Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Sep 28 2021 (IPS)

US President Biden’s earlier support for a vaccine patent waiver raised hopes for his summit last week. However, it proved disappointing, not only for efforts to end the pandemic, but also for US leadership in these challenging times.

Most rich countries have opposed most developing countries’ request to temporarily suspend World Trade Organization (WTO) intellectual property (IP) rules to more quickly contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Expectations were high as Biden had supported a patent waiver, albeit only for vaccines.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

With their IP, suppliers control production, supplies and prices. The industry claims it can meet all pandemic-related needs. But although it has no intention of meeting these needs, it insists the waiver is unnecessary. Hence, unless rich country governments stop opposing it, forthcoming WTO meetings will not achieve much.

Rich defend mRNA vaccine duopoly
COVID-19 vaccine supplies and prices are controlled by a few companies. Although BioNTech developed one of the two approved mRNA vaccines, it is now largely manufactured and marketed by Pfizer outside Europe.

BioNTech’s relationship to Pfizer is complementary, but not one between equals. By contrast, Moderna is a vaccine development start-up, with limited marketing and other capacities, especially outside the USA.

Meanwhile, able to pay more, rich countries have taken most vaccines, far, far more than enough. The duopoly initially sold more than 90% of their vaccines to rich countries, charging up to 24 times actual production costs.

Then, more vaccines started reaching MICs before recent efforts to push booster shots. Meanwhile, only 2.2% in low-income countries (LICs) have received at least one dose. Without drastic improvements, most in LICs will not be fully vaccinated before 2023.

Millions are dying as more dangerous variants emerge, confirming no one is safe until everyone is. Meanwhile, the October 2020 WTO waiver request to temporarily suspend IP rights for COVID-19 tests, treatments, equipment and vaccines has garnered broad support.

Vaccine technology not for sharing
Most global initiatives to make vaccines less unaffordable to MICs, such as COVAX, do not address the massive supply shortfall and high prices. Meanwhile, vaccine suppliers jealously protect their monopolies, claiming nobody else can safely produce them.

While at least 80 developing countries have been producing generic medicines and vaccines for decades, not all can produce the novel mRNA vaccines without access to new technical knowledge and materials. Yet, MSF has identified ‘mRNA vaccine-capable’ manufacturers in developing countries, including four in Africa alone.

MSF estimates such manufacturers can establish the capacity to produce up to 100 million doses annually within ten months for between US$127–270 million. But they would still need access to mRNA vaccine technology and reliable supplies.

But Pfizer and Moderna have both refused to share the needed. Now, instead of transferring technology or increasing vaccine supplies to developing countries, they have only contracted to supply vaccine ingredients to companies in rich countries and China.

State-subsidised super-profits
Despite benefiting from taxpayer funds, legally enforced patent monopolies and low taxes, People’s Vaccine Alliance research shows the three have used their mRNA vaccine duopoly to secure super profits. Their vaccines sell for US$41 billion over production costs estimated at US$1.20 per dose.

As a charity has noted, “Instead of partnering … to make sure that we have enough vaccine doses for everyone, these pharmaceutical companies prioritize their own profits by enforcing their monopolies and selling to the highest bidder”.

Moderna and Pfizer pay little in taxes despite making many times more than the pre-pandemic average profit rate of 8% for Fortune 500 companies in 2019. In the first half of 2021, Moderna – which had never made a profit before – paid a 7% US tax rate while Pfizer paid 15%, still well under the US statutory rate of 21%.

Perverse incentives
This new situation has created various perverse incentives prolonging the pandemic. Suppliers can make a great deal more in the medium term from tests, treatments, protective, other equipment and booster shots, supposedly for new, more dangerous variants.

Pfizer – already a large, diversified pharmaceutical conglomerate – has recently been growing by taking over businesses selling COVID-19 needs. With the prospect of more profitable booster sales, vaccine suppliers have little incentive to rapidly end the pandemic.

With COVID-19 now endemic, they continue to limit access to their vaccine technology to ensure scarcity and set prices to maximise profits. Hence, despite not having developed its own vaccine, Pfizer is now dominant.

What Biden must now do
Meanwhile, Biden has been under growing pressure to do much more. Probably more than anyone else, economist Dean Baker has long shown how the US can lead international cooperation to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, making the case for an inclusive international vaccine summit half a year ago.

Baker has argued how existing patent arrangements are not only inequitable, but also inefficient and wasteful. He has shown patent advocates as not only self-interested, but also dishonest. Instead, direct public funding would better incentivise new drug development.

US law – specifically Section 1498 of its commercial code – allows the government to require patent licensing in emergencies. Moderna, Pfizer and their scientific personnel can thus be induced to help rapidly scale up production internationally to vaccinate the world.

Also, the waiver proposal must be swiftly approved by the WTO to quickly enable more affordable access to tests, treatments, equipment and other materials urgently needed to better fight the pandemic until it can be ended altogether.

At his summit, Biden vowed to expand vaccine output in Africa and Asia. He can still do the right thing. This could well open a new era of multilateral cooperation instead of the dog-eat-dog new Cold War we are lurching towards. Perhaps there is still hope.

 

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By External Source
NEW YORK, Sep 27 2021 (IPS-Partners)

– On the sidelines of this year’s United Nations General Assembly, public, private and philanthropic donors announced a total of US$138.1 million in new contributions to Education Cannot Wait (ECW).

The new contributions come from: Germany (€50 million; approx. US$58.6 million); United States of America (US$37 million); European Union/European Commission (€25 million; approx. US$29.3 million); The LEGO Foundation (DKK35 million; approx. US$5.6 million); France (€4 million; approx. US$4.7 million); Switzerland (CHF2 million; approx. US$2.2 million); and, Porticus (€500,000, approx. US$588,000).

This new round of funding contributions will accelerate the impact of ECW’s education in emergencies investments, which have already reached more than 4.6 million crisis-affected children and adolescents. ECW’s COVID-19 response has also been delivered in record speed across 32 countries, reaching an additional 29.2 million vulnerable girls and boys. Since its inception in 2016, ECW has mobilized US$828.3 million through the ECW Trust Fund, and helped leverage with its partners US$1 billion worth of programmes aligned with ECW’s multi-year resilience programmes in 10 countries.

“We all see the dramatic crises worldwide. Children and young people suffer the most from hunger, violence, and lack of education. Every child has a right to education. Thus, I am proud to announce that Germany will commit €50 million to Education Cannot Wait,” said Gerd Müller, Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development of Germany.

“We need to act now, because we know that in times of crisis, education can offer stability, protection and prospects for the future. For 2022, we will make available a total of €50 million for the ECW multi-year resilience programmes, because education is key for achieving all dimensions of sustainable development,” said Dr. Maria Flachsbarth, Parliamentary State Secretary to the Federal Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development of Germany.

“The United States has proudly supported Education Cannot Wait since its inception in 2016. And we are proud to boost our support today. Education Cannot Wait is an educational lifeline in dozens of crisis-affected countries globally. We look forward to continued cooperation to increase access to education, improved learning outcomes and reach the most marginalized students – especially girls, refugees, internally displaced communities, gender and sexual minorities, and children with disabilities. We know when access to education is equal, the results are clear: greater economic growth, improved health outcomes, stronger democracies, more peaceful and resilient societies, and healthier and more successful children,” said USAID Administrator Samantha Power.

“We want all children to be born with the same opportunities. All too often, the fate and lives of our children are determined by the lottery of birth. This is why I am pleased to announce that Europe will be donating €25 million to the Education Cannot Wait global fund. An investment in education is an investment in a better world,” said the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.

“We must unite to put the SDGs back on track. As we continue to witness, we can never take access to education for granted. Team Europe has to date contributed to more than 40% of the funding of Education Cannot Wait, and the new €25 million contribution from the EU will further support it to reach the most vulnerable children and bring them back to education,” said European Union Commissioner for International Partnerships, Jutta Urplilainen.

“As world leaders gather for the UN General Assembly and define a path to address the interconnected crises of conflict, COVID-19, climate change and forced displacement, these crucial contributions will ensure the world’s most vulnerable children and adolescents have the chance to go learn, grow and thrive. We call on all governments and private sector partners to follow suit and support the mission of Education Cannot Wait: to leave no child or young person behind in conflicts or as refugees, but to ensure they can exercise their right to a quality education. This is a true investment in peace and prosperity,” said The Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown, UN Special Envoy for Global Education and Chair of ECW’s High-Level Steering Group.

“This new round of funding is a bold and important step in reaching the world’s most marginalized children and adolescents with the power of inclusive quality education,” said Yasmine Sherif, Director of Education Cannot Wait. “It shows the commitment of our strategic donors to scale up their generous support and we are deeply grateful for the trust placed in the proven ECW model. I thank you for this important funding by all of our partners, who came forward during the UNGA Week, enabling us to deliver more support, faster and more sustainably, for crisis-affected children and youth.”

Falling behind in achieving SDG4
Despite these significant contributions, large gaps for education in emergencies funding persist. ECW analysis of humanitarian appeals indicate that funding requirements for education grew from US$1 billion in 2019 to US$1.4 billion in 2020.

Global leaders are signaling the alarm bells as new reports indicate the world is falling behind in delivering on the Sustainable Development Goals, (including SDG4 for inclusive equitable quality education), by 2030.

According to the United Nations, COVID-19 has wiped out 20 years of education gains, with an additional 101 million of children in grades 1 through 8 falling behind in minimum reading proficiency levels. Globally only 85% of children completed primary school in 2019, up from 82% in 2010, while only about half of students will graduate from secondary school.

An estimated 1.5 billion students were impacted by COVID-19 school closures, and a recent study by the Malala Foundation estimates that an additional 20 million girls would lose their access to education as a result of the COVID-19 crisis.

Girls and boys already impacted by conflict, climate change and displacement are being pushed further to the margins. When these girls and boys are pushed out of school, they face increased risks of gender-based violence, forced recruitment, and other grave violations.

Excerpt:

With new contributions from Germany, United States of America, European Union/European Commission, The LEGO Foundation, France, Switzerland, and Porticus, ECW and partners are building a movement to reach millions of the world’s crisis-affected children and youth with the safety, hope and opportunity of a quality education.

Maru Aguzzi at the exhibition in Paris, in front of works by Alejandro Magallanes (photo by SWAN).

By SWAN
PARIS, Sep 27 2021 (IPS)

So, what’s the difference between illustration and “art”?  When asked this question, Maru Aguzzi replies with a wry smile: “Perhaps the price?”

Aguzzi is the curator of Gran Salón México-Paris – Contemporary Mexican Illustration, an exhibition taking place at the Mexican Cultural Institute in the French capital until Oct. 26. The show brings together some 40 illustrators, whose work includes painting, drawing, print-making, video and other genres.

‘Autorretrato’ by Rocca Luis Cesar, photo courtesy of Gran Salón México.

The pieces are strikingly artistic, even if they’re being presented as illustrations. All are “original” works created especially for this exhibition, which is the first in France from Gran Salón México, an annual art fair that Aguzzi created in 2014.

The fair’s mission, she says, is to offer a glimpse into the country’s growing illustration “wave”, and to bring to the public some of the best contemporary works in this category – a field that actually “plays” with the limits of art.

“Saying that price makes the difference is perhaps the funny answer, but you can go deeper and see how illustrators choose to explore content or not,” Aguzzi told SWAN. “The way the work is presented, viewers don’t have to dig for content or meaning as with contemporary art, where the work requires some kind of engagement from the viewer for completion. Illustration has an immediate impact, and viewers can like what they see or not. It’s that simple.”

Gran Salón’s participating illustrators use a variety of media just like their “artist” peers, she said. Works in the show range from oil and acrylic paintings on canvas to charcoal drawings on paper. In between, viewers can enjoy watercolours, collage, animation and digital art.

In fact, some of the illustrators do exhibit in art fairs as well, further blurring distinctions, Aguzzi said. They draw on a long tradition of Mexican artists working in various genres, as did renowned painters Diego Rivera and Rufino Tamayo – whose influence can be felt in the current show, alongside that of multi-genre Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, for instance.

‘Creciendo juntos’ by María Ponce, photo courtesy of Gran Salón México.

Picasso and his paintings of women are evoked with a twist in the illustrations of Rocca Luis Cesar (born in Guadalajara in 1986), while the more “veteran” Carlos Rodríguez (born in La Soledad, San Luis Potosí, 1980) draws upon images – such as the watermelon – that appear in the paintings of Tamayo.

Both illustrators convey a strong artistic sensibility, with Rodríguez in particular being inspired by “classical painting, mythology, naïve art and porn” – as his bio states. His two vibrant, erotic paintings in the show were created specifically to conjure a Latin American ambience in Paris, Aguzzi said.

Another notable aspect of the exhibition is its sense of humour or satire, in addition to the addressing of serious topics, such as climate change and language rights. One of the youngest illustrators, María Ponce, born in Oaxaca in 1994, exemplifies this with her colour drawings about daily life and with her “Creciendo juntos” piece, which conveys the message that we have to take care of the environment and trees if we too wish to keep thriving.

Meanwhile, illustrator and filmmaker Gabriela Badillo (born in 1979) uses her work to highlight Mexico’s indigenous languages through her 68 Voces project, a video series with stories told in these languages. Badillo co-founded audiovisual production company Hola Combo with a belief in the social responsibility of media, according to the exhibition, and she and her colleagues have worked with indigenous groups, including children, on creative initiatives.

Her videos, and other film clips and works of animation, add to the unexpected scope of the Gran Salón show.

“The work that illustrators are producing in Mexico includes numerous genres, and I really wanted to show this range,” Aguzzi told SWAN.

Additional information:

https://icm.sre.gob.mx/francia/index.php/fr/ & https://gran.salon/ 

Sheeba Aslam Fehmi at an event organized by Dhanak, celebrating couples who married under the Special Marriage Act.

By Mariya Salim
NEW DELHI, India, Sep 27 2021 (IPS)

When Ali (name changed) proposed to his best friend, little did he know that her parents would take six years to agree to their alliance because he was born into a Muslim family, and they were Hindus.

“Everything they had heard all their life pointed to Muslims being violent, conservative, forceful etc. The idea of me being Muslim and marrying their Hindu daughter was too much to fathom despite them thinking of me highly,” he said in an interview with IPS.

This story is one of the few where the end was ‘happy’, and the family did not bow to societal pressure. However, if one looks at recent propaganda and the increase of Islamophobia in India, one concept which has added fuel to this fire is the fictitious propaganda of ‘Love Jihad’.

Love Jihad is a term propagated by religious fundamentalist groups, alleging a conspiracy by Muslim men to convert non-Muslim girls in the guise of love.

The propagation of this concept is perhaps one reason why Ali had to struggle to convince his wife’s parents that his religion had nothing to do with his love for their daughter.

While it may be easy to counter such a narrative, socially, with more awareness, what has made this term popular and the hate associated with it resulting, in some cases, in violence is the support it has garnered from right-wing political parties and their success at turning such marriages into a criminal offence.

“Social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, host hundreds of pages and handles which post unverified incidents as ‘real news’ of Hindu women being deceived by Muslim men into marrying them and ending up either dead or as captives forced to convert and live in the homes of their supposedly violent Muslim husbands,” says Ashwini KP, an academic and rights activist based in Bangalore.

Challenging the provisions of one such draconian state law passed in the state of Gujarat as Gujarat Freedom of Religion (Amendment) Act, 2021, Advocate Isa Hakim, one of the petitioners’ lawyers, argued: “Amendments (in the Act), read with the discourse around Love Jihad, it is clear that the impugned Act is enacted with nothing but a communal objective and is thereby opposed to the constitutional morality, basic features and fundamental rights guaranteed under Articles 14, 19, 21, 25, and 26 of the Constitution.”

The Gujarat High Court, through an order on August 19, 2021, put a stay on the operation of several sections of the Act, including a provision that termed interfaith marriages as a means for forceful conversion. The order, the court stated, was being passed “to protect the parties solemnising inter-faith marriage from being unnecessarily harassed”. The state government soon after decided to challenge this order in the Supreme Court of India.

Addressing a rally last year in Uttar Pradesh, the chief minister Yogi Adityanath openly proclaimed: “Govt will work to curb ‘Love-Jihad’, we’ll make a law. I warn all those who conceal their identities and play with the respect of our sisters if you do not mend your ways, your ‘Ram naam satya’ journey (a phase associated with people being taken to be cremated) will begin”. Therefore, it is not surprising that in a state whose chief minister makes such open threats, right-wing groups have used love Jihad to stoke communal tensions and rioting. A total of five states in India, where the BJP is in power, have laws based on the conspiracy theory of Love Jihad, without actually using the phrase.

“It is also to undermine the agency of 21st-century Hindu women. We are a society that is afraid of its own daughters, and to keep a check on them prohibiting them from making their own choices, they (current regime) have brought out very Islamophobic and communal legislation under the garb of a safety and security issue for ‘their’ women,” says Sheeba Aslam Fehmi, research scholar and journalist in an exclusive interview with IPS.

Fehmi, also the president of Dhanak, works to protect the couples’ right to choose marriage or relationship partners. The organisation supports couples in inter-faith and inter-caste marriages.

She told IPS they also try to assist interfaith couples with safe houses to ensure they do not become targets of right-wing attacks.

Popular Indian jewellery brand Tanishq withdrew this advert with a depiction of an inter-faith marriage. It said while the campaign was to celebrate diversity it had prompted reactions “contrary to its objective”.

It is perturbing that couples who want to marry under the ‘Special Marriage Act’ (an Act passed by the Indian Parliament allowing interfaith marriages without conversion) have a section, which is now being challenged, where a 30-day notice is publicly displayed, inviting objections, before the marriage is registered.

Shital (name changed), shared with IPS how she received threatening calls from some right-wing groups once she and her Muslim partner decided to register under the Act.

“My Aadhar card (national ID) details were made public on a Facebook group. My parents, who approved of our alliance, received calls where they were threatened with ‘dire consequences’ if they did not stop our marriage,” Shital said. She called the marriage off because of these security concerns.

Asif Iqbal, the co-founder of Dhanak, said in an exclusive interview to IPS that they started the organisation because there was no support system for interfaith couples trying to marry using the Special Marriage Act. The objective was to organise people against religious fanaticism.

“I was made to sit for six hours in a police station in Delhi. The investigating officer was trying to enquire about a possible conspiracy as I was the last person an interfaith couple spoke to before they eloped. The boy was Muslim, and the girl Hindu,” said Iqbal.

The fear of vigilante groups, in the online and in actual physical spaces, is so prevalent that even brands advertising using the idea of inter-faith marriages, particularly where the boy is Muslim, are targeted as promoters of Love Jihad. A recent example was a popular jewellery brand depicting a Hindu woman and a Muslim man getting married. The advert was trolled on social media, that the company removed the advertisement from all forums.

For couples looking to challenge the draconian laws, the only recourse is the courts. However, the worrying feature is that Love Jihad targets Muslims and criminalises its men in a society with frequent incidences of Islamophobia.

 

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Young girls in Turkey use their digital devices. Over 30 years after the invention of the world wide web, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has laid out the ways that young people and children should be treated in the digital world, and how their rights should be protected. Credit: UNICEF/Olcer

By Hamid Mehmood
HAMILTON, Ontario, Canada, Sep 27 2021 (IPS)

In 2020, every human on Earth created an average of at least 1.7 megabytes of data per second, collectively amassing 2.5 quintillion data bytes. Some 90% of the world’s total data was created in the last two years alone.

Globally, companies are undergoing transformations including the use of digital technologies to create new or modify processes, culture and customer experience to meet changing business and market expectations.

The COVID pandemic has accelerated companies’ digital transformations, and by 2022 an estimated 70% of global Gross Domestic Product will have gone through some form of digitization, the result of an estimated $6.8 trillion in investments.

This exponential growth of big data availability is propelling disruptive technologies like those using artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, and cloud computing, which all significantly alter how consumers, industries, or businesses operate.

Data-fueled artificial intelligence applications alone are projected to generate additional economic activity of around $13 trillion by 2030. Because of this value generation capability, data is considered the “new oil.”

However, the trend from the last decade shows that, just like oil, the hot spots to generate and create value from data are located just in a selected few countries. We are witnessing the creation of a data-impoverished Global South, which cannot reap the financial benefits or use data to address challenges like massive forest fires, water scarcity, floods, droughts, and other manifestations of the changing climate.

It is alarming that, despite the much talked-about explosion in data generation, critical high quality data for global, regional, and national development is lacking. Major gaps are opening between the data haves and have-nots.

Unfortunately, the have-nots include the majority of countries facing challenges like water scarcity, access to clean water, exposure to flood risk, and drought, which require quality data to be generated and processed to create actionable information and knowledge.

Today in the Global South water data collection tends to focus on individual development projects, spawning a patchwork of data sets of short time duration, restricted spatial coverage and limited availability.

This decline is most evident in Africa, where the density of water-data collection networks has been declining over time and falls far below World Meteorological Organization guidelines.

In the last two decades alone, the majority of new stations established to report to WMO’s Global Runoff Data Center are located in “new oil” rich countries. According to the WMO database, gauging stations in North America outnumber those in the 20 most water-stressed countries by more than 10-1. Similar data inequality exists for water-quality and water-related disasters.

In the last decade, remote sensing data coupled with cloud computing has shown promise to address the water-data inequality in the Global South and is successfully used to monitor various parameters of surface water bodies over a period of time.

However, the lack of traceable ground truth observations against which to validate the satellite observations is a key challenge, essentially making the remote sensing data unfit to be used as part of water-related decision support systems. Also, the remote sensing data has failed to accurately quantify parameters like precipitation and river flows where the data gaps are most prominent in the Global South.

In addition to the lack of water data faucets, the uncoordinated and unmonitored data generation efforts in the Global South are leading to the creation of data wastelands, where more than 80% of data created is unstructured and random.

Converting this unstructured data to actionable information is expensive; cleansing and deduplicating a record can cost as much as $10. This poor quality and sparse data also impacts AI and blockchain adoption, essentially shutting out the Global South from the economic activity, social and climate change mitigation benefits these technologies provide.

Given the rise in the severity and frequency of water-related challenges, it is essential to address the data inequality-related issues to achieve the water-related Sustainable Development Goals in this decade.

The solution includes Global North leadership in the new world data order to share their data and information-related technologies with the Global South to help generate quality and actionable data at a global and national scale.

The Global North must also commit to water science capacity building by funding operation monitoring, data rescue and update, and training of water scientists. Given the international nature of emerging water resource issues, the commitment and support of the entire global community is required to reverse the ongoing decline of critical water data sets.

Hamid Mehmood is a Senior Researcher, Hydro-informatics and Information Technology, at the UN University’s Canadian-based Institute for Water, Environment, and Health, which is supported by the Government of Canada and hosted at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. The Institute marks its 25th anniversary in 2021.

 

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Members of the Cangrejera Drinking Water Association in the Desvío de Amayo village, La Libertad municipality in central El Salvador, stand at the foot of the tank from which water flows by gravity to the nine villages that benefit from this community project. There are an estimated 2,500 rural water boards in the country, which provide service to 1.6 million people. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
LA LIBERTAD, El Salvador , Sep 27 2021 (IPS)

After climbing a steep hill along winding paths, you reach a huge water tank at the top that supplies peasant farmer families who had no water and instead set up their own community project on this coastal strip in central El Salvador.

“It wasn’t easy to carry out our project; building the tank was tough because we had to carry the materials up the hill on our shoulders: the gravel, cement, sand and iron,” José Dolores Romero, treasurer of the Cangrejera Drinking Water Association, told IPS.

The association is located in the village of Desvío de Amayo, in the canton of Cangrejera, part of the municipality and department of La Libertad.

The system, which began operating in 1985, provides water to 468 families in this and eight other nearby villages.

This is what hundreds of rural communities and villages have done to gain access to drinking water, as the government has failed to provide service to every corner of this impoverished nation of 6.7 million people.

Faced with the lack of service, families have organised in “juntas de agua”: rural water boards that are community associations that on their own manage to drill a well and build a tank and the rest of the system.

In El Salvador there are about 2,500 rural water boards, which provide service to 25 percent of the population, or some 1.6 million people, according to data from the non-governmental Foro del Agua (Water Forum), which promotes equitable and participatory water management.

The boards receive no government support, despite the fact that they provide a public service that should fall to the National Administration of Aqueducts and Sewers (Anda).

María Ofelia Pineda, 58, washes a frying pan and other dishes she used to prepare lunch at her home in the village of Las Victorias in Cangrejera on El Salvador’s coastal strip. Families like hers benefit from the water provided by the Cangrejera Drinking Water Association, which has been operating for 36 years. For seven dollars a month, the residents of this rural town receive 20 cubic metres of water. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

A community project

In the village of Desvío de Amayo, located at the centre of the country’s coastal strip, families used to dig their own wells in their backyards, but the water was not potable, and caused health problems as a result.

“It’s true that when you drill a well here you find water, but it isn’t drinkable, and the springs in the coastal area are contaminated with feces,” said Romero, who along with several other members of the water board met with IPS for a tour of the area.

The water in the tank is made potable by adding chlorine, a task carried out by José Hernán Moreno, 66, who described himself as the “valvulero”, responsible for the tank, which has a capacity of 200 cubic metres.

When there is a mishap with one of the pipelines running to one of the communities, it is Moreno who is in charge of closing the necessary valves.

With a quiet chuckle, he recalled that on one occasion he “killed” some fish that a local resident was raising in a pond, hinting that he may have put in more chlorine than he should have.

“They got mad at me, they blamed me, but my duty is to pour in the necessary chlorine,” Moreno said.

The well drilled by the association is 60 metres deep, and the water is pumped four km uphill to the tank from the village using a pump driven by a 20-horsepower engine.

From there, it is gravity-fed to the nine villages it serves.

“We have water all day and all night, and what we pay depends on how much we use,” one of the beneficiaries, Ana María Landaverde, a 62-year-old mother of five, told IPS.

Carlos Enrique Rosales stands in front of the lighting panel of the community water system. He is in charge of maintaining the well, pump, motor and other parts of the system, located in the Desvío de Amayo village in Cangrejera, in the Salvadoran municipality of La Libertad. The project provides water to 468 families in this and eight other villages, which the government does not supply. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Each family pays seven dollars for 20 cubic metres a month, the equivalent of about 20 barrels or 20,000 gallons. If they consume more than that, they pay 50 cents per cubic metre.

But water was not always available 24 hours a day.

Years ago they received only a couple of hours a day of service because, as there were no metres to measure water consumption, many families wasted water, while others received little.

Some used it to irrigate home gardens and even small fields where they grow corn, beans and other crops.

“Before there was a lot of water waste, that’s why the micro-metres were installed,” said Landaverde. The 20 cubic metres are enough to cover the needs of her family, which now has six members, including several grandchildren.

Since these devices were installed to measure consumption, families have used water more rationally and now there is enough for everyone, 24 hours a day.

“We know that we have to take care of it, with or without metres we have always taken care of it,” Ana Leticia Orantes, 59, told IPS.

She lives in the village of La Ceiba, which is also in Cangrejera. She and one of her sons grow crops like corn, beans, yucca and chili peppers on a 2.7-hectare plot of land.

“This little piece of land gives us enough to live on,” she said.

However, not everyone was happy when the metres were installed. People who were using it irrationally, to irrigate crops for example, were furious, said Romero, the treasurer.

“We had serious problems because they were used to wasting water and suddenly we restricted their water use with the metres, measuring consumption,” he said. “I made a lot of enemies, they almost killed me.”

With the money received for the water service, the association has managed to become self-sustainable, and has the necessary financial resources to pay for repairs and equipment maintenance.

This is important because the system has been operating for 36 years and, as with a car, breakdowns can happen at any time.

The well of the community water system in Cangrejera, in central El Salvador, is 60 metres deep, and a 20-horsepower motor drives the pump that directs the liquid to a tank four kilometres uphill. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Strength through unity

The Cangrejera project initiative is part of the Association of Autonomous Drinking Water and Sanitation Systems (Asaps), a group of 15 water boards located in four municipalities in the department of La Libertad.

The four municipalities are La Libertad, Huizúcar, Villa Nueva and Santa Tecla. The idea is to support each other when technical or other problems arise.

“There are problems that we can’t solve on our own, we need other people to lend us a hand,” said Romero.

Asaps is also part of a cooperative in which two other community water associations participate, one located in Suchitoto, in the department of Cuscatlán, in the centre of the country, and another in Chalatenango, in the north.

The aim is that through the cooperative, materials and equipment can be acquired at a lower cost than if the associations were to purchase them on their own.

The boards are also part of the Water Forum, a nationwide citizens’ organisation that, among other questions, is pushing for a water law in the country to achieve equitable and sustainable use.

The draft law has been debated in the legislature for more than a decade, but it has stalled over the issue of who should control the governing body: whether only state agencies or representatives of the business community should be included as well.

The latter would include members of the powerful industry of producers of carbonated beverages, juices, beer and bottled water.

The government of Nayib Bukele, in power since June 2019, introduced a new proposal in the legislature last June, and has enough votes to pass it: the 56 out of 84 seats held by the ruling party, New Ideas.

Social organisations and the water boards themselves see the government proposal as a sort of veiled privatisation, since one of the articles grants exploitation rights to private entities for 473,043 cubic metres per year, for periods ranging from 10 to 15 years.

Experts say this amount could supply an entire town.

“How much profit will those barbarians who bottle and sell it make from the water?” complained Romero.

The water boards are demanding to be included in the government proposal, arguing that they play an important role in providing a service not offered by the State.

“We are doing a job that should fall to the government, and what does it give us in return? Nothing,” he added.

María Ofelia Pineda, a 58-year-old native of the village of Las Victorias, also in Cangrejera, said the service received from the community water system changed their lives forever.

“It’s a great thing to have the water right here in the house, we don’t have to go to the river anymore. When it rained we couldn’t go, we were in danger because of the floods,” she told IPS, while washing a frying pan and other dishes she used to make lunch.

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Image by SilvanaGodoy from Pixabay

By Thomas Pogge
Sep 24 2021 (IPS)

Impact Funds would make the business of innovation more cost-effective and enable a triple win for the potential beneficiaries of innovations.

Globalized in 1995 through the TRIPS Agreement, humanity’s dominant mechanism for encouraging innovations involves 20-year product patents. Such temporary monopolies give innovators exclusive rights over production and sale of their innovation, thereby enabling them to collect large markups from early users.

The resulting high prices impede diffusion of innovations during their patent period. Coal-fired power plants in India were built without the latest “ultrasupercritical” green technology because its use would have required some $1.5 million per boiler in licensing fees. An excellent cure for hepatitis-C, sofosbuvir, was introduced in 2013 at a price of $84,000, about 3000x manufacturing cost. It has since reached only 5 million patients worldwide; the other 66 million remain infected and continue to spread the disease. During their long patent period, innovations produce a mere fraction of the social value they could produce if competitively priced.

Impact funds would bring revolutionary change. Where monopoly rewards turn innovators into jealous spies in search of possible infringers, impact rewards would encourage innovators actively to promote their registered innovation’s fast, wide and impactful diffusion

This access problem can be avoided by creating publicly financed impact funds that would reward innovations sold at competitive prices according to the social benefits achieved with them. As with the patent system, the fixed cost of innovation would largely fall on those who can afford it. Yet there would be no need to exclude the rest. With socially valued innovations rewarded from public funds, everyone can have access to them without monopoly markups.

Impact rewards can work in any domain where a uniform metric of social value can be formulated, such as health gains for pharmaceuticals, pollution reduction for green technologies, expertise and employment for education, nutrient yield and reduced use of fertilizers and pesticides for agriculture. Such a system would work best if many states jointly supported it, thereby greatly increasing its social value while diluting its cost.

The pharma sector is a good domain for exploring this idea. Its innovations protect and promote health, an appropriate purpose for public funding. Let us imagine then a Health Impact Fund that, supported by many countries, invites innovators to register any of their new pharmaceuticals for participation in ten consecutive annual payouts, each split among registered products according to health gains achieved in the preceding year.

With these rewards enabling innovators to recoup their R&D expenses and to make appropriate profits, registrants would have to accept competitive pricing during the reward period and also to waive any remaining monopoly privileges thereafter. In non-contributing affluent countries, however, registrants should remain free to charge monopoly prices. This exception would attract registrations by reducing their opportunity cost and would also give affluent countries more reason to join the funding coalition.

Some variant of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), as widely employed and refined in recent decades, could be used as a common metric for comparing and aggregating health gains across diverse diseases, therapies, demographic groups, lifestyles and cultures. To reassure funders and/or innovators, a maximum and/or minimum reward per QALY could be specified.

Assuming an initial contribution rate of 0.02% of gross national income and one-third weighted participation by states, the Health Impact Fund could get started with annual pools of $6 billion — less than 1% of the $800 billion the world currently spends each year on branded pharmaceuticals. States’ contributions would be offset by savings on (a) registered pharmaceuticals and (b) other health care costs, as well as by gains in (c) economic productivity and (d) consequent tax revenues.

With annual pools of $6 billion, each registered pharmaceutical would participate in $60 billion worth of disbursements over its ten-year reward period. A commercial innovator would register a product only if it expected to make a profit on top of recouping its R&D expenses. There is some debate over what these fixed costs of innovation amount to. The number of products registered with the Health Impact Fund would throw light on this question because of the Fund’s self-adjusting reward rate. Were it to attract roughly twenty products, with two entering and two exiting in a typical year, this would show that the prospect of $3 billion over ten years is seen as satisfactory — neither windfall nor hardship. This self-adjustment feature reassures innovators/contributors that the reward rate will not fall/rise to an unreasonable level.

The Health Impact Fund demonstrates that we can incentivize innovations in a way that avoids the severe access barriers of monopoly patents. These barriers therefore constitute an immense human rights violation. As illustrated by the hepatitis-C case, millions suffer and die each year because generic manufacturers are forbidden to sell them the medicines they need at competitive prices. Millions more suffer and die because high markups impede the diffusion of green technologies in poorer countries.

Impact funds would bring revolutionary change. Where monopoly rewards turn innovators into jealous spies in search of possible infringers, impact rewards would encourage innovators actively to promote their registered innovation’s fast, wide and impactful diffusion. Registrants would even subsidize it to poor buyers insofar as the increase in rewardable impact justifies the cost of the subsidy.

Impact funds would secure additional gains for human rights as well. Where patent rewards fail to incentivize innovations that meet needs specific to the poor, impact funds would encourage such innovations by assessing impact regardless of the economic position of the beneficiaries. Thus, pharmaceutical innovators could profitably develop and deploy good new treatments for the now notoriously neglected tropical diseases, which afflict over a billion people, and for other major diseases concentrated among the poor, like tuberculosis, malaria, hepatitis and pneumonia, which together kill some seven million people annually.

While patent rewards are largely indifferent to an innovation’s third-party effects, impact funds would take them fully into account. Thus, the Health Impact Fund would reward containment of a disease with a new medicine for having protected from infection people who never took the medicine. An innovator rewarded through monopoly markups, by contrast, is rewarded only insofar as its medicine fails to contain its target disease. By eradicating a disease, such an innovator would destroy its own future market.

Patent rewards tempt innovators in various ways to “put profits over people.” Impact funds align profits with human needs, making the business of innovation much more equitable in terms of research priorities and access to its fruits: innovators do well by doing good. By guiding innovators to organize their R&D and marketing holistically toward achieving the most cost-effective social gains, impact funds enable a triple win: for the potential beneficiaries of innovations, for the innovators and also for governments and taxpayers.

Thomas Pogge is the Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs and director of the Global Justice Program at Yale. He co-founded Academics Stand Against Poverty and Incentives for Global Health.

This article was originally published by OpenGlobalRights

Solar water heaters on top of buildings are found across Jordan. The country has embarked upon a climate-responsive economy recovery and a new growth trajectory strategy. Photo Credit: NDC Partnership

By Sania Farooqui
NEW DELHI, India, Sep 24 2021 (IPS)

For the first time in decades, Jordan’s economy contracted in 2020. COVID-19 took a heavy toll on the economy, and it was concerning for the country, particularly because Jordan had managed to grow at an average rate of 2%, despite regional and international shocks to its economy amounting to 44% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) over the past decade.

In 2020 GDP contracted 3.5% YOY, with a projected rebound towards the middle of 2021. The unemployment rate in Jordan increased to 22.7% of the labor force in 2020 from 19.1% a year earlier. It is the highest jobless rate since at least 2005.

The Government of Jordan (GoJ), in light of COVID-19, has taken steps to respond to both the health and economic risks associated with the pandemic. Both are said to be of concern because some of the pandemic restrictions continue to extend into 2021, and economic recovery could be stalled.

One of the key solutions that Jordan has readily embarked on is a climate-responsive recovery and a new growth trajectory strategy. Jordan’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) under the Paris Agreement on climate change is one of the key platforms through which it hopes to achieve its green development measures.

“Jordan’s climate-responsive and green economy framework focuses on several key sectors: water, waste management, energy, agriculture, tourism, and transport, in addition to health as a key adaptation sector,” says Lamia S. Al-Zoa’bi, Director of Development Plans and Programs in Jordan’s Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation (MOPIC) in an interview given to IPS News.

“In Jordan, the focus is on a climate-responsive, green recovery that can create jobs and economic transformation (JET), through a focus on public/private investments and climate finance,” says Al-Zoa’bi.

The climate action planning adopted a comprehensive set of strategic climate responses, including Jordan’s initial Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC) in 2015, followed by its first NDC in 2016. Building on these efforts, and in collaboration with national and internal stakeholders, the country launched its NDC Action Plan with priority projects in 2020, with support from the NDC Partnership.

The Ministry of Environment, with support from the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI), launched the Green Growth National Action Place (GG-NAPs) 2021-2025, which are mainly medium-term implementation plans. A majority of actions in the GG-NAPs are climate responsive and aligned with NDCs, which have a longer time frame for implementation until 2030. Through the Partnership’s Climate Action Enhancement Package (CAEP), Jordan conducted a Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) for 35 priority climate actions contributing to the implementation of Jordan’s NDC as previously identified by Sectoral Working Groups jointly with a climate finance strategy.

Earlier in June 2021, The World Bank Group approved a US$500 million program to catalyze public and private investments in Jordan for a green and inclusive recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this statement, World Bank Group’s Mashreq Regional Director, Saroj Kumar Jha says, “Jordan has been one of the most active and pioneering countries in the region in ratifying and adopting international climate change initiatives, including the Paris Agreement. Jordan can now capitalize on these efforts to become an attractive destination for green and climate-related investments.”

The Inclusive, Transparent and Climate Responsive Investments is part of the US$1.1 billion recently announced for Program-for-Results (PforR), through combined loans and grants, financing support from the World Bank Group and other international partners to support Jordan in responding to the pandemic and promoting an early, climate-resilient, and inclusive recovery.

According to a report by the United Nations Environment Programme, the Mediterranean region, which is home to several countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), has been described as a ‘climate change hotspot’. According to the National Climate Change Adaptation Plan, climate-related hazards, such as extreme temperature droughts, flash floods, and storms, affect Jordan. These hazards are increasing in frequency and intensity over the years due to climate change.

Jordan, however, positioned itself well ahead in tackling these issues by advancing its climate policy framework under the Paris Agreement, which it ratified in 2016. Jordan was amongst the first countries to launch a Climate Change Policy in 2013 and has consistently issued its national communications under the United Nations Framework Convention (UNFCCC).

Ahead of COP26, Jordan is updating its NDC, building on a prioritization exercise conducted in 2020 in five key sectors as part of its engagement with the NDC Partnership. “The NDC Action Plan seeks to scale renewables and energy-efficient measures, adapt water, agriculture and health sectors to climate impacts, and strengthen the resilience of disadvantaged groups and vulnerable ecosystems,” says Al-Zoa’bi.

So far, cost-benefit analysis (CBA) for reducing GHG emissions and potential climate impacts have been conducted for 35 prioritized NDC actions.

“Generating new jobs while maintaining social protection is one of the main short-to-medium-term priorities, given the record unemployment that comprises almost 25% of the labor force. While existing jobs are under pressure from the tourism sector fallout, the path to recovery in international arrivals is uncertain. Increasing tax revenue is an important outcome, as both current and projected fiscal deficit levels require new sources of tax income. All of these are seen to be drivers for green recovery in Jordan,” Al-Zoa’bi says.

Jordan’s green growth pathway aims to provide substantial benefits for the country’s economy, people, and environment. This includes plans for reducing dependency on fuel imports through transformations in the transport sector. This helps to mitigate uncertain and exogenous economic shocks arising from volatility in fossil fuel prices and physical interruption supplies.

According to the Jordan Sustainable Consumption and Production National Action Plan 2016-2025, the combination of green growth and sustainable consumption and production efforts in energy, transport, water, agriculture, waste, and tourism has the potential to attract sustainable green investments amounting to 1.3 billion U.S dollars and create 51,000 new jobs over ten years.

“Jordan is updating its first NDC by raising its macroeconomic GHG emission reduction target, this forthcoming updated NDC with higher climate ambition aims at driving Jordan’s post-COVID-19 recovery process into a lower carbon and more climate-resilient development pathway steered by national green growth priorities while fully committing to the provisions of the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement,” concludes Al-Zoa’bi.

 

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A fisherman displays his catch of the day in Dominica. Credit: Alison Kentish/IPS

By Alison Kentish
DOMINICA, Sep 24 2021 (IPS)

On September 10th, on a sweltering summer afternoon, three fishers drove a van around the residential community of Castle Comfort in Dominica, blowing forcefully into their conch shells – the traditional call that there is fresh fish for sale in the area.

One of the men, Andrew Joseph, urged a customer to double her purchase of Yellowfin Tuna, stating that at five Eastern Caribbean dollars a pound (US$1.85), she was getting the deal of the summer. (In the lean season, that price can double).

“It’s good fish, it’s fresh, it’s cheap,” he told IPS, adding that, “People eat too much meat. This is what is good for the body and the brain.”

Little did he know that he was echoing the words of a scientist who is rallying the world, and the landmark United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) to put greater emphasis on the financial, nutritional and traditional benefits of aquatic foods.

“Foods coming from marine sources, inland sources, food from water, they are superfood, but this is being ignored in the global debate and at the country level, because we have had a focus on land production systems and we have to change that,” Shakuntala Haraksingh Thilsted, Global Lead for Nutrition and Public Health at World Fish told IPS.

The nutrition scientist is also the Vice-Chair of Action Track 4, Advancing Equitable Livelihoods, at the UNFSS.

As the landmark summit hopes to deliver urgent change in the way the world thinks about, produces and consumes food, issues like the linkages between aquatic systems and health are emerging.

So are other linkages a scoping report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) says the world cannot ignore. The report, approved in June, paves the way for a 3-year assessment of the interlinkages among biodiversity, water, food and health.

In the case of the UNFSS, it shows how food systems transformation can be achieved if tackled as one part of this network.

“It will assess the state of knowledge, including indigenous and local knowledge, on past, present, and possible future trends in these interlinkages, with a focus on biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people,” IPBES Executive Secretary Dr Anne Larigauderie told IPS.

“The IPBES nexus assessment will contribute to the development of a strengthened knowledge base for policymakers for the simultaneous implementation of the post-2020 global biodiversity framework, under the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the Paris Agreement adopted under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”

Landscape Ecology Professor Ralf Seppelt was one of the scoping experts for the nexus assessment. He says the science is clear on how food systems impact biodiversity and why agroecology must be a pillar of efforts to transform food systems.

“Micronutrients are lacking a lot. Micronutrients are provided by fruits and vegetables, which need pollination. So, the nexus is really strong between agroecological principles and the nutritional value of what we are producing,” he told IPS.

“Wherever we have to increase production, we should do it on agroecological principles. We should consider what farmers say and do, their needs, their access to production goods such as fertilizers and seeds, and it’s equally important to change our diets. It’s not just reducing harvest losses and food waste, but also about moving away from energy-rich, meat-based diets and feeding ourselves in an environmentally friendly way,” he said.

Professor Seppelt is also hoping that the voices of small farmers and indigenous communities are amplified in the global food transformation conversation. “IPBES made an enormous effort to work with indigenous peoples and local communities and include indigenous and local knowledge in its reports. We organized workshops, to collect a diversity of views about nature and its contributions to people, or ecosystem services to make the assessment as relevant as possible to a range of users,” he said.

For Thilsted, any plan to revamp food systems must come with a commitment to weed out inequality. She says from access to inputs and production to consumption and waste, inequality remains a problem.

“This unequal distribution of who wins, who loses, who does well, who does not do too well, who profits and who does not is putting a strain on food and nutrition and it is limiting our progress towards a sustainable development future,” she told IPS.

“COVID-19 has shown the fragility of the system and it is further displacing the vulnerable, for example, women and children who are being more exposed to food and nutrition insecurity.”

The IPBES nexus assessment hopes to better inform policymakers on these key issues.

It is not the first assessment of interlinkages. Earlier this year IPBES and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) launched a landmark workshop report that focused on tackling the climate and biodiversity crises as one.

Now, the current nexus assessment on interlinkages among biodiversity, water, food and health will explore options for sustainable approaches to water, climate change, adaptation and mitigation, food and health systems.

IPBES Executive Secretary Dr Anne Larigauderie says it also shows that there is hope for restoring the balance of nature.

“I would like people to remember and know that they are a part of nature, that the solutions for our common future are in nature; that nature can be conserved and restored to allow us, human beings, to simultaneously meet all our development goals. We can do this if we work together, act more based on equity, social and environmental justice, reflect on our values systems, and on our visions of what a good life actually is.”

 

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By Ian Richards
GENEVA, Sep 24 2021 (IPS)

Last week the World Bank announced it was “discontinuing” its “Doing Business” report, which ranks countries on the ease of opening and operating a company.

It cited the outcome of an investigation that found the World Bank had changed the rankings under pressure of funding. This wasn’t the first time the rankings had come in for criticism. A 2008 internal evaluation report highlighted their lack of transparency, while in 2018 the Bank’s chief economist, Paul Romer, resigned decrying data manipulation.

In truth, the rankings had for some time faced a credibility issue. My colleagues and I saw this first hand. And there were a number of reasons for it.

Firstly, Doing Business had become too politicised. It was originally intended as a way to measure improvements in countries’ business environments. It used an index score based on the number of procedures and time to for example start a business or get a construction permit – there were ten indicators.

However, the Bank also used it to rank countries, fêting top scorers and reformers. Governments soon saw a good ranking as an end in itself, regardless of how it impacted their development. A slip in rank could be politically damaging.

The rankings ostensibly promised a rigorous evaluation of each country’s business environment. Yet with a small team in Washington DC operating in what the investigation described as a toxic environment, much of the work evaluating the ten indicators in 190 countries was farmed out to national volunteer panels, who were asked to amend or approve pre-filled questionnaires.

Credit: World Bank

Not all were experts on the matter and some did not even work in the country. Many we spoke to barely gave the questionnaire a glance before signing off. Further, the English questionnaires posed challenges in countries where the language isn’t commonly spoken.

The result was that governments didn’t always see their hard work reflected in the rankings, leading to lobbying campaigns that, perhaps unsurprisingly, favoured those with greater weight and not always in the right way.

Some governments complained that their score changed for little reason, and in the case of Chile, according to the party in power. The untransparent nature of the changes contrasts for example with UNCTAD’s Global Enterprise Registration index, which specifically invites input from the public.

The investigation confirmed a perception that rankings were helped by paying the World Bank to advise on reforms instead of turning to development institutions such as UNCTAD or UNDP.
It noted that, “the vast majority of Bank employees that we spoke to raised the issue of the inherent conflict of interest that advisory services create.”

The methodology also had its flaws. It did little to distinguish between good procedures, such as ensuring compliance with environmental rules, and unnecessary red tape, such as requiring yet another stamped and notarised copy of a document.

And while reforms to the business environment can be measured in the number of days and procedures saved, it didn’t measure their impact.

For example, at the start of Covid we helped Benin move the process of creating a business online, meaning it could be done from a mobile phone instead of spending days queuing at government offices in the tropical sun. It also cut total time to two hours. But it didn’t end there.

As a result of the changes, which made life easier for those short on time or far from the capital, the number of companies created increased by 43 percent, half started by under-30s, half in rural areas and a third owned by women. This impact, more than a simple ranking, should be the real cause for celebration.

So, what happens next? The Bank’s board has said it will “be working on a new approach to assessing the business and investment climate.” What could this look like, how can it encourage real development, how can it be depoliticised, and is it still relevant?

Doing Business is meant to promote development by making it easier for the private sector to operate.

Therefore, it shouldn’t just measure if reforms make procedures easier on paper, but if they’re actually leading to more companies being created, and if so where and by whom? In other words, is there a real development impact?

It should also measure if procedures are clearly understood. Because lack of clarity on which paperwork to prepare, where to go, how much to pay and what to expect often discourages business owners from registering, perpetuating the informal economy. Hanoi municipality in Vietnam shows how this can be done well.

The team should be sufficiently staffed to operate without an extensive reliance on volunteers, and any desk analysis should be double-checked with field visits to government offices, backed by surveys of private companies.

The team’s independence could be protected by a committee with membership from other development organisations. That committee would oversee the elaboration of each report. It would also hear appeals from governments who feel that the index does not correctly capture their situation.

The construction of the index should be published online, including the data collected, decisions on outliers and any other assumptions, such that a member of the public with adequate statistical expertise could reasonably generate the same results.

For transparency’s sake, the consideration of appeals by governments should also be published.

The index should be less political. This means no rankings. Reforms aren’t a race, and quality trumps quantity. An improved business environment is a means to an end but not an end in itself.

The final question though is whether such an index is still needed at a time when many governments, pushed by Covid and the demands of younger entrepreneurs, are shifting their administrative procedures online.

Earlier this year, Bhutan made it possible for small business owners to register their companies through a government website and receive automatically-generated legal documents by email in seconds.

As more governments adopt that same platform and technology, countries will soon be separated by hours or minutes rather than weeks and days. Procedures will be reduced to a single step.

Under this scenario, it is not clear that there will be anything left for Doing Business to measure.

Ian Richards, a development economist at the UN, helps governments improve their business environments and attract investment.

 

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Sepesa Curuki and his daughter Lupe. The family is heartbroken about leaving their ancestral lands but their home is no longer safe after being battered by intense and frequent cyclones, flooding and erosion. Credit: Sepesa Curuki

By Neena Bhandari
Sydney, Australia, Sep 23 2021 (IPS)

Sepesa Curuki and his community are coming to terms with the prospect of relocation from Cogea village on Fiji’s second-largest island of Vanua Levu. Their village, which lies between two rivers that flow into the Pacific Ocean only 2km away, has been battered by intense and frequent cyclones, flooding and erosion, threatening their very existence.

“We are heartbroken to be having to leave our ancestral land, but to survive, we must relocate to a safe place,” the 36-year-old school teacher tells IPS on a scratchy phone line, reverberating with the background sound of pelting rain.

“Our close-knit community of 72 people has experienced three severe tropical cyclones in one year. TC Harold in April 2020 and TC Ana in January 2021 caused extreme flooding, and TC Yasa in December 2020 completely consumed 23 of the 37 houses in the village. Not even a single post was left standing. The remaining homes, including ours, experienced widespread destruction,” says Curuki, who now lives with his wife, mother, two brothers and four children in a two-bedroom concrete home and a tent.

Fiji accounts for 0.006 percent of global carbon emissions, and it became the first country to ratify the 2015 Paris Agreement. But it, along with its other low-lying Pacific Island neighbours, is experiencing the catastrophic effects of climate change unfolding in a fast forward mode.

“Heavy rainfall has been triggering landslides and causing the riverbank to burst, flooding and severely damaging the crops – our only source of livelihood. In my life span, I have never seen anything like the destruction caused by TC Yasa. Most of the villagers are now living in tents scattered around the silt-covered remnants of what was once a thriving village with farms green with root crops,” says Curuki’s 63-year-old mother, Timaima, on the speakerphone as she chops cassava (tavioka) and dalo (taro) for lunch.

A quarter of Pacific Islands people live within 1 km of the coast. With the next cyclone season looming, the people of Cogea are awaiting relocation as a matter of urgency.

Sepesa Curuki’s mother Timaima and his daughter Lupe prepare dinner. Credit: Sepesa Curuki

Fiji had released its relocation guidelines in 2019, which stated that “planned relocation represents an option of last resort”. Human mobility is established as a priority human security and national security issue in the country’s National Climate Change Policy 2018-2030. The government has established the Climate Relocation of Communities Trust Fund (CRCTF) to relocate communities forced to move to safe areas by climate change-induced rising seas and extreme weather.

To improve evidence-based decision making in disaster preparedness and response and access to climate change adaptation and mitigation finance, the UK Space Agency’s International Partnership Programme (IPP) CommonSensing supports Fiji, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu to use satellite remote sensing-based earth observation (EO) data.

The project is being implemented by the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) through its UN Satellite Centre (UNOSAT) with a consortium of partners, including the Commonwealth Secretariat, which is spearheading the access to climate finance component of the project.

“We provide technical assistance to Fiji, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, through the Commonwealth Climate Finance Access Hub (CCFAH), working towards using the geospatial-based CommonSensing platform to make better, more robust proposals for accessing climate finance, and support long-term decision-making,” says UnniKrishnan Nair, Head of Climate Change Section at the Commonwealth Secretariat.

“CommonSensing uses satellite data for calculating baseline conditions and for measuring the climate-related changes over time in aspects, such as deforestation, sea-level rise, flooding, land degradation, fisheries, coastal protection and food security. This concrete evidence-based data, which shows the impact of climate change on vulnerable communities and what can make them more resilient, makes the rationale for funding much stronger,” Nair tells IPS.

Of the international climate finance available, only three percent went to Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in 2017-18. A report compiled by the Fijian Government and the World Bank said Fiji would need to spend $4.5 billion over the next ten years on measures to adapt to climate change.

To support the development of climate change project proposals, capacity-building and project implementation, the CCFAH embeds Commonwealth National Climate Finance Advisers (CNCFA) in government departments of these countries.

Sepesa Curuki at his home in Cogea Village in Fiji. The impact of climate change has meant the village is no longer safe for this teacher and his family.

“The EO tools can help SIDS to develop and implement green stimulus measures and also in the process of revising and implementing their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) as the ability to access climate finance effectively becomes increasingly relevant,” Katherine Cooke, CNCFA for Fiji, tells IPS.

“We have recently conducted Climate Finance ‘Writeshop’ training for government officials and stakeholders in Fiji in the use of CommonSensing data to meet the complex requirements of climate finance applications. It focused on three project proposals: Fiji Rural Electrification Fund – Mitigation; Climate Change Relocation – Adaptation; and Decarbonization of public bus transport in Fiji – Mitigation,” Cooke adds.

EO technologies and data in enabling better access to climate finance is still in its early stages. It is currently being trialled for Disaster Risk Reduction and Response and Adaptation.

As UNITAR-UNOSAT Geographic Information Systems (GIS) expert, Leba Gaunavinaka, who is embedded with Fiji’s Ministry of Economy, tells IPS: “In the event of natural disasters and the three recent Tropical Cyclones that hit Fiji, the National Disaster Management Office (NDMO) activates their National Emergency Operations Center (NEOC) and divisional EOCs coordinating response. We join them with other governmental representatives as part of the joint task force UNOSAT provides satellite imageries and GIS support to the team engaged with planning and deployment for distribution of relief in the immediate aftermath.”

These activities include tracking the cyclone path with the latest updates from the Fiji Meteorological Service and mapping impacted communities (potential population and households affected) with the Fiji Bureau of Statistics, mapping post-disaster assessments with UNOSAT rapid mapping support, and producing on-demand GIS maps for routes taken by deployed teams.

Gaunavinaka says, “NDMO’s GIS team provides updates to the daily situational reports (SITREPs). For TC Ana, there was widespread flooding due to the intense and prolonged rainfall that followed. UNOSAT supported with a flood susceptibility map (using height above nearest drainage method), and this was also shared with government stakeholders”.

“There is a trend to use offline apps for capturing data by actors on the ground and later sync when there is internet connection. Now there is an active OpenStreetMap (OSM) Fiji community supported by the HOT’s Community Impact Microgrant running monthly mapathons to crowd-source information updating Fiji’s building outlines coverage of OSM. One can also find areas where there are data gaps in building outlines and where OSM mappers aim to focus on, from UNOSAT’s Data Quality Assessment Tool available from the DSS tool on the CommonSensing Platform,” she adds.

Based on the available data, users can benefit from understanding the overall risks their communities are prone to and what priority interventions can be deployed to reduce vulnerabilities and improve coping capacities.

 

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Combines harvesting durum wheat in Enchant, Alberta, Canada. GPS-programmed, they are already driverless except for going around corners, August 2021. Credit: Trevor Page

By Marwa Awad
OTTAWA, Canada, Sep 23 2021 (IPS)

Current food systems are no longer fit for the 21st century. Inequitable distribution, poor nutritional habits, and climate change are three issues breaking down our global food systems today, forcing us to look for solutions to transform them. Food aid – very much part of our global food systems – needs to be responsive to the challenges that lie ahead.

The World Bank estimates that the global food system is worth roughly $8 trillion – about one tenth of the entire world economy, yet this expensive system fails to provide proper nutrition and enough food. According to the World Food Programme, the problem lies in poor distribution of nutritious food. Although there is enough food in the world to feed every single person, close to one billion go to bed hungry each night, while 2 billion people are overweight.

“What we have today is a food system that doesn’t provide everyone with the nutrition they need. Yet it wreaks havoc on the environment and consequently is a huge contributor to today’s climate crisis,” said WFP’s Deputy Executive Director, Amir Abdulla.

According to FAO, in 2017, farming alone accounted for 68 per cent of rural income in Africa, and about half of rural income in South Asia. With the climate crisis already on us and Covid-19 pandemic disrupting all human activity across all sectors, transforming global food systems is paramount to withstanding these shocks.

Mal/nutrition

The diet culture and weight-loss industry are booming in many parts of the world. As much as this reflects the concentration of the global food supply in the hands of rich economies, it also points to the lack of nutritional quality and diversity in what people choose to eat.

According to the 2020 Global Nutrition Report, one in every nine people globally is either hungry or undernourished while one in every three people globally are either overweight or obese. In fact, overweight and obesity are increasing rapidly in nearly every country in the world, with no signs of slowing, the report says.

Meanwhile, almost a quarter of all children under 5 years of age are stunted. The disparities between the haves and the have nots are striking. While wealthier countries suffer from obesity and overweight rates five times higher than in poorer countries, underweight can be ten times higher than in the poorest countries than richer ones.

Collecting her WFP ration from an NGO centre in Bangladesh. Vulnerable group feeding, with development aspects progressively added, has provided a safety net for millions of poor, malnourished Bangladeshis for decades. Credit: Trevor Page

Reforming food and health systems globally is urgently needed to address inequalities in distributions by making healthy, nutritious foods the most affordable option for all.

The economic argument for this reform is compelling. The 2020 Global Nutrition Report states: “Malnutrition costs the world billions of dollars a year in lost opportunities for economic growth.” Ensuring equitable access will allow more than 800 million people to enter the labour market and support the economic development of their countries and around the world.

“We have to be able to continue levels of production, probably change what we are producing, where we are producing it and how we are producing it, and then find a set of systems that allow equitable distribution so that people have access to the nutritious food that they need,” said Abdulla.

The World Food Programme, the largest humanitarian organization in the world, understands fragile, broken, or distorted food systems, because it’s the core of the organization’s work. With an unparalleled six decades of experience repairing, sustaining, and improving food systems for the world’s most vulnerable and isolated communities, WFP is the best positioned food assistance agency with the knowledge and expertise to work with stakeholders to turn things around.

For food systems to work and provide answers to the challenges of the 21st century, they must be designed at the core to allow for equitable food distribution, which is not an easy task, says Abdulla: “This has potential social undertones which would worry some people, but you need to have series of mechanisms that permit equitable distribution.”

Food Aid and nourishing our world

If we already produce more than we need but we are not necessarily producing the right food in the right place, then how can we obtain food security in the interim while working on the vital paradigm shift. Increasing income, so that everyone at the household level can buy enough food to keep themselves fit and healthy is the key to food security.

At the national level, countries must either be able to produce all the food that their citizens need or buy it from those countries that produce a surplus. Until that happens, food assistance programmes in food insecure areas will remain a necessity.

Meanwhile, our capacity to feed ourselves has made immense progress over the past 50 years, yet viewed globally our food systems are inequitable, undermine public health, and have an enormous impact on our natural environment.

WFP estimates that the number of acutely food insecure people has increased by 80% – from 149 million pre-COVID, to more than 270 million today. The pandemic is placing significant stress on food systems, especially in lower-and-middle income countries, and fragile states where food systems are already flawed or disrupted.

In 2020, WFP reached 115.5 million vulnerable and food insecure people in 84 countries, delivering food and other assistance through a fleet of 30 ships, 100 planes and more than 5,000 trucks. Besides providing immediate relief, WFP has been paving the way for more equitable food systems through protecting the livelihoods of smallholder farmers around the world by helping them increase their agricultural productivity and reduce post-harvest losses, increase their access to agricultural inputs, assets, services, and markets while simultaneously improving their resilience to climate and other shocks.

WFP emergency relief supplies for the survivors of the massive 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami arriving at small ports on Indonesia’s Aceh coast. Credit: Trevor Page

As for food supply chains and markets, WFP utilizes its supply chain and procurement expertise to support governments and private sector stakeholders to strengthen markets, facilitate the movement of food and its availability. In the second half of 2020, WFP purchased over 550,000 MT of food from local food systems, that is over USD 268 million injected into those food systems. The volume of food purchased represents an increase of 33% when compared with the same period of 2019.

The world will not attain the goal of Zero Hunger by 2030, as the leaders of nation states and multilateral organizations have reluctantly accepted. Zero Hunger, along with the other SDGs that will not be attained by 2030 are all interconnected. While the SDGs must remain our goals, we need to find better ways of attaining them. Food is the most basic of our needs. Hopefully, we are on the verge of changing the existing food systems, so that progressively, fewer of us around the world will go to bed hungry.

Marwa Awad, a resident of Ottawa, Canada, works for the World Food Programme. She is the co-host of The WFP PEOPLE Show.

 

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By Agnes Kalibata
NEW YORK, Sep 23 2021 (IPS)

With the world still counting the social and economic costs of the Covid-19 pandemic, amid a fresh “code red” on the climate crisis, food may not seem like the most pressing threat to humanity.

Yet transforming entire food systems around the world offers the solution to the $12 trillion challenge many have not yet realised we are facing.

The existential threats that appear to be looming on the horizon are in fact already silently costing the world in poor health, environmental losses and stifled economic growth, a toll that could reach $16 trillion by 2050.

Rethinking the whole food systems value chain from the way food is produced to how it is marketed and sold, and how waste is processed, has the potential not only to save these hidden costs but to safeguard the very sustainability of people and planet.

The caveat is that this transformation at every point in the process, from sowing and harvesting to cooking and composting, will not be easy or straightforward. Choices made at the farm and business level to the technologies we advance in science and policies we make in governance come with trade-offs and risks.

But the rewards on offer – on every front and for every country worldwide – go beyond dollar figures to tangible improvements for lives, livelihoods and the natural world.

To start with, improving the productivity and efficiency of food systems can support a strong and equitable economic recovery from the pandemic, and lay the foundations for a more prosperous future.

In low-income countries, for example, the biggest losses currently come just after harvest, when farmers struggle to extend the shelf life of their crops and produce long enough to reach market for a lack refrigeration or appropriate storage.

Meanwhile, in high-income countries, food is more often wasted by consumers who buy more than they need.

Reducing these losses would cost an estimated $30 billion, according to the Food and Land Use Coalition, but the potential return could be as much as $455 billion in savings and new opportunities. It could also reduce eight per cent from current global emission levels.

Investments into stronger local value chains, allowing farmers to get more food to market and consumers to buy only what they need, can help improve livelihoods for those in agricultural sectors while also improving access to nutritious food, reducing the hidden cost of diet-related illnesses and educating consumers on the environmental cost of their choices.

Such efforts were among the outcomes of the UN Food Systems Pre-Summit at the end of July, when Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda, announced a common position for Africa ahead of the Summit. At the heart of this shared agenda was a commitment to bolster local markets and supply chains and increase agricultural financing to 10 per cent of public expenditure.

Transforming food systems from production to consumption and disposal can also support the “Net-Zero” goals adopted by a growing number of countries.

With food systems collectively contributing around a third of emissions, wholesale nature-positive changes can help countries meet their Paris Agreement targets and reduce biodiversity loss.

And there are opportunities to invest in more sustainable food systems across the board, from innovations that reduce emissions associated with livestock through better health and nutrition, to using clean energy in food processing, transporting and packaging, which accounts for more than 20 per cent of food system emissions.

These solutions will be promoted by countries and partners leading global initiatives and coalitions that cut across the interconnected challenges of climate change and hunger to increase both resilience and sustainability.

Finally, investing in healthier and functional food systems would also unlock better public health, saving the global cost and burden of hunger, malnutrition and illnesses linked to poor diets, such as diabetes.

This starts with developing food systems that prioritise food safety and hygiene, including reducing the spread of foodborne illness, which alone costs low and middle-income countries an estimated $110 billion a year in lost productivity and medical expenses.

Such a shift would require investments on the supply side, to scale-up and incentivise production of adequate, accessible and healthy food, and investments into educating consumers to make better informed dietary choices.

The prize of successfully transforming global food systems is not just the $12 trillion saving in hidden costs, but the very survival of the world as we know it.

To date, the UN Food Systems Summit has generated dozens of game-changing initiatives to help countries realise the full potential of functional and sustainable food systems, and we have already seen almost 70 countries incorporate them into national pathways that address their unique circumstances and challenges with many more to come at the Summit.

We are fast approaching the crucial moment for more governments and their publics to throw their weight behind these solutions and commit to flagship initiatives that will bring to bear the promise of a healthier, inclusive and resilient future. We cannot afford to get this wrong.

 

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Excerpt:

The writer is UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit

Climate finance can be channeled to sustainable agriculture at large through small-scale investments. Finance can help profitable businesses that promote biodiversity and conservation, improve productivity, nutrition, and resilience, while also benefiting farmers and their communities. Credit: Priscilla Negreiros/CPI - Climate Policy Initiative

By Barbara Buchner
SAN FRANCISCO, California, Sep 22 2021 (IPS)

September 23, 2021 is the first-ever UN Food Systems Summit, convened to mobilize the highest-priority transformations needed to end hunger through the sustainable production and distribution of food. Transforming food systems to ensure food security for all has never been so urgent.

Ongoing waves of Covid-19 and extreme weather events have exposed and multiplied the vulnerability of food systems across the globe, increasing food prices and food insecurity in every country, but especially in countries least equipped to handle multiple, ongoing crises. One-in-four people globally – 1.9 billion – are moderately or severely food insecure. A statistic that is sadly, and unnecessarily, increasing. And by 2050 the world will need to feed an estimated 9.7 billion people, all while protecting natural resources and biodiversity.

Ending hunger by 2030 is a core challenge set by the UN Sustainable Development Goals, but food system transformation is not always high on the list of public funders and private investors. We need to rethink this priority because the potential benefits—economic, social and environmental—are huge. Agriculture, while both a contributor to and a victim of climate change, must and can be part of the solution. Improved climate action in food systems can deliver 20 percent of the global total emissions reductions needed to meet the Paris Agreement targets by 2050, along with other sustainability and resilience benefits.

How does this translate in practical terms?

Barbara Buchner

This can range, for example, from increasing the efficiency of energy-consuming agricultural practices, reducing methane emissions, and using more renewable energy. Regenerative agriculture practices such as cover crops, tillage reduction, and improved grazing remove carbon from the atmosphere and put it back in the soil. Adaptation can mean converting to crops that are less resource intensive and more resilient. We must also support programs that reduce food waste and improve sustainability across the value chain, including changing consumer diet and purchasing patterns.

Climate finance can provide the means to accelerate this critical process, but the slow pace of climate finance is particularly true in the agricultural sector. Cumulative climate finance for agriculture, forestry, and land use represents only 3% of the total tracked global climate finance. This is a crisis, and a missed opportunity, but there are numerous next steps we can take to address these issues.

Use public finance wisely. Governments must make more effective use of public resources and policies targeting capacity building for climate-related finance and incentivizing conservation efforts, rather than on agriculture subsidies that support unsustainable crops and practices.

Channel climate finance to sustainable agriculture at large. We must enhance collaboration between the public and private sectors to mitigate the risk associated with investments in the agricultural sector. Blended finance mechanisms, including guarantees and first-loss tranches, can improve the risk-return profile of small-scale agriculture investments.

Invest with integrity. International and domestic climate flows should stimulate the transition of agri-businesses and its finance service providers towards low emission supply chains. Public, development, and private sectors must work together to further enhance their reporting of climate finance for sustainable foods systems under a common definition and set methodology.

By focusing on these priorities, we can finance profitable businesses that promote biodiversity and conservation, improve productivity, nutrition, and resilience, while also benefiting farmers and their communities.

The UN Food Systems Summit is a great opportunity to harness science, finance, and collaboration to make significant progress towards our 2030 food security goals.

Dr Barbara Buchner is an Austrian economist, with a doctorate in economics from the University of Graz. She specializes in climate finance, and is Global Managing Director of Climate Policy Initiative

 

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The Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina, Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Mottley and Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern. Credit: Pictures in montage ©United Nations

By Alison Kentish
DOMINICA, Sep 22 2021 (IPS)

On September 20, Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina accepted an award from the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network for her country’s ‘striking’ progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

That progress includes an adult literacy rate that jumped from 21 percent in 1981 to 75 percent in 2019 and a spike in access to electricity from 14 percent in 1991 to 92 percent today. The country has also drastically reduced the childhood mortality rate. Fifty years ago, 225 of every 1,000 children died before the age of five. By 2019, that figure was down to 31.

“Even though we are in the midst of a big crisis globally everywhere, we still want to celebrate Bangladesh’s achievements. When we analyze, as the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network does each year, countries’ progress toward the SDGs, Bangladesh came first in the world in most progress between 2015 and 2020,” said Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and Network President.

Sheikh Hasina has led Bangladesh for most of the award period. The four-time Prime Minister (1996-2001, 2009-2013, 2014-2018, 2018 to present) was honored for her commitment to sweeping education, healthcare, and social reform and her tireless focus on gender equity.

She credited her success with SDG progress to a vow to ‘leave no one behind.’

And it is that drive, along with her firm, decisive and science-driven approach to issues of sustainable development that has marked her leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Known as dynamic and visionary, Prime Minister Hasina is among women leaders whose stewardship of their countries during COVID-19 has been instructive and inspiring for the world.

Her administration issued a strict ‘no mask, no service’ policy in 2020. An early intervention saw students transitioning to online learning. They returned to the classroom last week, after 18 months. The government disbursed 26 stimulus packages totaling $14.6 billion to keep the economy afloat and expanded its social safety net programs to include 11 million people, most of them women and children.

Bangladesh has rolled out a massive, free vaccination campaign.

In June, Hasina told the country’s parliament that it aims to have 80 percent of the population vaccinated and promised to procure the vaccines ‘no matter how much’ it costs.

To date, just over 11 percent of the eligible population is fully vaccinated.

This year, the leader who usually uses her time at the United Nations General Assembly to advocate for climate financing and gender equity is adding vaccine equity to her mission.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has upset the world. It has taken countless lives and upset livelihoods. Millions of people worldwide have been reduced to poverty and hunger. Education is facing huge disruptions, especially of children,” she said.

“We want vaccines for everyone everywhere. There are many poor countries that cannot buy vaccines. Vaccines should be made available to them. Developed and rich countries can come forward.”

One day after Prime Minister Hasina addressed the 9th Annual International Conference on Sustainable Development, a fellow revered female leader, the Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Mottley, made her case for support for vulnerable states.

Prime Minister Mottley has been hailed across the Caribbean and internationally as a well-spoken, forthright, and no-nonsense leader, providing the decisive leadership needed in a pandemic.

She is the first woman to lead the Caribbean country, and like Hasina, Mottley carries the weight of steering a climate-vulnerable country through a protracted crisis.

The worst pandemic in over 100 years has dealt a blow to her country’s, economy with a 17 percent decline in GDP in the last year. In April this year, a volcanic eruption on nearby St. Vincent doused Barbados in ash. It was the worst ash fall in over a century. Then in July, Elsa became the first hurricane to hit Barbados in 66 years.

Through it all, Mottley, the Caribbean’s only female Prime Minister, has remained resolute in steering her country through its multiple crises. Caribbean nationals regularly tune in to her national addresses – talks to her people that are tough when necessary, interspersed with light-hearted moments, but always clear and consistent messaging that has led many to refer to her as Prime Minister of the Caribbean.’

“You really inspire us. Your leadership is absolutely wonderful, and the power of your vision is just what we need,” Professor Sachs told the Barbados leader.

Mottley’s goal now is to ramp up vaccination numbers. According to the Barbados Government Information Service, about 36 percent of the eligible population is fully vaccinated, with the country recording just under 6,500 vaccinations weekly.

Mottley is aiming for 10,000 vaccinations a week,

“If we can do that, and we can maintain that each week for the next five weeks, then we will have the majority of those persons fully vaccinated before the end of November… We may, as a country, consider then the options of significant review and removal of restrictions that we have in place,” she said this week.

On a different island, this time in the South Pacific, another popular female leader assured her country that 90 percent vaccination coverage or higher would bring significant ease in restrictions.

“High vaccination raters will undoubtedly be a game-changer for New Zealand, but the key there is high,” said Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

Ardern’s administration has launched an ‘elimination’ strategy for COVID-19. According to the country’s health ministry, it is a targeted means of ‘finding the virus and stamping it out. It is hinged on vaccination as protection.

The leader, now in her second term in office, was a popular figure pre-COVID – a young mother, the country’s youngest female Prime Minister who gained international admiration for her poise, empathy, and stoic leadership through crises such as the March 2019 terror attacks and a volcanic eruption nine months later.

During the pandemic, Arden again grabbed global attention for stewardship in crisis.

A former communications major, her regular press appearances show a world leader taking clear, tough decisions based on science, justice and equity.

Like Prime Ministers Hasina and Mottley, Arden is exhibiting the best of female leadership even in the worst of times.

She continues to take early action against potential COVID-19 case surges – even when her decisions raise eyebrows. In August, New Zealand dominated international headlines when Ardern announced a swift, national lockdown over a single case of the Delta virus.

This week, she said that decision saved her country from a potential explosion in cases.

“With Delta, we knew we couldn’t take chances, and the immediate move to Level Four, initially to understand the breadth of the outbreak and then to get it under control, was the right move and has worked,” she told a September 19 post-cabinet press briefing.

“Modelers tell us that, had we waited just one more week to act, we would be sitting at around 5,000 cases by now,” she said.

According to UN Women, women are heads of state and government in only 21 countries, but they continue to be applauded for their more efficient management of the COVID-19 health crisis.

“They are being recognized for the rapidity of the response they are leading, which has not only included measures to ‘flatten the curve’––such as confinement measures, social distancing, and widespread testing––but also the transparent and compassionate communication of fact-based public health information.”

The leaders face their fair share of challenges.

Prime Minister Hasina has stated that COVID-19 is threatening her country’s ambitious plans to further accelerate health, education, and climate initiative, on the journey of successfully achieving the SDGs. Prime Minister Mottley is leading a small island state in a stubbornly vaccine-hesitant region, and Prime Minister Arden’s lockdown and elimination strategies have earned her some caustic criticism.

What the three have shown, however, is that women leaders have the resolve and strength to make hard decisions – along with the compassion, sensitivity, and empathy to help their countries survive the toughest of times.

 

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Leaders from BRICS nations participate in the 13th annual summit despite diplomatic tensions within the group (image: Alamy)

By Flávia Milhorance
RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 22 2021 (IPS)

Amid scepticism and a lack of public interest, domestic crises and the backdrop of Covid-19, last week the BRICS countries delivered on their commitment to hold an annual summit without showing the signs of disunity that has beset the group in recent years.

So what still holds the bloc of so-called emerging nations together?

In a virtual event, the heads of state of host country India, Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa renewed the group’s pledge of cooperation for the thirteenth time, in an event that passed without incident, unlike the barbs of last year. It also failed to attract much public interest.

Internet searches for BRICS-related news during the summit fell to one of their lowest points levels in the group’s history, according to Google Trends. Online searches usually peak in popularity during the event but have rarely sparked as much interest as the 2014 summit, when the bloc launched the New Development Bank (NDB).

Today, not even one of the BRICS’ most enthusiastic supporters, the economist Jim O'Neill, who coined the group’s acronym two decades ago, seems impressed with the latest developments

Scepticism towards the progress of the bloc pervades. It launched in 2009 with industrialised nations in the grip of the financial crisis with great – perhaps too great – expectations over its potential to redefine global governance. Today, not even one of the BRICS’ most enthusiastic supporters, the economist Jim O’Neill, who coined the group’s acronym two decades ago, seems impressed with the latest developments.

“The bloc’s ongoing failure to develop substantive policies through its annual summitry has become increasingly glaring,” O’Neill wrote after the event.

 

BRICS’ first decade of success

O’Neill’s frustration derives from what he recalls the “roaring success” of the four founding BRICS nations first decade. South Africa joined the group in 2010.

In 2009, Russia hosted the first summit, seeking a more active voice on global economic affairs in response to the devastating financial crisis.

In its early years, “countries pushed for reforms of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and offered an alternative to the international financial order by creating the NDB,” said Karin Costa Vazquez, of the Center for BRICS Studies at Fudan University.

At that time, and excluding Russia, countries formed the BASIC group, offering an alternative voice in international climate negotiations after the “failure of developed countries to define a climate agenda” and the collapse [of COP15] in Copenhagen”, said Izabella Teixeira, who was Brazil’s environment minister from 2010 to 2016.

“The BRICS were an environment of important political dialogue,” Teixeira told Diálogo Chino. “It was a super interesting moment of confidence building. There was an informality in the conversation among the ministers.” The group’s diplomatic role, Teixeira added, “was absolutely important” in the negotiations that would later culminate in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

From then on, however, experts chart the emptying of the BRICS as a group, as economic and political crises burdened member countries. It witnessed recession in Russia, South Africa and Brazil, tensions between China and India and the belligerent anti-China rhetoric of Jair Bolsonaro, who became president in 2018 and began to deconstruct environmental policies and isolate himself diplomatically.

“The country has gone against the world,” Teixeira said.

 

BRICS retains relevance

Although the heyday may be behind it, BRICS is still relevant today, according to Costa Vazquez. “The BRICS is the only space that the largest emerging economies in the world have to coordinate positions and propose initiatives of common interest to the five members. This is no small thing when we are talking about more than 30% of world GDP,” she said.

Vazquez argues that in order to keep functioning, the multilateralism of the bloc has given way to more bilateral agreements. As such, it is more flexible, limiting cooperation when interests diverge and resuming and expanding it when they converge.

Since BRICS doesn’t function as an economic bloc, it does not have a formal statute of rules that dictate its behaviour. The cost of membership is low, and the diplomatic benefits are still significant, according to Oliver Stuenkel, from the Getulio Vargas Foundation.

Stronger diplomatic relations can also reflect booming bilateral trade. For example, trade between Brazil and China should hit a new record in 2021. Last year, bilateral trade topped US$100 billion for the first time and as of last month, it had already surpassed US$93 billion.

Unsurprisingly, Bolsonaro adopted a milder tone on China at the recent BRICS summit. Meanwhile, China’s President Xi Jinping said that, regardless of the difficulties, the BRICS will maintain solid and constant cooperation.

 

NDB offers hope

Despite few new articulations on historic areas of cooperation such as climate, the main product of the BRICS, the NDB, is gaining momentum. Paulo Nogueira Batista Júnior, and economist who was vice-president of the bank between 2015 and 2017, criticised the slowness of the NDB to produce results and fulfil its aspirations of becoming a global development bank.

Today, however, Batista Junior sees advances. “In the last two years, the bank seems to have moved a little more and achieved some results,” he said. “For example, it has approved projects, including support programs to combat Covid-19, continues to hire employees, built its headquarters, developed technically and opened the process of inaugurating new members.”

In early September, the NDB announced the addition of Uruguay, the United Arab Emirates and Bangladesh to its membership. In its six years of operation, the bank has approved some 80 projects, with investments totalling US$30 billion. The bank has also made US$10 billion available to BRICS member countries to combat Covid-19.

“The bank is already part of the landscape,” said Batista Junior. Can the same still be said of the BRICS bloc?

This article was originally published by ChinaDialogue

Processed, canned food lines the shelves at a Canadian supermarket. Credit: Trevor Page

By Trevor Page
LETHBRIDGE, Canada, Sep 22 2021 (IPS)

Food processing extends shelf-life and can transforms raw food into attractive, marketable products. It can also prevent contamination. The transformation can involve numerous physical and chemical processes such as mincing, cooking, canning, liquefaction, pickling, macerating, emulsification, irradiation and lyophilization. Frozen processed and raw food changes transport and storage requirements radically; while the packaging of food, both raw and processed, is an industry unto itself.

Adulteration is a serious problem, particularly in developing countries where regulatory bodies are weak. Food is considered adulterated when a substance is added that degrades its quality or turns it hazardous. That could be changing its colour to make it look better, or adding chemical preservatives. Adding sand particles, pebbles and other extraneous matter to grain and pulses to make up weight is also considered adulteration. So is mixing water with milk and oil with chemical derivatives or cheaper oils.

Many countries in the global South would benefit from assistance to help develop their food safety regulations as well as inspection measures and enforcement. Many of the food processing industries are small scale, cottage in size, and often start in backyards or dingy premises. They are reluctant to engage food technologists because that involves extra cost and they tend to be skeptical of regulating institutions.

Codex Alimentarius was established in the early 1960s by FAO and WHO. It is a collection of internationally recognized standards, codes of practice and guidelines relating to food and its production, labeling and safety. Although 189 countries were members of the Codex Alimentarius Commission in 2021, the body does not have regulatory authority. As with many UN endeavours and standards, Codex Alimentarius is a reference guide, not an enforceable standard on its own. Several countries, however, have adopted it as part of their own regulations. More need to do so. But not all are happy with Codex Alimentarius. Some respected critics, including Vandana Shiva, claim its codified policies are simply designed to serve the interests global agribusiness and undermine the rights of farmers and consumers.

CONSUMPTION

We eat when we’re hungry. Food is the fuel that gives us energy and keeps us fit and healthy. (Sadly, almost 1 billion of us don’t get enough food to eat and need food aid. Commentary on that will be in the next article in this series.)

Fast food, the diet of increasing numbers around the world. Credit: Trevor Page

Globally, food consumption has been rising for over 50 years. Richer countries consume most calories, but encouragingly, the biggest increase in calorie intake has been in low income countries. The two main reasons for increasing food consumption are economic development and our growing population. As people become wealthier, they can afford to eat more food. People in Belgium and the USA consume around 3800 calories a day, whereas those in Ethiopia and Haiti survive on around 2000 calories a day. A high level of food wastage occurs in rich countries because people buy more food than they need. Fast food and food advertising also increase food consumption in rich countries. As the global population continues to grow, there are more mouths to feed. By 2050, the UN expects the global population to be around 10 billion.

SUPPLY CHAIN

A food supply chain is the process between production on farms and our dining table. The food we eat reaches us in domino-like fashion from producer to consumer, while the money consumers pay for food goes to those who work at various stages along the chain in the reverse direction. When one part of the supply chain is affected, the whole chain is affected and can collapse like dominos. Covid-19 has disrupted supply chains around the world, both in terms of food availability and price. Extreme and erratic weather, as a result of climate change, will pose a major threat to food supply chains in future.

Supply chain. Container ship at Valparaiso, Chile. Credit Trevor Page

LOSS AND WASTE

Around one-third of all food produced globally for human consumption is lost or wasted. According to FAO, this amounts to about 1.3 billion metric tons per year. In addition to pre-harvest losses, 14% of all food produced is lost between harvest and retail and significant quantities are also wasted in retail and at the consumption level. In the case of fruit and vegetables, over 20% is estimated to be lost every year. The water used to grow the food that is lost represents 6% of total water withdrawals. According to the World Bank, without urgent action, global waste will increase by 70% on current levels by 2050. The East Asia and the Pacific region is responsible for generating close to a quarter of all waste. And by 2050, waste generation in Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to more than triple, while in South Asia waste will more than double. Plastics, say the World Bank, are especially problematic. “If not collected and managed properly, they will contaminate and affect waterways and ecosystems for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.”

Clearly, there’s a lot to be done to make this part of our food system more efficient and less harmful to human health, as well as to reducing loss and waste.

Trevor Page, resident in Lethbridge, Canada, is a former Emergencies Director of the World Food Programme. He also served with the UN Food & Agriculture Organization, FAO, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR and what is now the UN Department of Political and Peace Building Affairs.

 

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Food security experts have raised an alarm that with as many as 811 million people the world over or 10 percent of the global population going hungry, the world is off-track to ending hunger and malnutrition. More so, after a decade of steadily declining, the number of malnourished people grew by 161 million from 2019 […]

“Our Common Agenda” report looks ahead to the next 25 years and represents the Secretary-General’s vision on the future of global cooperation and reinvigorating inclusive, networked, and effective multilateralism. The Secretary-General presented his report to the General Assembly in September 2021 before the end of the 75th session of the General Assembly.

By Mandeep Tiwana
NEW YORK, Sep 22 2021 (IPS)

When the UN Charter was being drafted in the closing days of the Second World War in 1945, a debate ensued on what its opening words should be. Jan Smuts, representative of colonial South Africa, had originally suggested that the UN Charter begin with the words, ‘The High Contracting Parties.’

This would have clearly placed the very the people the UN was set up to serve out of the picture. Ultimately, an elegant and notably democratic solution was arrived at, to begin the UN Charter with the words, ‘We the Peoples of the United Nations’. The UN has never wavered from this aspiration in principle despite the political ebbs and flows.

In practice, however, it’s arguably another matter.

Although, people around the world generally hold positive opinions about the UN, its ability to respond to global crises remains constrained by state-centric bureaucratic impulses and the assertion of narrow interests by powerful countries.

This has worked to the detriment of people who seek the assistance of the international community to alleviate their suffering, including recently in Burundi, Libya, Myanmar, Palestine, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen and elsewhere.

The UN’s refugee agency estimates that there are at least 82.4 million forcibly displaced persons globally. Concerned citizens and civil society organisations have long argued that they need to have a greater stake in the UN’s functioning to enable it to better respond to violent conflict and human-induced disasters.

In 2020, the imperative to make the UN more inclusive in its engagement with relevant stakeholders was recognised in a rare show of unity by the UN General Assembly through the landmark Declaration to commemorate the UN’s 75th anniversary.

All heads of state and government affirmed that contemporary challenges require cooperation not only across borders but across the whole of society. They committed to upgrading the UN and tasked the UN’s Secretary-General to produce a report on how to respond to current and future challenges.

This 10 September, following extensive global consultations, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres did just that, releasing the much-awaited Our Common Agenda report, with substantial hope riding on it.

For thousands of civil society activists and organisations in all corners of the globe who dedicated significant time and effort in providing inputs, Our Common Agenda offers a critical pathway for increasing participation in the UN, with the aim of enhancing its effectiveness and getting it closer to its founding values.

Notably, the report emphasises the indivisibility of human rights even as personality cult-driven leaders and authoritarian regimes are undermining the universality of internationally agreed human rights norms and development principles by disingenuously urging accommodation for cultural values and national characteristics.

The report also highlights what it calls a global “infodemic” plaguing the world, in a veiled reference to state-run propaganda and manufacture of politically expedient ‘facts’ by polarising figures. It calls for a global code of conduct to promote integrity in public information.

Significantly, a new social contract between governments and their people is proposed to rebuild trust, foster gender equal participation and social protection.

A multitude of challenges facing the world, from the ravages of climate change to vaccine nationalism to dysfunctional multilateralism, are identified. In the light of these, the report calls for a fresh embrace of global solidarity and renewed focus on boosting partnerships.

The report rightly urges greater political voice for the world’s many young people in decisions that affect them and commits to upgrading the position of the UN Youth Envoy to a UN Office for Youth.

The role of civil society as an integral part of the UN ecosystem is recognised. To foster inclusion, all UN entities are urged to set up civil society focal points if they haven’t done so already.

But somewhat disappointingly, the key demand by scores of civil society organisations and over 50 states for a people’s champion or civil society envoy to drive participation across the UN is simply acknowledged and parked for future consideration.

This is a lost opportunity as there are far too many inconsistencies in how the UN’s sprawling infrastructure engages with active citizens and civil society organisations. A civil society envoy at the UN headquarters would play a vital role in supporting all UN forums, agencies and offices to develop good practices on participation and also act as liaison between civil society focal points across the UN.

With an eye on upgrading the UN, the report exercises remarkable foresight in proposing an Envoy for Future Generations. A ‘Summit for the Future’ is envisaged in two years’ time to forge global consensus. People’s involvement – beyond high level panels and speeches by powerful politicians and celebrated technocrats – will be crucial if this summit is to be meaningful.

To help the UN evolve and face the future, the Secretary-General could explore the establishment of a UN World Citizens’ Initiative. It’s an innovative idea whereby a critical mass of people could bring a petition for action on a matter of vital public importance by the UN General Assembly and the Security Council.

Significantly, the report makes a compelling case for ‘networked, inclusive and effective multilateralism,’ key components of which are described as cross-pillar coordination at the regional and international levels, space for all voices, including civil society as well as global south states, local governments, parliaments, international institutions and the private sector, and delivery of results through resource prioritisation and accountability for commitments.

These are ambitious objectives, and it is hard to see how they can be achieved without a serious rethink about how deliberations are carried out and decisions are made at the UN. Current processes are bureaucratic and heavily state centric, often screening the UN from the everyday struggles and demands of people, including victims of abuses.

There’s an acute need for more imaginative modes of direct people’s representation to make the UN fit for purpose for the 21st century and beyond. Innovative ideas to set up citizens’ panels and a UN parliamentary assembly exist but are still erroneously seen as being too ambitious.

The ambition of Our Common Agenda must now be followed by ambitious transformative actions. We mustn’t forget that the formation of the UN in 1945 was a revolutionary achievement. Since then, the UN has always been a work in progress. But with perseverance and foresight, we can put ‘We the Peoples’ at its heart.

Mandeep Tiwana is chief programmes officer at CIVICUS. He is based at CIVICUS’s UN liaison office in New York.

 

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The World Food Programme distributing food in El Salvador. The second of the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals is to end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture. Credit: WFP/David Fernandez

By Trish Cotter
MELBOURNE, Sep 21 2021 (IPS)

COVID-19 has exposed serious vulnerabilities in how people around the world access and consume food.

One of the more alarming trends is the significant increase in the consumption of foods that may be tasty and convenient, but harm our heath. These ultra-processed products include sugary drinks, snack foods, frozen meals, packaged breads and frozen desserts.

In the half century or so since they have been available, ultra-processed products have largely displaced traditional diets, pushing healthy food options off of store shelves. Ultra-processed products comprise more than half of diets in the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom, and between one-fifth and one-third in Brazil, Mexico and Chile.

These low-nutrient foods, which are ready to eat or ready to heat, have become a dominant player in our food system and are now among the most aggressively promoted and marketed products in the world.

Ultra-processed products are booming globally. While sales are highest in Australia, the United States and Canada, they are increasing rapidly in middle-income countries including China, South Africa and Brazil. And worryingly, children and low-income people in communities with fewer healthy food choices, are often the primary targets of ultra-processed product marketing.

As public health and world leaders gather at the United Nations Food Systems Summit on September 23 to discuss how to make food systems healthy and sustainable, they must take a stand against profit-driven commercial influence, to help countries and consumers decrease their reliance on ultra-processed products.

During the U.N. Food Systems Pre-Summit in July, the food and beverage industry’s considerable resources were on full display. One of their tactics was to position themselves as part of the process to create a healthier food system.

Let’s be clear: The food and beverage industry is part of the food system, and while they need to be part of the solution, policymaking focused on a healthy food system cannot by muddied by commercial interests.

To attain healthier food systems, we must urgently address the proliferation of ultra-processed products. Their pervasive and growing accessibility has worried public health experts for years. Today, these ultra-processed products are a majority of what’s available in most people’s neighborhood at an affordable price.

But these foods and beverages—which are chemically or physically transformed using industrial processes that make the product hyper-palatable, more appealing and potentially addictive—come at a cost to consumers: they are known to drive obesity rates up and increase noncommunicable diseases including Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and even some cancers.

Powerful food corporations such as The Coca-Cola Co., Nestlé, Unilever and McDonald’s, invest many millions each year in formulating and marketing these products to be highly desirable.

While sales in high-income countries are beginning to level out, middle- and low-income countries are where “Big Food” sees its future and where sales are expected to significantly grow over the next decade.

COVID-19 exposed the vulnerabilities in our food system and added urgency for more effective global policies to combat food insecurity and promote access to safe and nutritious food.

The good news: decades of lessons learned and global best practices from countries leading the way can guide other governments in turning the tide against ultra-processed foods and beverages.

In many cases, this work is being led by countries across Africa and Latin America. Here are some key results from their efforts:

The gold standard: taxes on sugary drinks and junk food

Over 40 countries have now implemented taxes on sugary drinks. In the 12 months following the roll out of Mexico’s 10% soda tax in 2014, the country saw a decline in the purchases of taxed beverages and an increase in the purchase of water. Taxes work and do double duty—the revenue collected can support health programs.

Warnings about unhealthy food via clear front-of-package nutrient labeling

Several countries including Colombia, Ecuador, Iran and Peru have already implemented or have proposed to implement front-of-package labels on unhealthy foods to reduce the unsustainable burden of poor diets on individuals, government and society.

Chile’s comprehensive health regulations, which included the adoption of front-of-package labels, reduced purchases of sugar-sweetened beverages by nearly 25% in just 18 months. When warning label regulations were first rolled out, Chile was the world’s number one consumer of sugar-sweetened beverages per capita.

Restrictions on marketing and promoting healthy food polices in the public sector

Protecting future generations from the lifelong consequences of unhealthy eating habits is paramount. Children are extremely vulnerable to food marketing, which makes partial or voluntary regulations to restrict marketing ineffective.

In 2016, Chile implemented a ban on advertising ultra-processed products during child-targeted television programs. Following this regulation, preschoolers’ exposure to junk food advertising that featured child-directed appeals, such as cartoon characters, dropped by 35%.

The percentage of TV ads promoting unhealthy foods and drinks (i.e., products that failed to meet the policies’ nutrition criteria) decreased significantly from 42% pre-regulation to 15% post-regulation.

Governments must work alongside the public health community to transform the image of ultra-processed food and beverage products from glossy packaged, alluringly marketed, ready-to-eat, convenient and tasty products, to be seen as what they are: the vector for obesity and a risk factor for serious disease alongside tobacco, alcohol, and other unhealthy commodities.

Taxes, smart labeling, and marketing regulations work. At Vital Strategies, we believe everybody, everywhere has a right to healthy foods. When people are provided with the tools to understand the products that are harmful to their health, they are able to make better decisions.

With unhealthy diets responsible for an estimated 11 million preventable deaths each year, we cannot let the industry stand in the way or even set the rules.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated barriers to accessing affordable healthy foods, forcing many to rely on ultra-processed food and drink products and low-nutrient foods, which has resulted in poorer-quality diets.

Governments have the power to regulate these products and prevent the food industry from controlling our diets. The tools are out there. If we want to stave off the devastation to our food system—and our health—we can’t afford to wait.

Trish Cotter is the Senior Advisor, Global Lead, Food Policy Program at global health organization, Vital Strategies.

Footnote: The UN Food Systems Summit, scheduled to take place on Thursday, 23 September, will be a completely virtual event during the UN General Assembly High-level Week.

According to the UN, the Summit “will serve as a historic opportunity to empower all people to leverage the power of food systems to drive our recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and get us back on track to achieve all 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.”

 

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