rica, Jan 11 2022 (IPS)

Jan André is a cheerful and outgoing young man, a superb dancer, and aspiring schoolteacher. Indeed, he wants to become the best schoolteacher in Costa Rica. Fortified by his own will and the encouragement of his family, he overcame violence and adversity to become an outstanding university student.

Yet, in spite of his accomplishments, some people cross the street when they see him coming their way. They hide their belongings when he approaches them on the bus. Guards and staff single him out for surveillance when he enters a supermarket. Police search him and seize his belongings even when he is in a crowd in a public space.

Deeply affected by these experiences, Jan André is now fighting for the rights of people of African descent in Costa Rica.

Inspired by Jan’s work, my colleagues and I decided that the UN has a crucial role in collecting and sharing the life stories of Afro-Costa Ricans. The resulting stories are collected under an initiative called “I am Afro-descendant in Costa Rica and this is my story.”

Caption: The cover of the “I am Afro-descendant in Costa Rica and this is my story,” online publication. Cedit: UN Costa Rica

Published online and in the form of a book, these stories were also designed to celebrate the first International Day for People of African Descent and the bicentenary of Costa Rica’s independence.

With this initiative, we wanted to stop talking about Afro-descendants in the abstract and instead introduce our readers to a variety of women and men, young and old, rural and urban. All of them as unique individuals who help make Costa Rica what it is today.

What have we learned from these stories?

On the one hand, we were able to reveal the incredible diversity of the Afro-descendant community in Costa Rica, the life stories, struggles and dreams true to each one of our profiles. On the other hand, however, we identified a shared experience of discrimination and injustice, a common sense of not being ‘seen’ in their own country and a collective strength that is borne out of families and communities.

It is not for Afro-descendants to “overcome” the discrimination and exclusion to which they are subjected. It is up to all of us to eradicate racism and the enduring legacy of slavery.

That is why, in December 2020, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution that 31 August would henceforth be the International Day for People of African Descent. The resolution was initiated by the Government of Costa Rica, led by its Vice-President, Epsy Campbell, and garnered the support of 52 member states.

With UNFPA as the leading entity, we in Costa Rica marked the first commemoration of this international day last year.

“The legacy of slavery echoes down the centuries,” UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed reminded us as part of this commemoration. “The world has not yet overcome racism. Equality and justice for all still elude us. Millions of people of African descent continue to suffer systematic discrimination, perpetuating inequality, oppression and marginalization.”

When we ensure equal opportunities for all populations to achieve their potential and the fulfillment of their rights, we are creating a fairer and more prosperous society for all of us.

The International Day for People of African Descent is a chance to promote the diverse heritage and extraordinary contributions of the African Diaspora. It is also a call to action, a call for all of us to commit ourselves every day throughout the year to build a culture of ever-greater freedom, inclusion, equity and opportunity.

Source: UN Development Programme (UNDP)

Allegra María del Pilar Baiocchi is UN Coordinator Costa Rica. Editorial support was provided by Carolina Lorenzo, Development Coordination Office, and Paul Van DeCarr, Development Coordination Office. To learn more about the United Nation’s work in Costa Rica, please visit CostaRica.UN.org.

 

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By Genevieve Donnellon-May
AUSTRALIA, Jan 10 2022 (IPS)

For the first time since 1990, China has (re)opened an embassy in Managua, Nicaragua, less than a month after Nicaragua cut ties with Taiwan. The (re)opening of the embassy on January 1, 2022 comes amidst the backdrop of US-China tensions, particularly over trade and Taiwan, as well as worsening Cross-Straits relations.

Genevieve Donnellon-May

China and Nicaragua officially (re)established diplomatic relations last month. On December 10, Asia time, diplomatic relations between China and Nicaragua were officially established. The official “Joint Communiqué on the Resumption of Diplomatic Relations Between the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of Nicaragua” was signed in Tianjin, China, by Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu and Laureano Ortega, an advisor for investment, trade, and international cooperation to Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega – and, more importantly, the president’s son. As per the Joint Communiqué, Nicaragua recognises that Taiwan is part of China’s territory.

In response, Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) responded by stating that Taiwan “deeply regrets” that President Daniel Ortega has disregarded the long-standing friendship between the two countries. MOFA noted that it has worked with the Central American country for many years to promote cooperation that “is beneficial to the people’s livelihood and assists the overall development of the country,” according to a MOFA press release. MOFA also reiterated that “Taiwan is not a part of the People’s Republic of China, and that the PRC has never governed Taiwan. The Taiwanese people will not bow to pressure from China.”

Days after the (re)establishment of China-Nicaragua relations, China sent 200,000 doses of Sinopharm vaccines to Nicaragua as part of its vaccine diplomacy. The 2000,000 doses, which were the first of 1 million, were accompanied by a Nicaraguan delegation led by President Ortega’s son, Laureano Ortega Murillo. The Nicaraguan foreign minister, Denis Moncada, thanked China for its vaccine donation and noted that was an “ideological affinity” between the two countries.

China and Nicaragua originally established formal relations almost forty years ago. In 1985, Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega established relations with China. After he lost the election in 1990, the president Violeta Chamorro recognised Taiwan. In 2007, however, Ortega returned to power and was re-elected in November 2021 for a fourth term. A month after his re-election, Nicaragua cut ties with Taiwan, following months of worsening relations between Ortega and U.S. President Biden’s administration.

In addition, Nicaragua’s decision to establish formal relations with Beijing means that the number of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies has decreased to 14, down from 22 when President Tsai Ing-wen took office in 2016. Previously, China and Taiwan had observed a so-called “diplomatic truce” in place during the previous Ma Ying-jeou administration and the Kuomintang (KMT) wherein China did not diplomatic overtures to Taiwan’s diplomatic partners.

As a result of the change in recognition and China’s inroads in Central America, Taiwan appears to be increasingly isolated on the international stage. Most countries switched to Beijing by the end of the 1970s, after Taiwan (as the Republic of China or ROC) lost its seat in the United Nations in 1971 to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Aside from Nicaragua, recent transfers of recognition from Taipei to Beijing have been undertaken by the following countries: Solomon Islands (2019), Kiribati (2019), El Salvador (2018), Dominican Republic (2018), Panama (2017), Gambia (2016), and Sao Tome and Principe (2016).

After Nicaragua, many eyes are now on Honduras, a small Central American country, and its newly elected president, Xiomara Castro. In November 2021, the outgoing Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez began a three-day surprise visit to Taiwan. The visit came amidst concerns from Taiwanese officials in Honduras that the next Honduran president may sever ties with Taipei and establish formal diplomatic ties with Beijing.

Establishing ties with Beijing was one of the pledges made by Castro during her presidential campaign in 2021. A switch in relations from Taipei to Beijing, she declared, would give Honduras access to economic opportunities as well as Chinese-made Covid-19 vaccines and low-cost medicine. Although Castro will not be sworn in as president until later this month, her pledge may put Honduras in the middle of an intensifying diplomatic tug-of-war between Taiwan and China and becoming the new front against intensifying global showdown between the two superpowers. These geopolitical tensions combined with the financial needs of Central American governments, the resurgence of populist leaders in the region, and China’s growing economic importance, combined with China’s vaccine diplomacy and the absence of a truce between Taipei and Beijing, all influence Central America’s relations with both the U.S. and China. And currently, they are the driving factors in pushing Central American countries “away from the US and towards China”, as noted by Evan Ellis, a professor at the US Army War College who researches Latin America’s relationships with China.

At the same time, a move to establishing diplomatic relations with China could be partly motivated by a desire to counter American hegemony in the country and the region. Washington has long dominated Central America both economically and politically, viewing it as its strategic backyard. Before the presidential election, China accused the US of “arm-twisting and bullying behaviour” after Washington reiterated that it wanted Honduras to maintain its longstanding diplomatic relations with Taiwan. However, the U.S. holds considerable sway over Honduras. In particular, remittances, mainly from people living in the U.S., make up more than 20% of Honduras’ gross domestic product, according to the Brookings Institute. This economic reality, combined with significant U.S. aid to Honduras, also means that Washington does have influence over local politics.

However, in recent years, Honduras has seen rapid increases in inequality, corruption, violence, and poverty have further driven migration to the US. Unemployment has risen above 10% while major hurricanes devastated northern Honduras in 2020. Honduras is now the third poorest country in the Americas: over 66% of the population live in poverty. According to the World Bank, the pandemic considerably impacted the country’s economy, with the national GDP expected to have contracted by 9% in 2020.

Nonetheless, China’s influence in Honduras continues to grow. In 2020, Chinese state-owned companies finished the construction of 105MW hydropower dam in the country. Also, more external debt is owed to China than to the U.S. According to World Bank data, 4% of Honduras’ outstanding external debt is owed to China, while only 0.01% to the US. Further, China already accounting for as much as a fifth of Honduran imports. In this way, any potential financial benefits, such as loans and investments from establishing formal ties with China, or even playing Washington and Beijing off each other, may be considered too important to ignore.

Genevieve Donnellon-May is a research assistant with the Institute of Water Policy (IWP) at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests include China, Africa, transboundary governance, and the food-energy-water nexus. Genevieve’s work has been published by The Diplomat and the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum.

 

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A waste collection bin awaiting the city council's collection. Markets are one of the places the SADC hygiene strategy is targeting. The picture was taken around 5 am as people gathered for the market day. It is a stone’s throw away from the health centre featured in the story. ​Credit: Charles Mpaka​/IPS​​

By Charles Mpaka
Blantyre, Malawi, Jan 10 2022 (IPS)

The toilets in the maternity wing of Namatapa Health Centre in the populous Bangwe Township in Blantyre, Malawi’s commercial city, fell into disrepair a few years ago. So, pregnant women who come to deliver their babies and their guardians use two pit latrines.

The faulty facilities also serve as bathrooms.

Visiting the bathrooms and toilets is an act of courage, says Thokozani Paulo, who spent four days at the centre in November 2021, during the birth of her first child.

“When you want to bath or relieve yourself, the image is dreadful because half the time, there is a mess, and the stench is terrible,” she tells IPS.

At night, there is no light, and the rooms are swarming with mosquitoes.

In addition, there is not much dignity and privacy for users either. There are no doors, so women improvise using their wraps for privacy.

“So, you are bathing, and someone comes in looking to relieve themselves,” says the 23-year-old in an interview with IPS at her home. Her month-old baby girl is sleeping peacefully on her lap.

Workers at the facility clean the two toilets – but without detergent and only once every day in the morning. One day, the women in the ward and their guardians pleaded with the workers to clean the toilets at least twice a day.
“They shouted at us saying we were not the ones paying their salaries and that we should just focus on what we had gone to the health centre for,” Paulo says.

The only basin for handwashing in the ward was never supplied with soap in the four days she was at the health centre.

In November, this experience, and the experiences of many others like Paulo were top of the agenda at a meeting of health ministers from the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) in Malawi’s capital, Lilongwe.
At that meeting, among other things, the ministers endorsed the SADC Hygiene Strategy (2021-2025).

According to the strategy developed by the SADC Secretariat, analysis of national blueprints in the region on health, water, sanitation, environmental health, and nutrition indicates there is “an enabling environment” for implementation of hygiene practices.

However, there are still considerable gaps in most of the 16 member states.

“There is still need to mainstream and integrate hygiene in most of the national policies in order to broaden the enabling environment base for effective and sustainable promotion of hygiene practices,” it reads.

The framework, therefore, challenges SADC governments to increase hygiene coverage and behaviour change across all settings. These settings include health care facilities, schools and day-care centres, workplaces and commercial buildings, prisons, markets and food establishments, transport centres and places of worship.

The key hygiene behaviours include handwashing with soap, safe drinking water management, faecal disposal, food hygiene, menstrual hygiene, and waste management.

In the case of health care centres, these need to have a safe and accessible water supply, clean and safe sanitation conveniences, hand hygiene amenities at points of care and toilets, appropriate waste disposal systems and environmental cleaning.

According to the strategy, infrastructure that supports hygiene and healthcare waste management practices helps prevent the spread of diseases within the health service facilities and in the surrounding community.
The strategy was developed with the support of UNICEF and WaterAid Southern Africa.

Maureen Nkandu, Regional Communications Manager for WaterAid Southern Africa, says the policy underlines the need for leadership, commitment, and accountability “to create a culture of hygienic behaviour and practices across all levels of society and to enable hygiene services, behaviour change and promote basic sanitation”.

“For these objectives to be effective, there will be a requirement for strong planning, financial resourcing, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation systems in each of the SADC countries,” Nkandu tells IPS.

She says WaterAid has rallied key partners, including WASH-oriented civil society and development agencies, to demand adequate resources to implement the strategy effectively.

Further, achieving sustainable hygiene behaviour across generations needs innovative behaviour change programmes of scale. This can be realised through adequate financing, coordination of relevant sectors and political leadership, Nkandu says.

For Malawi, the strategy presents an opportunity for the country to push harder towards attaining Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs) targets related to hygiene, says Maziko Matemba, a community health ambassador appointed by the Ministry of Health.

Matemba corroborates Paulo’s experience, observing that many healthcare facilities in Malawi are a source of infection for patients, guardians, and visitors because of poor hygiene.

“Sanitation and hygiene in most of our public health facilities is a serious concern. People go to hospitals to get treated, but we have cases where patients and guardians have returned home with new health conditions contracted due to poor hygiene,” he says, citing washrooms as hotspots.

Matemba argues that healthcare facilities could promote good hygiene in Malawi and SADC.

“People gather in these facilities to seek services. That’s a huge advantage to drive home awareness messages and demonstrate by own standards how people can promote good hygiene in their homes,” says Matemba, who is also Executive Director for Health and Rights Education Programme (HREP), a local organisation.

But in all this, funding is a major factor, he observes.

“Hospital administrators tell us that if they have no money for a primary commodity like drugs, hence these perennial drug shortages we see, how can mops, handwashing materials and chemicals to clean toilets with become a priority?”

Matemba tells IPS that although civil society organisations have been campaigning for ages for the government to address the critical shortage of funding to hospitals, not much has changed.

“Development budget is always inadequate. Recurrent expenditures, already less than required, are further cut, and the little that remains hardly goes to the facilities in time. Treasury always says the resource envelope is limited,” says Matemba.

He says the strategy challenges Malawi as SADC Chair to lead the way for member states to improve the hygiene situation in the region by fixing their own.

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Health, Adrian Chikumbe, tells IPS that the SADC strategy is an important approach in minimising transmission of infection in health facilities and communities.

According to Chikumbe, a recent assessment by the ministry reveals that almost a third of Malawi’s health care facilities lack running water and 80 percent of patient latrines had no associated hand washing facility.

The assessment also found that environmental cleanliness was generally below average, characterised by poor waste management practices.

He says most of the lower-level facilities in the country lack resources to maintain functional WASH infrastructure.

“The Government recognises that it cannot do everything alone. It, therefore, has plans to mobilise partner support led by district authorities to plan and prioritise water, sanitation and hygiene infrastructure in all health facilities,” he says.

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Regions with higher than average university attainment in the 1960s continue to have higher university attainment rates today.

By External Source
Jan 10 2022 (IPS)

Many newly independent African countries in the 1960s inherited regional and ethnic inequalities in formal educational attainment. These new states bound together sub-national regions of diverse ethnic and religious communities. The regions differed in their exposure to missionary activity – the main vector in the spread of formal western education in the colonial era.

Inequalities in educational access increased the higher up the educational ladder one climbed. Access to university education was both extremely limited and highly skewed.

As access to higher education determined which people would come to hold some of the most important positions in society, politicians cared a great deal about how higher education spread. Given this context, how did regional inequalities in university access evolve after independence?

While several recent papers have highlighted considerable social inequalities in access to higher education in African countries today, there’s little work that looks at how and why such inequalities have changed over time.

In a recent paper I therefore traced the regional origins of university graduates since the 1960s in seven African countries: Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. I constructed a measure of regional inequality for each country and examined some of the factors that influenced this inequality trend.

The results show that regional inequality fell in the first two decades of independence. However, from the 1980s regional inequality remained stagnant or grew across this group of countries. Inequality grew primarily because the main urban metropolises have been pulling ahead, leading to a growing urban bias in university access.

I used recent census data which contains information about where people were born and what level of education they attained. I grouped these people by their district or province of birth, depending on the administrative structure of the country. In Ghana for instance, people were grouped into the country’s ten regions, while in Kenya they were grouped into the country’s 47 current counties.

By grouping people by age bracket, and assuming that most people who attend university do so around age 20, I could then trace how the regional distribution of university education changed over time.

 

Slow start

University education was slow to develop across these former British colonies. The share of the population attending university in the late colonial era was extremely low.

 

Gross university enrolment rates. Rebecca Simson

 

Around the time of independence, Kenya had roughly 400 university students (1961), while Tanzania and Zambia had 300 students each (1963). The distribution of these scarce educational opportunities was regionally skewed. University attendance tended to be highest among those growing up in the main cities and in the regions with the most economic production (particularly cash crops and mining).

This historical legacy has been long lasting. On average, the regions with higher than average university attainment in the 1960s continue to have higher university attainment rates today.

 

Trends in access

But the picture is not all bleak. In the first decades of independence there was some catching-up by some of the lower performing regions within each country. The regional inequality trend for each of the seven countries shows that inequality fell in most countries in the 1960s and 1970s. In this period the number of university students was growing quite rapidly. Bursaries for students were generous and governments made some efforts to ensure regional balance.

In the 1980s many African countries ran into financial difficulties. Governments struggled to finance their largely public university systems. During this period, the rate of university expansion reduced. University access became increasingly competitive. This ended the period of regional convergence in university enrolment. Regional inequalities in university access began to grow again.

My analysis found that those best placed to access the highly competitive university system were increasingly those students born in the main cities where incomes were higher and parents more educated. Measures of regional inequality with the exclusion of the capital cities show there was no or very little growth in regional inequality since the 1980s. This shows that most of the inequality rise was driven by the capital city region.

In the 1990s many African countries reformed their university systems again by introducing or raising fees. They also allowed more private universities to establish themselves. This increased the number of students that could be educated and led to the rapid rise in university enrolment. But from the available data it seems that regional inequalities in university access have remained high or risen further.

 

Concentrated in cities

There are many reasons for this continued growth in inequality in access. The most important factor is one that’s difficult for policymakers to address. The census data shows that the focus countries have a considerable rate of rural-urban migration. These migrants are a small share of the university educated. As a result, university graduates are increasingly concentrated in the cities. University students tend to be the children of the highly educated – they’re in turn more likely to gain higher education. This perpetuates the concentration of the highly skilled.

The slightly better news is that because cities tend to be ethnically mixed, the growing urban bias does not seem to have resulted in a sharp increase in ethnic inequality in university education. In three countries (Ghana, Malawi and Uganda) the censuses also asked respondents to state their ethnicity. Using these self-reported ethnicities, I measured ethnic inequality by cohort. I found much less inequality growth on an ethnic compared to a regional basis.

Since migration is a major driver of this regional differentiation, this trend will probably continue unless there’s more economic development and more job creation outside the main urban centres. This implies that the face of Africa’s educational high-achievers is changing. From a slim educational elite of the 1970s, where most university-educated people had rural or small-town roots, the highest educated ranks are increasingly dominated by people born and raised in the main, multi-ethnic urban centres.

Rebecca Simson, Research Fellow in Economic History, University of Oxford

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

Whale sharks, the largest of living sharks, filter-feed on plankton and other small marine creatures, which they suck into their open mouths as they swim. Credit: Enric Sala, National Geographic Pristine Seas

By Enric Sala
WASHINGTON DC, Jan 10 2022 (IPS)

There is no other place in the world like Costa Rica’s Cocos Island National Park. The waters surrounding the island–covered with tropical forests–are a playground to countless shivers, or schools, of sharks, including hammerhead sharks, whitetip reef sharks and whale sharks.

Also boasting rays, turtles, whales and dolphins, It’s one of the world’s most biodiverse waterways. In recent years, however, industrial fishing activity has encroached on the area, threatening this unparalleled marine life.

Fortunately, Costa Rica took decisive action this month by expanding the protected waters by 27 times. They also protected an additional marine area–the Bicentennial Marine Managed Area, which is twice the size of the expanded Cocos Island National Park. The area includes no take zones and will closely monitor fishing activity.

Stories like this one are all too rare. In the last century alone, we have removed over 90% of the ocean’s large fish, yet less than 8% of the ocean is under some kind of protection. We’re still learning about the collateral damage from destructive fishing activities, like bottom trawling, which scrape up the ocean floor—the world’s largest carbon storehouse.

It’s clear that commercial fishing, global warming and pollution have decimated the ocean. Few corners of the vast ocean are safe. As a result, the seas are losing their ability to safeguard biodiversity, provide food and store carbon—all of which are critical to maintaining a livable planet, which was under intense discussion at the climate talks in Glasgow late last year.

But it is possible to restore the ocean’s benefits to people and the planet. All we must do is rewild the sea. The only catch is that we can’t wait. We have less than a decade to act.

Since 2018, I have worked around the clock and around the world with a team of scientists to identify which areas of the ocean we must protect first. We have discovered through our research and countless expeditions the trade-offs among the ocean’s benefits.

To support our work, we developed a framework that could help us maximize the benefits that humanity obtains from the ocean. We found that if we were to give equal importance to biodiversity, food and carbon, it is imperative to protect 45% of the ocean – the “right” 45%.

Even if we decided that biodiversity is not so important, we would need to protect 30%–the minimum area needed to preserve marine life and all of the benefits it provides to people.

Costa Rica is part of a growing group of world leaders that understand the benefits of protecting marine areas. At the Glasgow climate talks, Costa Rica, together with Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama, announced their commitment to create more marine reserves in the Eastern Tropical Pacific.

Establishing no-take areas along an “ocean highway” for migratory species such as tuna will actually increase fish supplies in the surrounding areas. As a result, biodiversity and economies benefit.

Earlier this month, the government of Portugal expanded a marine protected area around the Selvagens Islands, located midway between Madeira and Canary Islands. At 3,677 square kilometers, the area is now the largest fully protected marine reserve in Europe.

Countries worldwide must establish more of these protected areas by 2030 if we are to ensure that the ocean can continue to provide us with its benefits. Protections must be strong. Marine protected areas can only work their magic if all fishing and other damaging human activities are banned—and these rules are enforced.

So far, 77 countries have agreed to champion a global goal to protect 30% of the ocean—and well as land—by 2030. They are pushing to ensure that the 30×30 target is enshrined in a global UN biodiversity agreement, under negotiation now and expected to be signed in 2022.

But the world doesn’t have to wait for the ink to dry on the agreement to establish more marine protected areas. Too much is at stake. I have seen with my own eyes how nature recovers in marine reserves. More importantly, I have seen how this return of nature has helped people gain better lives.

Enric Sala is an Explorer in Residence at the National Geographic Society, the founder of Pristine Seas, and the recipient of this year’s Prince Albert I Grand Medal for his work to protect the ocean. Pristine Seas has helped to establish 24 marine protected areas, covering a total area of more than 6.5 million square kilometers — more than twice the size of India.

 

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Community support workers are key in raising awareness about TB and promoting diagnosis and treatment. Credit, Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Jan 7 2022 (IPS)

Global efforts to end tuberculosis (TB) are futile without dedicated investment in research into the debilitating disease that is killing 4000 people a day, Stop TB Partnership warns.

“TB is a disease that is not a darling of donors and investors,” Lucica Ditiu, the Executive Director of the Stop TB Partnership, told IPS in an interview from Geneva.

“We do not have a Bill Gates that can support TB research, yet TB remains a disease of concern with deaths increasing for the first time in over a decade,” she added.

TB, a bacterial disease mainly affecting the lungs, has been around for over millennia and remains one of the top killer diseases globally. But it is preventable and curable with the right investment in diagnosis and treatment.

Ditiu attributed the rise in TB incidents to several factors; many people diagnosed and on treatment for TB have defaulted owing to the disruption of health services in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and global lockdown. Furthermore, many people remain undiagnosed because they have not been reached.

Dr Lucica Ditiu, Executive Director of the Stop TB Partnership. Credit: Stop TB Partnership

“Southern Africa has done a good job in respect of Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa as well as Rwanda in trying to disrupt as little as possible the treatment and diagnosis of people with TB,” Ditiu said. She commended awareness programmes in the media and community door-to-door campaigns to promote diagnosis and treatment.

Countries need to invest more in finding people with TB and putting them on treatment. Until you find people, you cannot put them on treatment, and this is where we are very much lagging, she said.

Ditiu fears the worst should the world fail to change the current TB transmission trend. An estimated 5.8 million people received treatment for TB in 2020; a drop of 21 percent from 2019, and more than 4 million people worldwide remain untreated. According to Stop TB Partnership, half of those untreated are likely to die from the disease.

Admitting that funding for TB has always been insufficient, Ditiu said TB was the poor cousin compared to the deep pockets for HIV and AIDS.

“In general, we have available only 30 percent of the funding needed globally. We have places that have done well in preventing TB in people living with HIV. Prevention of TB in people living with HIV is going well, especially in African countries because HIV has resources.”

According to the Stop TB Partnership, a network of international organisations established in 1998 to help end TB as a public health problem, funding for TB research and development (R&D) has remained flat since 2018.

Global funding for tuberculosis (TB) research totalled 915 million US dollars in 2020 – less than half the goal of 2 billion US dollars set forth by participating country governments at the 2018 United Nations High-Level Meeting on TB.

In 2021, TB had a funding gap of 13 billion US dollars globally, with only 5,3 billion US dollars available for its programmes. It experienced a drop in funding amounting to 500 000 US dollars in 2020 as many countries took money away from TB to respond to COVID-19.

A new report, Tuberculosis Research Funding Trends, 2005–2020 by Treatment Action Group (TAG) and the Stop TB Partnership, found that TB received less than 1 percent of the amount invested in COVID-19 Research and Development over the first 11 months of the pandemic.

“The mobilisation of over 100 billion US dollars for COVID-19 research and development in the first 11 months of the pandemic shows us just how powerful a coordinated effort against a disease can be,” noted Ditiu.

While the pandemic has shown that effective vaccines can save lives, the world is still banking on a 100-year-old vaccine, Bacillus Calmette-Guérin or BCG. However, a more effective vaccine could have higher efficacy rates, especially for adults. Why has it taken so long to develop a new, more effective TB vaccine when the health burden of TB is increasing?

“This is the drama,” Ditiu commented. “We have a vaccine for a hundred years that we know for the last 40 years does not work (effectively) except for newly-born babies, and yet we have not done much about it.”

While ongoing research on new vaccines had been slow because of poor funding, Ditiu said several potential vaccines were in the pipeline, and a vaccine could be expected by 2027.

“It takes a long time to get a vaccine. But because of COVID (we realised), it is possible to have a vaccine much quicker, and we hope to use the learnings from COVID-19 to get a TB vaccine,” Ditiu told IPS.

Tuberculosis vaccine research has been slowed by chronic underfunding with only one moderately effective century-old TB vaccine, compared to over 20 COVID-19 vaccines.

“What’s enabled the development of dozens of COVID-19 vaccines in less than a year has essentially been money,” noted Austin Aurinze Obiefuna, Executive Director of the Afro Global Health Alliance and incoming Vice-Chair of the Stop TB Partnership Board.

“I think that the same enormous amount of funding should be applied with equal vigour to the development of TB vaccines. But that simply doesn’t seem to be happening.”

According to the Stop TB Partnership, making much-needed progress against TB demands investment that matches the threat of the disease around the world. This includes a commitment to rectify the inadequate funding of the past. Over the next two years, 10 billion US dollars are needed to close the tuberculosis R&D funding gap.

“Wealthy countries need to step up and put more money into correcting global health inequalities, which COVID-19 vaccine allocation inequities laid bare,” urged Mark Harrington, Executive Director of TAG, an independent activist, and community-based research and policy think tank.

“COVID-19 made more people around the world aware of the importance of R&D spending than ever before. Now is the time to finally start making investments ambitious enough to end TB for good.”

 

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• http://www.ipsnews.net/2022/01/activism-will-key-overcoming-covid-19-crisis/

Protest sign, London. Credit: People’s Vaccine Alliance

By Ben Phillips
ROME, Jan 7 2022 (IPS)

As the Omicron surge overwhelms the world, it is clear to people everywhere that the actions which leaders so far have taken in response to the Covid-19 crisis have not been sufficient to overcome it.

We are not beating Covid. It looks rather like Covid is beating us. What is to be done?

Crucially, they are two key dimensions to what is needed now which, though related, are distinct. The first dimension is what policies are required to get us out of the crisis. The second dimension is how to get those policies put into place.

In other words, the first key question is “what do leaders need to do?”, and the second key question is “how do we make them do it?”

On the first question, the world is fortunate that we are not short of excellent public health expertise. Whilst there are no quick fixes, the contours of the policies required are not a mystery, and have been set out, to leaders and to media, repeatedly, by the World Health Organisation, by leading academics, and by health practitioners.

They come down essentially to this: in a pandemic emergency, leaders need to deploy the whole range of tools that have been shown to help. The key here is the whole range.

Importantly, in terms of how these approaches can be realized, this requires that they are realized for the whole world. Until they do, none of us will get out of the crisis. When Desmond Tutu said that “I am because you are, I am because we are”, that was not only true ethically, but, it turns out, true epidemiologically too.

The approaches required include vaccines, treatments, and also, as the WHO’s Peter Singer has noted, “public health measures that encourage spending time outdoors, physical distancing, wearing masks, rapid testing, limiting gatherings and staying home when sick”.

None of these alone is enough. Any approach that only does one of these, however well, would fail – all of them are needed, together.

It requires the application of the whole range of policy tools. For example, rich countries, and Foundations based in rich countries, have emphasized the importance of sharing doses as a solution (even whilst they have comprehensively failed to deliver on their promises to do so).

In contrast, developing countries, the World Health Organisation and civil society have all highlighted that sharing doses alone cannot ensure enough for everyone, and that it is essential also to share the technology so that multiple producers across the world can simultaneously manufacture enough to vaccinate the world.

This requires rapid agreement and implementation of the TRIPS Waiver proposed by South Africa and India at the WTO, and it also requires that rich country governments use their huge leverage (as procurers, investors and regulators) over the companies they host to make them share knowledge, know-how and material. Furthermore, this requirement to share Covid technologies needs to apply to vaccines, medicines and diagnostics.

As public health professors Madhukar Pai of McGill and Manu Prakash of Stanford have noted, “Science has delivered many tools that work against Covid-19. But equitable distribution of these tools is where we are failing.

If we can find a way to share effective tools equitably and increase their production across the world, then we have a real shot at ending this pandemic.

If we hoard these tools, block TRIPS waiver, and think we can boost our way out of this pandemic in the global North, we will begin 2023 by playing whack-a-mole with the rho, sigma, tau or Omega variants.”

The challenge then, is not that we don’t know what leaders need to do. The challenge is that they are not doing it. We like to believe that our leaders are led by the evidence. But evidence alone is not enough.

The brilliant and essential reports of scientists will not be enough to shift the much harsher world of political interests. Getting leaders to do what is needed to overcome the Covid-19 crisis – in particular getting leaders to force the big pharmaceutical companies to share the rights and recipes for the vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics so the world can produce the billions needed – will depend on pressure from ordinary people.

This is not a new lesson. We saw it in the late 1990s and early 2000s with antiretrovirals for HIV. Then, as now, a monopoly hold on production was preventing people in developing countries from accessing life-saving help.

Then, as now, the big pharmaceutical companies worked aggressively to block other producers from manufacturing what would save millions of lives. Then, as now, rich country governments sided with the big pharmaceutical companies. Twelve million people died. Finally, massive global public pressure, together with assertive action by developing countries, ensured that production was opened up and lives could be saved.

It was not a coincidence that when the Covid-19 crisis erupted the first groups to call for the sharing of medical technologies, and to start to organise for it, were groups of people living with HIV. They are the heart of the movement for a People’s Vaccine because, from painful experience, they know what it takes. Health, like justice, is never given; it is only ever won.

Some people are inspired by activism. Others, understandably, just want to get on with their lives. Activism feels like another burden. They’re ready to do their part by wearing a mask when available and getting vaccinated when offered. But they want to leave the leadership to our leaders.

The thing is, that’s not enough. Our leaders are not leading. They are not doing all they can to end the crisis. They are not forcing the big pharmaceutical companies to share technologies so that enough can be produced. They are not ensuring access to health care as right. They are not protecting the vulnerable from the shock of the crisis.

The past two years can best be summed up like this: the science is working, but the politics is failing.

It is only through bold action by political leaders that the Covid-19 crisis will be ended. It is only through people’s organising that we’ll make leaders take that bold action. As the great novelist Alice Walker once put it so powerfully, “activism is the rent we pay for living on the planet”.

Ben Phillips is the author of ‘How to Fight Inequality’ and an advisor to the United Nations, governments and civil society organisations (CSOs).

 

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By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Jan 6 2022 (IPS)

There are more under-reported consequences of human activities unmatching the rhythm of Mother Nature. Such is the case, among many others, of the growing salinisation and ‘plastification’ of the world’s soils.

In fact, currently it is estimated that there are more than 833 million hectares of salt-affected soils around the globe (8.7% of the planet). This implies the loss of soil’s capacity to grow food and also increasing impacts on water and the ability to filter pollution.

Unsustainable human activities are exacerbating soil salinity. Excessive tillage, the over-use of fertilisers, inappropriate irrigation methods and use of poor-quality water, deforestation or the overexploitation of groundwater are the main drivers of human-induced soil salinisation

Soil salinisation and sodification are major soil degradation processes threatening ecosystems and are recognised as being among the most important problems at a global level for agricultural production, food security and sustainability in arid and semi-arid regions, says the UN on occasion of the 2021 World Soil Day.

Not only: salt-affected soils have serious consequences on soil functions, such as in the decrease in agricultural productivity, water quality, soil biodiversity, and soil erosion and have a decreased ability to act as a buffer and filter against pollutants.

Salt-affected soils reduce both the ability of crops to take up water and the availability of micronutrients, and they also concentrate ions that are toxic to plants and may degrade the soil structure.

 

A threat to global pantry

Soil salinity is a naturally occurring phenomenon in arid environments, such as deserts, where intense evaporation and a chronic lack of water often turn the earth overly saline. Soils like these are less fertile because salt hampers plants’ natural ability to take up water from the ground, explains the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

“But unsustainable human activities are exacerbating soil salinity. Excessive tillage, the over-use of fertilisers, inappropriate irrigation methods and use of poor-quality water, deforestation or the overexploitation of groundwater are the main drivers of human-induced soil salinisation.”

The World Soil Day 2021 and its campaign “Halt soil salinisation, boost soil productivity” aimed to raise awareness of the importance of maintaining healthy ecosystems and human well-being by addressing the growing challenges in soil management, fighting soil salinisation, increasing soil awareness and encouraging societies to improve soil health.

According to FAO, these are, among others, the impacts of salt-affected soils:

Salt-affected soils have serious impacts on some of the ecosystem services soils usually provide, which are critical for supporting human life and biodiversity leading to an array of consequences including:

• decreased agricultural productivity, water quality, soil biodiversity, and increased soil erosion;
• decreased ability to act as a buffer and filter against contaminants;
• degraded soil structure;
• decreased functions of ecological systems such as the hydrological and nutrient cycles;
• reduced ability of crops to take up water
• reduced soil fertility and availability of micronutrients.

 

Half of Uzbekistan’s soils covered by salt

The Central Asian country is doubly land-locked – meaning it is surrounded by countries that are themselves landlocked – and more than half of Uzbekistan’s soils are salt-affected, making it extra hard to farm productively, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reports as an example.

 

Not only salt… also plastic

A December 2021 new report by FAO suggests that the land human beings use to grow food is contaminated with “far larger quantities of plastic pollution,” posing an even greater threat to food security, people’s health, and the environment.

The report – “Assessment of agricultural plastics and their sustainability: a call for action” – is the first global report of its kind by FAO and contains some startling numbers.

According to data collated by the UN agency’s experts:

– Agricultural value chains each year use 12.5 million tonnes of plastic products.

– A further 37.3 million tonnes are used in food packaging. The crop production and livestock sectors were found to be the largest users, accounting for 10.2 million tonnes per year collectively, followed by fisheries and aquaculture with 2.1 million tonnes, and forestry with 0.2 million tonnes.

– Asia was estimated to be the largest user of plastics in agricultural production, accounting for almost half of global usage. In the absence of viable alternatives, demand for plastic in agriculture is only set to increase.

– According to industry experts, for instance, global demand for greenhouse, mulching and silage films will increase by 50 percent, from 6.1 million tonnes in 2018 to 9.5 million tonnes in 2030.

– Such trends make it essential to balance the costs and benefits of plastic. Of increasing concern are microplastics, which have the potential of adversely affecting human health. While there are gaps in the data, they shouldn’t be used as an excuse not to act, FAO warned.

“This report serves as a loud call to coordinated and decisive action to facilitate good management practices and curb the disastrous use of plastics across the agricultural sectors,” FAO Deputy Director-General Maria Helena Semedo said in the report’s foreword.

The report was presented today at a virtual event in conjunction with World Soil Day marked each year on 5 December.

 

Ubiquitous

“Plastics have become ubiquitous since their widespread introduction in the 1950s, and it is difficult today to envisage life without them.

In agriculture, plastic products greatly help productivity, according to the report.

“Mulch films, for instance, are used to cover the soil to reduce weed growth, the need for pesticides, fertiliser and irrigation; tunnel and greenhouse films and nets protect and boost plant growth, and extend cropping seasons and increase yields.”

This is also the case of “coatings on fertilisers, pesticides and seeds control the rate of release of chemicals or improve germination; tree guards protect young seedlings and saplings against damage by animals and provide a microclimate that enhances growth.”

Meanwhile, plastic products help reduce food losses and waste, and maintain its nutritional qualities throughout a myriad of value chains, thereby improving food security and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the report explains.

 

Billions of tonnes of plastic not properly disposed

Of the estimated 6.3 billion tonnes of plastics produced up to 2015, almost 80% has not been disposed of properly, says FAO.

Once in the natural environment, plastics can cause harm in several ways. The effects of large plastic items on marine fauna have been well documented.

However, as these plastics begin to disintegrate and degrade, their impacts begin to be exerted at the cellular level, affecting not only individual organisms but also, potentially, entire ecosystems.

Microplastics (plastics less than 5 mm in size) are thought to present specific risks to animal health, but recent studies have detected traces of microplastic particles in human faeces and placentas. There is also evidence of mother-to-foetus transmission of much smaller nanoplastics in rats.

While most scientific research on plastics pollution has been directed at aquatic ecosystems, especially oceans, FAO experts found that agricultural soils are thought to receive far greater quantities of microplastics.

Since 93% of global agricultural activities take place on land, there is an obvious need for further investigation in this area, concludes the report.

 

Need to know more?

Very little of the plastic we discard every day is recycled or incinerated in waste-to-energy facilities. Much of it ends up in landfills, where it may take up to 1,000 years to decompose, leaching potentially toxic substances into the soil and water, according to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), which warns that one third of all plastic waste ends up in soils or freshwater.

Furthermore: over 400 million tonnes of plastic are produced globally each year. It is estimated that one third of all plastic waste ends up in soils or freshwaters, according to Researchers from the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB).

 

More than marine pollution

Most of this plastic disintegrates into particles smaller than five millimetres, referred to as microplastics, and breaks down further into nanoparticles, which are less than 0.1 micrometre in size.

“In fact, terrestrial microplastic pollution is much higher than marine microplastic pollution – an estimate of four to 23 times more, depending on the environment. Sewage, for example, is an important factor in the distribution of microplastics.”

Also that “80% to 90% of the particles contained in sewage, such as from garment fibres, persist in the sludge. Sewage sludge is then often applied to fields as fertiliser, meaning that several thousand tonnes of microplastics end up in our soils each year.”

US President Donald Trump addresses the seventy-third session of the United Nations General Assembly. September 2018. Credit: UN Photo/Cia Pak

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

Unless the Republicans and Democrats put the nation above their party and personal interests, our democracy will face the gravest danger in more than a hundred years.

Authoritarianism will creep in, leading to the collapse of American political institutions and the demise of our democracy as we know it.

Righting the Wrong

On January 6, Trump was planning to hold a press conference during which he was expected to repeat lies for the hundredth time that the election in 2020 was stolen, that the insurrection a year ago was actually peaceful, and that he – not Biden – is the duly-elected president.

He canceled the press conference at the urging of the GOP and now is expected to instead spread these lies at his Arizona rally next week. He will, needless to say, remain true to himself and deny any wrongdoing and blame the Democrats for persistently undermining his presidency as well as for all the ills that face America today.

Trump is uniquely dangerous; he wants to solidify his absolute control over the Republican Party, rouse his followers, instill hatred of the Democrats, and of course raise enough money for his re-election campaign should he decide to run again.

Moreover, the Arizona rally will be his first foray into the mid-term elections designed to rouse the rank-and-file of the Republican Party to recapture the House and the Senate as the forerunner to the 2024 election.

The tragic aspect of the Trump phenomenon is that the elected leaders of the Republican Party continue to follow him religiously, regardless of the fact that he is corrupt, was defeated in re-election as an incumbent, was impeached twice, and faces several criminal charges.

Indeed, no former president in American history has been able to maintain his grip on his party the way Trump has. And no Republican Party has abdicated its moral and constitutional responsibilities and willingly succumbed to a deranged egomaniac, misogynist, and habitual liar. How could this happen, and why? The answer is Trump’s and the Republicans’ voracious lust for power.

The Republican Party has become a minority party and there is no circumstance under which the party can win nationally in a free and fair election. Demographically, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, and other minorities currently represent more than 40 percent of the American population, and it is estimated that by 2045 they will become the majority, who largely vote for Democrats.

Collectively, even at the present they can deny the Republican Party from ever capturing the White House again if they go out and vote en masse.

The Republican Party faces two choices: one is to adapt to the changing demographic reality and develop socio-economic programs that respond to the needs of people of color (POC) without sacrificing much of their conservative ideology.

This includes lowering taxes, particularly for those who earn less than $200,000 a year, immigration reform, which the Republican Party has long-acknowledged needs addressing and will help in outreach especially to Hispanic voters, and supporting minority small business owners with tax breaks and other financial incentives, which won’t incur further government spending.

The second choice is to prevent or make it extremely difficult for POC to exercise their right to vote through a variety of deplorable measures. One state after another is passing discriminatory rules, including gerrymandering districts on racial lines, restricting early voting, which disproportionately affects Black Americans who are more likely than any other ethnic or racial group to cast early ballots (whether in-person or by mail and absentee ballots), enacting voter ID laws even though voter impersonation fraud is exceedingly rare and those who don’t have valid ID are disproportionately POC, and empower state legislators to invert their own elections and manipulate the electoral college to their advantage.

Sadly, if not tragically, the Republican Party went for the latter option. Many Republicans simply believe that POC are illegitimate citizens and should not be able to vote and have the power, as they fear accurately or otherwise, to enact laws against whites, the way whites have enacted discriminatory laws against POC. America, from their perspective, was founded by white people, and the thought that the US is becoming browner every passing day scares them to the core.

They needed a leader who is a bigot, shameless, and crude, with no scruples and no morals, but audacious—a performer with the ability to sway large audiences with his lies and sneering face. The Republicans need him to promote their agenda without fear of public repercussions, and he needs the party to satisfy his ego in order to exercise raw power, and also grant him its full support should he decide to run again.

We are still reeling from the violent storming of the Capitol on January 6 to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. Trump, who incited his followers to attack the Capitol, was ready to shatter our democracy only to bask in his authoritarian impulse.

What does that say about the Republican Party, which largely ignored or downplayed the insurrection in its determination to seize power and chose chaos and violence over voting, even at the expense of tearing our democratic institutions apart? How ironic and deeply troubling that 52 percent of Republicans say that the insurrectionists were trying to protect democracy.

The most ominous note that must be repeated loud and clear is that the party under the leadership of Trump will incite violence should they fail to win the 2022 election, as anyone who carefully listens to the many utterances spewed by reckless Republicans leaders can discern with clarity.

In that context, although Trump during his rally will not openly encourage his followers to resort to violence to undo the result of the election, the message to them will be loud and clear.

It is hard to exaggerate the transformation of the Republican Party since the rise of Trump in 2016, from a patriotic party that stood for democracy to a white supremacist party willing to destroy it only to stay in power.

Many thousands of Republican leaders should follow the footsteps of Representative Liz Cheney, who stood up against Trump and in favor of the truth, and still rescue our democracy by accepting reality and being truthful with their followers.

The election of Biden gave the country hope of preserving our democracy and attending to the political and social malaise that swept the nation, especially during Trump’s tenure in the White House. But to address these ills, the Democrats must spare no effort to hold onto the House and Senate in the 2022 mid-term election, as these will be the most consequential in more than a century.

Indeed, should the Republicans manage to recapture both chambers of Congress, our democracy will slide toward the precipice of disintegration while authoritarianism creeps in, and Biden’s agenda will be shattered.

The Democrats have their work cut out for them. They must rise in unison, which is bitterly still missing, stop short of nothing to strengthen voting rights, prevent the appointment of partisans to subvert the election, fight political corruption at every level, make political power decreasingly dependent on money, get out the vote, and eliminate the filibuster to pass the voting rights bill.

Furthermore, they must hold accountable the traitors behind the insurrection on January 6, including Trump.

Democrats and the millions of law-abiding Republicans should sound the alarm before it’s too late, and never waver to preserve and protect America’s 244-year-old democracy that served as a beacon of hope and freedom to the global community.

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

 

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