Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

A young asylum-seeking girl from Afghanistan walks on a makeshift bridge inside what is known as the Olive Grove, an improvised camp adjacent to the Moria Reception and Identification centre on the Greek island of Lesvos. © UNHCR/Achilleas Zavallis

By Joseph Chamie
NEW YORK, Sep 1 2020 (IPS)

Although the right to seek asylum is recognized nearly universally, governments across the globe are increasingly declaring, “Not Here!”. Those governments view the large and growing numbers of men, women and children seeking asylum in their countries as serious threats to their native populations, ways of life and cultures. 

They also believe that most asylum claims are not legitimate or are scams, largely being made by economic migrants, criminals, terrorists, invaders, infiltrators, rapists, free loaders and benefits seekers.

Despite the internationally recognized right for people to cross borders to seek asylum, in reality governments in virtually every region of the world are increasingly preventing, discouraging and complicating attempts of men, women and children to cross into their territories and claim asylum

Existing asylum policies and laws, in their view, encourage unauthorized border crossings and permit economic migrants and many others to misuse humanitarian protections to gain employment, assistance and other benefits while their cases are adjudicated, which can take many months.

In the aftermath of World War II with millions forcibly displaced, deported and/or resettled, the right to seek and enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution was established in 1948 by the United Nations in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Today virtually all members of the international community of nations have signed on to this historic agreement.

The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees codified the right of asylum for anyone having “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or  political opinion.” The Convention also stipulated that those seeking asylum should not be penalized for their unauthorized  entry or stay. 

However, the Convention did not require governments to grant asylum to those who qualified. It only stated that countries should apply the provisions of the Convention without discrimination as to race, religion or country of origin.

At the end of 2019 there were more than 4 million asylum seekers worldwide, a four-fold increase over the level a decade earlier. Increases in the numbers seeking asylum have been even greater in some individual countries. For example, between 2008 and 2018 the numbers of new asylum requests jumped six-fold in the United States, seven-fold in Germany and twelve-fold in Spain.

During the recent past many millions have sought asylum largely in Europe and North America (Figure 1). Among OECD  countries 60 percent of the more than 12 million new asylum requests since the start of the 21st century have been in six countries, namely, Germany (19%), United States (15%), France (9%), United Kingdom (6%), Sweden (6%) and Italy (5%). 

 

Source: OECD.

 

Globally, governments of rich and poor countries alike are closing their borders to those fleeing poverty, human rights abuse, violence, failing states and most recently climate change. Despite the internationally recognized right for people to cross borders to seek asylum, in reality governments in virtually every region of the world are increasingly preventing, discouraging and complicating attempts of men, women and children to cross into their territories and claim asylum.

In the United States, for example, the Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that the Administration can deny asylum to anyone who has crossed a third country en route to the U.S. border without seeking protection there. In a more recent decision the Court said that asylum claims threatened to overwhelm the immigration system and ruled that asylum seekers have no right to appeal to U.S. courts if their claims were rejected at the border. 

Another policy of the Trump Administration to deter those seeking asylum was family separation, i.e., separating children from their undocumented asylum-seeking parents who were imprisoned. The Administration has also been using health concerns from the coronavirus pandemic as a national security threat to turn away those seeking asylum with no access to due process, often without explanation. 

The proportion of asylum court decisions that have been denied in the United States has increased markedly during the last several years (Figure 2). After hitting a low of 42 percent in 2012, the proportion of immigration court asylum decisions denied in the U.S increased to 69 percent in 2019, a record high for the 21st century.

 

Source: TRAC Immigration.

 

Various European countries, including Austria, Croatia, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Malta, Poland, Serbia and Spain, are also tightening borders and applying pushbacks to those seeking asylum and sending them back to Libya, Morocco, Turkey, Tunisia or neighboring countries.

The United Kingdom has also called upon its Royal Navy and Air Force to help police and monitor the increasing migrant crossings in the English Channel and end demand by returning boats back to France. 

Similarly, many Asian countries, including Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand have refused port – or “push back” – boats filled with asylum seekers and migrants. Those governments maintain that their pushback policies are intended to fight human smuggling. 

Also, Australia has forcibly intercepted asylum seeker boats and push them back to where they had come from. Other countries, such as South Korea, Japan and China, choose to provide monies and humanitarian assistance to address the asylum and refugee crisis, but typically say “Not Here!” to accepting asylum seekers.

In many African countries, such as Cameroon, Mozambique, Niger and South Africa,  those seeking asylum have encountered resistance, onerous restrictions and abuse, with many wishing to relocate to other countries. The coronavirus pandemic has made the plight asylum seekers even more difficult, as they are frequently seen as virus carriers.  

Latin American asylum seekers are also encountering difficulties finding welcoming safe havens. Many, especially those from Central America, are reluctant to seek asylum in countries that can be just as dangerous with violence, robbery, extortion and sexual abuse as the places that they are fleeing.

The situation in the region has become more challenging as 4.5 million Venezuelans had left the country by the end of 2019, with the large majority not recognized as asylum seekers or refugees.

The world for asylum seekers has changed greatly since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights more than a lifetime ago. Mass displacement is vastly more widespread than in the past.

It is also no longer a short-term and temporary phenomenon with growing numbers of men, women and children forced from their homes for long periods of time. 

At the end of 2019 a record breaking 80 million people globally, double the number a decade ago, were forcibly displaced from their homes due to persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations or events seriously disturbing public order. No less than one-third of them were refugees and more than four million were asylum seekers.

In addition, the world is experiencing a great migration clash between the many millions who want out of their poor and violence ridden countries and the many millions who want others to keep out of their wealthy and stable countries.

Lacking legal authorization to emigrate, men and women and increasingly even children are willing to risk their safety and lives to reach their desired destinations, with many relying on human smugglers.

In response to the growing unauthorized migration flows, migrant-destination countries are resisting the entry of irregular migrants, combating migrant smuggling, repatriating those unlawfully resident, objecting to accepting refugees and increasingly denying asylum claims.

In 2019 the large majority of first instance decisions on asylum applications were rejected (Figure 3). Countries where the proportions of first instance asylum applications rejected exceeded 70 percent included Hungary (92%), Czechia (90%), Poland (89%), Italy (80%), France (75%) and Sweden (71%).

 

Source: Eurostat and TRAC Immigration.

 

Moreover, the world’s population is nearing 8 billion, approximately four times its size at the end of World War II. Over the next 30 years the planet is expected to gain an additional 2 billion people. Most of that projected population growth will take place in poor failing states, places where even now millions are facing hunger, poverty, corruption, violence and human rights abuse.

Also, a landmark ruling by the United Nations human rights committee found that it is unlawful for governments to return people to countries where their lives might be threatened by a climate crisis. Under such a judgment, tens of millions of people could be displaced and seek asylum due to life-threatening climate and environmental changes.

So, get ready; it should no longer be a surprise. Future numbers of men, women and their children desperately seeking asylum are likely to be substantially greater than today’s record-breaking levels. And government leaders simply declaring, “Not Here!”, is certainly not going to be the solution to one of the defining issues of the 21st century.

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

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Women in the informal economy have been especially hard-hit by the pandemic. Photo: Sk Enamul Haq

By Fahmida Hasan
Sep 1 2020 (IPS-Partners)

All crises—natural disasters, wars, pandemics—affect different sections of people in different ways. Like any other crisis, Covid-19 has differing impacts on society. It has affected men and women, rich and poor, and adults and children differently. Since the ramifications of the coronavirus pandemic vary across people, measures towards the recovery from this crisis should also be focused towards each section of society distinctively.

Since the outbreak of coronavirus, several studies have revealed that the pandemic is not gender blind. They have indicated how the extent of women’s sufferings is more than that of men. Women have been the hardest hit both economically and socially. Women, being at the frontline of the crisis as healthcare workers, as caregivers at home, and as managers of the household, are having to bear the brunt of the coronavirus crisis more intensely than anyone else.

In Bangladesh, more than 85 percent of women are engaged in the informal sector to earn their livelihoods. Thus, a large number of women workers became unemployed overnight when the country went under lockdown. Most of them are yet to get back their jobs even though the economy has started to open up gradually. During the ongoing pandemic, domestic violence has also increased as economic stress and frustrations rose in the face of job losses. Girl children are being married off by poor parents as educational institutions are closed. Only a handful of urban schools can offer technology based online education to a privileged group of students. This could reduce the educational attainment of girls and reverse gender parity in primary education, which was achieved over the last few decades. Early marriage among girls will also increase their health risks, as they would become mothers at a very young age. Thus, the maternal mortality rate can rise too. While the wrath of the pandemic continued for the last six months, severe monsoon floods recently affected at least 50 million people’s lives and livelihoods in Bangladesh. Women and girls are again among the most vulnerable groups during such natural disasters.

In view of the negative impact of Covid-19, the government of Bangladesh has taken initiatives to support the affected sectors of the economy through various stimulus packages. It has announced a number of stimulus packages amounting to more than Taka one trillion, which is equivalent to about 3.7 percent of Bangladesh’s GDP. These packages, which are mainly credit facilities to businesses by banks, have been allocated for export-oriented sectors, the service sector, cottage, micro, small and medium enterprises (CMSMEs), large businesses, the agriculture sector and pre-shipment loan refinancing.

The government has allocated a share from the stimulus for the CMSMEs (Tk 20,000 crore) of women entrepreneurs. They will receive five percent of the total CMSME allocation, which is equivalent to Taka 100 crore. The recognition of women entrepreneurs’ needs in the CMSME category is well appreciated, especially since women entrepreneurs have been demanding dedicated support for the revival of their businesses. However, the overall disbursement of most stimulus packages is still not encouraging. This is no different in the case of women entrepreneurs also—the majority of them have not been able to receive the benefits of the credit support provided to them. The central bank has advised banks to disburse loans to affected businesses on the basis of bank-client relationships.

This is not working. There are a number of issues attached to loan disbursement to women. First, many micro and small entrepreneurs do not have records of bank loans, and thus there is no record of loan servicing or relationships with banks on this ground. Despite several dedicated loan schemes for them from many commercial banks, many women still find the procedures complex and do not feel encouraged to go to banks for loans. Second, many banks are not interested to give loans to women entrepreneurs. Banks do not find women’s business proposals bankable as their ticket size is small, which will increase banks’ operational costs. Third, banks are also not sure whether their loans will be repaid in time. Fourth, a large number of women entrepreneurs do not have collaterals to take loans. Fifth, access to information is limited to many women entrepreneurs outside big cities.

However, during the Covid-19 period, these small entrepreneurs will not be able to stay on course without government support. Except a handful of women entrepreneurs who have been fortunate to have their families support them, the others have been facing challenges throughout their journey. Barring a few in the urban areas, families take a skeptical view when a woman proposes to become an entrepreneur. Thus, many do not receive financial support from their families either. With limited financial and operational capacity, women entrepreneurs have fallen into a dire situation during the pandemic.

Banks are yet to appreciate the underlying challenges of small women-led enterprises. In this respect, the role of a number of organisations such as Microcredit Regulatory Authority (MRA), Palli Karma Sahayak Foundation (PKSF), Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) Foundation, and Bangladesh Small and Cottage Industries Corporation (BSCIC) is critical. These organisations can help identify women entrepreneurs across the country who are often outside the radar of financial institutions. Associations of women entrepreneurs can also facilitate the process and guide women entrepreneurs in accessing the stimulus package.

It is now well established that the recovery from the fallout of Covid-19 will be a long and arduous process. While the government has attempted to support the affected sectors through credit-based stimulus packages, its implementation will have to be monitored carefully so that stimulus packages do not create further inequality, not only between the rich and the poor, but also between men and women.

We must not forget that the high economic growth in Bangladesh during the past years has been on the back of its hardworking people. In this journey of economic prosperity, the contribution of Bangladeshi women cannot be undermined. Over the years, women’s participation in the labour force has increased and the nature of activities performed by women has also changed. They are not only working in traditional sectors, but many have stepped into non-conventional jobs and businesses. Supportive policy measures from the government of the day have also contributed to Bangladesh’s economic and social achievements. This has helped to lift a large number of people out of poverty and has also contributed towards gender empowerment.

In order to protect the progress made so far and to reverse the damaging impact of the pandemic on gender equality, government policies should be crafted through a gender lens. The private sector and women entrepreneurs themselves should also be part of the recovery planning. Economic prosperity cannot be sustained by ignoring women’s problems and by keeping women outside the economy. Since the objective of the post-pandemic recovery plan is to “build back better”, policymakers will have to create more opportunities for women to regain the momentum on gender empowerment and gender equality that was created before the coronavirus pandemic.

Dr Fahmida Khatun is the Executive Director at the Centre for Policy Dialogue

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

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Artist Ayushi Chauhan’s painting on the Fuzia website. Credit: https://www.fuzia.com/

By Fairuz Ahmed
NEW YORK, Sep 1 2020 (IPS)

Eight years ago, and at the age of 11, Fuzia co-founder Riya Sinha decided to start the online platform for girls and women. Her story and Fuzia’s DNA are intrinsically wrapped around each other – and highlight how even in the age of feminism where women’s voices tend to be drowned out, a platform for them can become a global success.

Sinha in an exclusive interview with Inter Press Service explains that Fuzia, with 4-million majority-female followership, was started after she published a book.

“We wanted to give girls a voice. I had written my first book: Runaway Twins when I was 11 and sold it over Amazon and through the local Palo Alto bookstore, Books Inc. in the United States,” she said. “This got me into thinking that every girl, in each corner of the world, needs to be given a place to express and engage. Each has a story, and what better thing can there be other than providing them with a platform? This is why we launched Fuzia.”

The website, which started primarily as a writers’ club, has broken barriers in an age of so-called women empowerment but where men still outweigh women in their impact in the publishing world.

More than 80% of the 100 most popular novels were written by men, according to an interactive infographic by Wordery published in 2019. A year earlier, a study found that three leading literary publications devoted less than 40% of their coverage to women authors.

Other factors set boundaries for female writers. Women, in developing countries, but their hobbies and creative talents at the backseat focusing on building a family first, then a career, and lastly express her creative side. A piece, if published, is then scrutinized by society and family. The scene is a bit different in countries like the United States and Canada – but there, creativity is overshadowed by the prohibitive costs of publishing.

Like many institutions, the publishing industry stands accused of gender bias. Every year, Women in Literary Arts (VIDA) Count goes through literary journalism outlets and tallies the genders of the writers whose works are featured and reviewed in those outlets.

According to their most recent study, in 2015 books by women made up less than 20% of books reviewed in the New York Review of Books, 30% in Harper’s Magazine, 29% in the Atlantic, and 22% in the London Review of Books.

Fuzia, however, is breaking these barriers for women and has rapidly become one of the topmost ‘liked’ communities on Facebook.

Young artist Ayushi Chauhan is inspired and supported by the Fuzia community. This is a quote from her published there.
Credit: https://www.fuzia.com/

Sinha says she is proud to bring together hundreds of thousands of women from Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, the U.S., and other places. Fuzia followers across the globe drive women empowerment and creativity through their fusion of cultures and ideas.

Central to Fuzia’s philosophy is to give women a voice. Women play a crucial role as daughter, sister, mother, and wife, supporter of the community as a friend and caregiver – but often, her voice is numbed. If her voice is given a platform, and she is encouraged to make her point come across and delivered to a greater audience, then, this will help solve a lot of underlying issues. Critical topics like domestic violence, domestic abuse, when, why, and how, methods of coping, strategies for help, the root cause of bullying, gender differences, treatment of sexual orientation, and many other disparities will surface, and with accurate reporting could provide solutions and support.

During this critical time, when the world is dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, Fuzia adapted its programs to support women.

“We prioritized by looking at what is most needed in the world today. For example, in the time of lockdown, we began developing Fuzia Wellness more rapidly, as people may need more access to mental health help when isolated at home,” Sinha said.

The platform, having just celebrated its 8th anniversary, has been recognized globally with the team awarded by the World Economic Forum “Young Leaders Creating a Better World for All” in 2018. Sinha has been invited to the TEDx stage, where she talks passionately about the role youth have in changing the world.

Sinha says Fuzia plans to continue to stay relevant.

“Our goals for the future are to be self-sustaining and generate revenue, expand the brand of Fuzia to become like another social media platform in its influence,” she says.

“We already link up talents, groom them, and offer career training. Many girls, from all over the world, have been using our platform, and they have become entrepreneurs, they have become small business owners, tech start-up founders, and more.”

The website and its underlying philosophy could also encourage female authors by supporting them and giving them the means to sustain this career choice. Fuzia supports its users with engagements of many, where anyone can publish, get noticed, and get constructive reviews. They also hold period writing contests and the winners are presented with acclamations, financial benefits, a pre-start to career, and mostly an audience of millions.

College student and Fuzia top user Ayushi Chauhan (22) said her experience on the platform had been positive.

“I believe that everyone has a unique talent, and Fuzia is a great platform to have your talent and skills showcased. It is free to express and share the platform, and I share my ideas on various topics here. I also get to meet many more talented women who inspire me and appreciate my artwork. I appreciate all the Fuziates for their love and support.”

With women empowerment platforms, like Fuzia, where technology meets creativity, it is hoped that more women can devote their time to writing and creating undampened by social boundaries. The supportive nature of the website means that barriers to creativity – where a woman may find herself scrutinized by family and society are broken down.

The Artists of Fuzia, Writers of Fuzia, Photographers of Fuzia identify talents and showcase them in front of a broad audience.

“I’m currently in my 2nd year of graduation in commerce. I began my craft four years back and still find myself sketching, painting, making some craft, or just doodling. I have kept my zeal to polish my skills intact, and I believe in taking inspiration from my flaws,” Chauhan said. “It is because of my passion that I challenge myself every day to learn new skills and Fuzia has been the best platform to help me do this. I showcase my artworks and creativity at Fuzia, and I grow better each day.”

With challenges like user visibility, retention, and coping with an ever-changing face of the digital media and publishing scene, any company wishing to make an impact needs grit.

Fuzia aims to hold on to their vision of empowering creative women through the fusion of cultures and ideas and have the open company culture of accepting and embracing change so that everyone can have a voice and make it heard without any barriers, said Sinha.

“Overall, what we give them is a playground where they can express, speak, and thrive. And that too, without any judgment. We give them a voice,” Sinha said.

 

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By Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Anis Chowdhury
KUALA LUMPUR and SYDNEY, Sep 1 2020 (IPS)

After accusing the World Health Organization (WHO) of pro-China bias, President Donald Trump announced US withdrawal from the UN agency. Although the US created the UN system for the post-Second World War new international order, Washington has often had to struggle in recent decades to ensure that it continues to serve changing US interests.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Invisible virus trumps POTUS
In early July, Washington gave the required one-year notice officially advising the UN of its intention to withdraw from the WHO, created by the US as the global counterpart to the now century-old Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO).

However, the White House decision violates US law as it does not have express approval of the US Congress required by the 1948 joint resolution of both US legislative houses enabling US membership of the WHO.

Trump had already refused to meet US financial commitments. This too violates the 1948 resolution requiring the US to fully meet its financial obligations for the current fiscal year before leaving, probably presuming that earlier dues have been fully paid up.

The WHO needs more funding than ever to address the COVID-19 pandemic by increasing cooperation, coordination and awareness, establishing standards and protocols, and securing medical supplies for all, especially needy countries.

The world would have been much worse off without the WHO, e.g., as it tries to ensure that COVID-19 vaccines are affordably accessible to all. By contrast, Trump’s jingoistic policies and actions have even involved piracy.

After concluding a favourable trade deal early in the new year, Trump praised China on 24 January: “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency”.

As POTUS’s failure to better handle the COVID-19 pandemic has become apparent to most, he has created scapegoats to gloss over his gross mismanagement, demonizing China to also serve larger political purposes. Growing Western paranoia about China’s rise has contributed to collective amnesia.

POTUS has accused the WHO of deference to China and deliberate failure to provide accurate information about COVID-19. Despite disproven and unproven allegations, Trump’s allegations of WHO bias for China have dominated international public opinion.

WHO’s mixed record
WHO policy decisions are made by the World Health Assembly (WHA) with almost 200 Member States. As in other UN bodies, decisions adopted with developing countries in the majority have often not been to Washington’s liking.

Anis Chowdhury

Without the bullying US presence, WHO’s functioning may improve, but the WHO will be weakened by reduced resources and possibly, sabotage. It will increasingly depend on other sources of funding, many private, US-based, which is likely to compromise its policies and practices.

Already, the WHO Secretariat has been widely criticised for favouring US interests, e.g., by procuring from US companies. US and other transnational companies greatly influence WHO policy and management decisions in their own favour.

Halfdan Mahler, a three-term WHO Director-General, warned that the pharmaceutical industry’s “unhealthy influence” was “taking over WHO”. Thus, any balanced inquiry of WHO bias should include the influence of big pharmaceutical corporations, especially as the agency increasingly depends on private funding.

Despite an official inquiry finding “no wrong doing” after a Council of Europe committee alleged possible conflicts of interest in WHO’s declaration of an A/H1N1 swine flu pandemic, criticisms of conflicts of interest remain.

The British Medical Journal found that key WHO influenza pandemic planning scientific advisers had been paid by pharmaceutical firms that stood to gain from the guidance they were preparing, i.e., possibly involving conflicts of interest never publicly declared.

Financial blackmail
UN organizations depend on mandatory annual contributions by Member States, determined according to agreed scales of assessment relative to their wealth and population. When a Member State fails to pay dues for the preceding two years, it loses voting rights.

The US should pay 22% of WHO’s annual budget, and the European Union 30. Of the total of US$489 million for 2020, the assessed contribution for the US came to US$115 million.

However, the US has regularly defaulted, partially or wholly, on contributions due to the WHO and the UN secretariat among others. For instance, the US only paid a third of its assessed WHO contribution for 2019.

Thus, while low-income countries duly pay their statutory contributions, the world’s largest economy selectively withholds payments due in order to influence UN agencies’ policies, decisions and practices.

Nonetheless, a larger share of WHO expenditure than the assessed US budgetary contribution ends up in the US to procure medicines, equipment and services.

US threatens UN multilateralism
Washington’s refusal to pay its WHO and other UN dues reflects its attitude to the democratization of the multilateral organizations it once created. US efforts to financially squeeze UN agencies are nothing new, having long refused to pay dues to the UN secretariat on various dubious grounds.

With its veto, the US has been able to ensure that the UN’s most strategic organ, the Security Council, could never undermine its interests despite the nominal ‘one-country-one-vote’ governance of much of the UN system.

Undoubtedly, like much of the rest of UN system, the WHO needs reform, e.g., to improve accountability in decision-making, but progress has been blocked by various divides, with support for Trump’s accusations and vague reform demands driven primarily by political considerations.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has also come under US arm-twisting, with the US and Israel pulling out in December 2018 following its overwhelming General Conference decision to admit Palestine as a member.

When Ronald Reagan was president, the US had quit UNESCO in 1984 after claiming that then Senegalese Director-General Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow had been “politicizing” the organization. The US only rejoined in 2013 during Obama’s second term.

Meanwhile, the US remains outside many other global multilateral initiatives, including the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Kyoto Protocol, the International Criminal Court and the Basel Convention, and has also withdrawn from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Paris Agreement and the UN Human Rights Council.

Even if he concedes the presidency in January, Trump’s jingoistic legacy has already irreversibly poisoned US public sentiment and international politics. Multilateralism and the UN system may well suffer irreversible collateral damage until an unlikely new ‘coalition of the willing’ rises to the challenge.

 

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Onergia, one of the two energy cooperatives operating in Mexico today, installs photovoltaic systems, such as this one at the Tosepan Titataniske Union of Cooperatives in the municipality of Cuetzalan, in the southern state of Puebla. CREDIT: Courtesy of Onergia

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Aug 31 2020 (IPS)

A Mexican solar energy cooperative, Onergia, seeks to promote decent employment, apply technological knowledge and promote alternatives that are less polluting than fossil fuels, in one of the alternative initiatives with which Mexico is seeking to move towards an energy transition.

“We organised ourselves in a cooperative for an energy transition that will rethink the forms of production, distribution and consumption to build a healthier and fairer world,” Onergia founding partner and project director Antonio Castillo told IPS. “In this sector, it has been more difficult; we have to invest in training and go against the logic of the market.”

The eight-member cooperative, created in 2017, has so far installed some 50 photovoltaic systems, mainly in the south-central state of Puebla."A public policy is needed that would allow us to move towards the transition. Getting people to adopt alternatives depends on public policy. It is fundamental for people to have the freedom to choose how to consume. It is our job to organise as consumers." --
Antonio Castillo

Castillo explained by phone that the cooperative works with middle- and upper-class households that can finance the cost of the installation as well as with local communities keen on reducing their energy bill, offering more services and expanding access to energy.

In the case of local communities, the provision of solar energy is part of broader social projects in which the beneficiary organisations’ savings and loan cooperatives design the financial structure to carry out the work. A basic household system can cost more than 2,200 dollars and a larger one, over 22,000.

“The communities are motivated to adopt renewable energy as a strategy to defend the land against threats from mining or hydroelectric companies,” said Castillo. “They don’t need to be large-scale energy generators, because they already have the local supply covered. The objective is to provide the communities with alternatives.”

Onergia, a non-profit organisation, promotes distributed or decentralised generation.

In Mexico, energy cooperatives are a rarity. In fact, there are only two, due to legal, technical and financial barriers, even though the laws governing cooperatives recognise their potential role in energy among other diverse sectors. The other, Cooperativa LF del Centro, provides services in several states but is not a generator of electricity.

The Electricity Industry Law, in effect since 2014, allows the deployment of local projects smaller than one megawatt, but practically excludes them from the electricity auctions that the government had been organising since 2016 and that the administration of leftwing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador put a stop to after he took office in December 2018.

Since then, López Obrador has opted to fortify the state monopolies of the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) and the Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) oil giant, which translates into favouring fossil fuels over renewable sources.

The National Electric System Development Programme 2018-2032 projects that fossil fuels will represent 67 percent of the energy mix in 2022; wind energy, 10 percent; hydroelectric, nine percent; solar, four percent; nuclear, three percent, and geothermal and bioenergy, four percent.

In 2032, the energy outlook will not vary much, as fossil fuels will account for 60 percent; wind, nuclear and geothermal energy will rise to 13, eight and three percent, respectively; hydroelectric power will drop to eight percent; while solar and bioenergy will remain the same.

In Mexico, rural communities are guaranteeing their electricity supply by using clean sources, thus furthering the energy transition to micro and mini-scale generation. The photo shows the “Laatzi-Duu” ecotourism site (the name means “standing plain” in the Zapotec indigenous language) which is self-sufficient thanks to a solar panel installed on its roof, in the municipality of San Juan Evangelista Analco in the southern state of Oaxaca. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

The government cancelled the call for long-term electric auctions that allowed private companies to build wind and solar plants and sell the energy to CFE. But these tenders privileged private Mexican and foreign capital and large-scale generation.

In a dialogue with IPS, independent researcher Carlos Tornel questioned the predominant energy design promoted by the 2013 reform that opened up the hydrocarbon and electricity markets to private capital, and the form of energy production based on passive consumers.

“We don’t have an effective legal framework to promote that kind of energy transition,” said the expert via WhatsApp from the northeast English city of Durham. “A free market model was pursued, which allowed the entry of megaprojects through auctions and allowed access to those who could offer a very low cost of generation, which could only be obtained on a large scale.”

With that strategy, he added, “small projects were left out. And the government did not put in place economic incentives to foment cooperative schemes.”

“We need a more active model focused on the collective good,” added Tornel, who is earning a PhD in Human Geography at Durham University in the UK.

Mexico, the second largest economy in Latin America with a population of 129 million, depends heavily on hydrocarbons and will continue to do so in the medium term if it does not accelerate the energy transition.

In the first quarter of 2019, gross generation totaled 80,225 gigawatt hours (Gwh), up from 78,167 in the same period last year. Gas-fired combined cycle plants (with two consecutive cycles, conventional turbine and steam) contributed 40,094, conventional thermoelectric 9,306, and coal-fired 6,265.

Hydroelectric power plants contributed 5,137 Gwh; wind fields 4,285; nuclear power plants 2,382; and solar stations 1,037.

The Energy Transition Law of 2015 stipulates that clean energy must meet 30 percent of demand by 2021 and 35 percent by 2024. By including hydropower and nuclear energy, the country will have no problem reaching these goals.

Residents of the small rural community of Amatlán, in the municipality of Zoquiapan in the state of Puebla, oversee the operation of photovoltaic panels installed by the Mexican cooperative Onergia. This type of cooperative can help rural communities in Mexico access clean energy, particularly solar power. CREDIT: Courtesy of Onergia

By early August, the government’s Energy Regulatory Commission (CRE) had granted 310 permits for solar generation, small-scale production and self-supply, totaling almost 22,000 Mw.

The 2017 report Renewable Energy Auctions and Participatory Citizen Projects, produced by the international non-governmental Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21), cites, with respect to Mexico, the obligation for investors to form self-sufficient companies, which complicates attempts to develop local ventures.

Onergia’s Castillo stressed the need for a clear and stable regulatory framework.

“A public policy is needed that would allow us to move towards the transition,” he said. “Getting people to adopt alternatives depends on public policy. It is fundamental for people to have the freedom to choose how to consume. It is our job to organise as consumers.”

Affected by the coronavirus pandemic, Onergia is reviewing the way it works and its financial needs to generate its own power supply. It also works with the Renewable Energies Institute of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in the design and installation of solar power systems.

In March, the government’s National Council for Science and Technology launched a strategic national programme on energy transition that will promote sustainable rural energy projects and community solar energy, to be implemented starting in 2021.

In addition, the energy ministry is set to announce the Special Energy Transition Programme 2019-2024.

But to protect the CFE, the CRE is blocking approval of the development of collective distributed generation schemes, which would allow citizens to sell surplus energy to other consumers, and the installation of storage systems in solar parks.

Tornel criticised the lack of real promotion of renewable sources.

“The Mexican government has been inconsistent in its handling of this issue,” he maintained. “They talk about guaranteeing energy security through hydrocarbons. There is no plan for an energy transition based on renewables or on supporting community projects. We have no indication that they support renewable, and that’s very worrying.”

The REN21 report recommends reserving a quota for participatory citizen projects and facilitating access to energy purchase agreements, which ensures the efficiency of tenders and the effectiveness of guaranteed tariffs for these undertakings.

In addition, it proposes the establishment of an authority for citizen projects, capacity building, promotion of community energy and specific national energy targets for these initiatives.

Related Articles

• Energy Cooperatives, Fogged Mirrors for Latin America
• Bioenergy, the Ugly Duckling of Mexico’s Energy Transition
• Mexico’s Plan to Upgrade Hydropower Plants Faces Hurdles
• Mexican Women Use Sunlight Instead of Firewood or Gas to Cook Meals

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Amnesty International showed evidence of workers hired to build FIFA World Cup stadiums in Qatar not being paid for up to seven months last year. Al Bayt Stadium, Al Khor, Qatar.

By Upasana Khadka
KATHMANDU, Aug 31 2020 (IPS)

Even as Nepali workers stranded overseas face confusion and uncertainty during the Covid-19 crisis, labour reforms in Qatar – including an increase in the minimum wage announced in Doha on Sunday — may have lasting implications for migrants there.

On 30 August, Qatar revised the minimum wage to QAR 1,000 (USD 275), while requiring employers to ensure that they provide decent allowances for food and accommodation worth QAR 300 and QAR 500, if not directly provided.

In addition, workers are now allowed to change jobs before the end of their contract without obtaining a No Objection Certificate (NOC) from the employer. The reforms will also apply to domestic workers, who are currently excluded from the labour law.

“We have been raising this issue for a long time. The previous temporary minimum wage of QAR 750 was too low, so this is positive news for our workers and reflects the Government of Qatar’s commitment to bring reforms to the labour sector,” said Nepali Ambassador to Qatar Narad Nath Bharadwaj.

There had been much criticism of the NOC requirement that forced migrants to continue working even when there were contract violations, or they were not fit for the job or employer.

“This removes the culture of employers wielding a disproportionate bargaining power by not granting NOC to workers while making them work under unfavourable terms. If migrants have jobs of their choice, their morale will be higher,” Bharadwaj says.

Recruiting agencies often over-promise or lie about job offers abroad, forcing workers to be stuck in companies despite unfavourable employment terms. In other cases, employers release NOCs only if workers are willing to pay them, sometimes as high as QAR 5,000.

 

 

As international pressure started building up from migrants’ rights groups, in 2018 Qatar removed restrictions on workers to get exit permits from employers before leaving the country. According to the International Labour Organication (ILO), this ‘effectively dismantles the long-criticized Kafala system of employment’.

The minimum wage issue had been a sticking point for workers in Qatar, where there are over 350,000 Nepalis. Qatar is the first country with which Nepal signed a labour agreement in 2005, and has remained one of the most important destination countries for Nepali workers.

The Nepal government had unilaterally imposed a minimum referral wage for the ‘unskilled’ category of QAR 900 with QAR 300 for food allowance, ensuring that employers are unable to hire Nepali workers below this wage regardless of Qatar’s lower minimum wage.

Other skill categories have a higher minimum referral wage range including semi-skilled (QAR 1,100-1,400), skilled (QAR 1,500-3,000) and professional categories (QAR 4,200-11,000 QAR).

As per this minimum referral wage requirement, all demand letters below QAR 900 used to be screened out by the Nepal Embassy during the approval phase. However, while many employers complied, there were also cases of employers and recruiters finding ways around this requirement via contract substitution. Once workers reach Qatar, they are made to sign another contract with a rate lower than the minimum referral wage.

Now, Qatar’s decision to raise the minimum wage for all workers means implementation will be more reliable via its Wage Protection System that monitors timely salary payment as per the contract and prevailing laws.

The Qatar government’s labour practices have been under international scrutiny ever since it won the bid to hold FIFA World Cup 2022. The pressure has led to some reforms over the years, although problems still prevail.

On 24 August Human Rights Watch issued a damning report on Qatar’s failure to follow through on promises of worker protection, pointing out the high incidence of withheld and unpaid salaries to workers in 60 companies. It said the situation had worsened as many employers used Covid-19 pandemic as a pretext to withhold or clear dues.

Ambassador Bhardwaj says, “Nepali workers affiliated with larger companies, including in many FIFA related projects are continuing work taking extra precautions. But there are Nepalis especially in the smaller companies impacted by the lockdown that have gone bankrupt, stopped paying wages, or cut staff size.”

Some 6,000 such workers have gone back to Kathmandu on repatriation flights, but there are 20,000 more who are waiting to return.

In June, Amnesty International also showed evidence of workers hired to build FIFA World Cup stadiums in Qatar not being paid for up to seven months last year.

There has also been international scrutiny in Malaysia, another country with large numbers of Nepali workers. Malaysia produces around two-thirds of the world’s latex gloves, and the US Custom Border Patrol issued detention order citing Malaysia’s labour violations in October last year.

Responding to the pressure, and amid soaring demand for personal protection equipment during the global pandemic, Malaysian companies have started reimbursing recruitment costs to workers, including Nepalis, while upgrading their living quarters, with stricter government oversight and social audits underway.

 

This story was originally published by The Nepali Times

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By Dr. Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury
SINGAPORE, Aug 31 2020 (IPS)

The Maldives is a picturesque country of merely 515,000 people located just beyond the southern tip of the South Asian land mass, in an idyllic Indian ocean setting. The nation is spread across 26 pretty atolls, comprising about 1192 islets, not all still inhabited. These are lapped by crystal blue waters containing flora and fauna of remarkable magnificence. Its scenic bounties attract droves of tourists who frolic in the sands, sun and the sea in salubrious languor. It has a thriving fishing, garment and tourism industry which have recently helped it graduate out of the United Nations list of Least Developed Countries (LDCs).It is so tiny that used to be said that the catch of a single large fish any day could cause a remarkable jump in its Gross National Product (GDP) numbers. It is not without reason that the archipelago has often been compared to a paradise.

But now it appears that peace in paradise could be confronting some strains due to regional and international politics. On the global matrix China is racing to reach peer status with the United states. The Chinese see the Indians, because of the increasing chumminess between India and the US as an impediment to their aspirations. Hence they appear to be out to clip India’s wings. Obviously, the way to go about it is to try and reduce India’s regional and global influence. India obviously resists Chinese attempts to do so. The inevitable result is conflict, as of now confined to borders or Line of Actual Control (LAC), as it is called, in the Himalayan mountain heights. This is complemented by tussle for control of the seas south of the border as well. This strategic competition is not just confined to the military sphere. There is also an economic battleground. In this China’s great weapon is the ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), linking scores of nations along land and sea- routes to China through mega infrastructural projects. The Maldives, located at a strategic point in the Indian ocean, therefore, could not be immune to this Sino -China rivalry at worst, and competition at best.

The Maldives, whose size precluded it, or did not require for it to play a major role in the international arena, was always close to India in the past. But that was before the transformations in the global power-paradigm with the rise of China and the onset of a major Sino-Indian rivalry. As was to be expected this became a factor in the domestic politics of the Maldives. Former President Abdullah Yameen leaned towards China. There was a course correction in 2018 when the current President Ibrahim Mohammed Solih seemed to return to the Indian fold. In the meantime, China had already scored a few points by committing US $ 200 million to build the China Maldives Friendship Bridge. This would link the capital Male with the airport island, Hulhule. At the same time there was a clutch of Chinese investments. These included plans for constructing an airport runway and housing projects.

India has now responded with a massive offer of its own. It comes under an umbrella called the Greater Male Connectivity project. The idea is to link Male with three other islands: Villingli, Thilafushi and Gulhifalhu. This will be done through a bridge, a causeway and an embankment. There will also be a port constructed in Gulhifalhu. For these purposes India would advance a loan and a line of credit worth approximately US $ 500 million. The most important component would be the 6.7 km long bridge, the construction of which is now scheduled to begin later this year. The main problem with Indian commitments, in the Maldives, as elsewhere in the region, is in the area of implementation. Disbursement of funds is often painfully slow, and the progress with infrastructural construction even more so. But for now, the government of the Maldives was happy, and President Solih described the deal as a “landmark moment in Maldives-India cooperation”. It is likely that like many other nations in the region, the Maldives will endeavour to navigate carefully between the two powerful protagonists, China and India, and try to reap some benefits from their mutual jostling for position.

It is probably in order to delve a little into the background of intra-mural South Asian politics in this context. When the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC), the product of a Bangladeshi initiative, was still active, it provided a structural fence around the subcontinental countries, grouping them together, stressing commonalities. But India-Pakistan rivalry has now stalled the activities of the forum. People-to-people contacts within the SAARC framework ceased, as also any public predilection for cooperation. India has encouraged formation of sub-regional bodies in its stead, but Indian preponderance in these has curbed the enthusiasm of others. The smaller South Asian States psychologically feel freer to invite outside actors like China into their midst. So, the state of comatose that afflicts SAARC has actually encouraged smaller South Asian countries to seek external linkages to enhance their capability to deal with India, which will, nevertheless, always remain a major factor in their policies.

Secondly, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)continue to turn more and more towards the fundamentalist values of Hindutva to cement their support among the Hindu power-base , in opposition to the other major community in India, the Muslims, it is likely to impact on their co-religionists of the subcontinent negatively. This includes Muslim-majority countries of South Asia. Here the Maldives assumes a special significance as the Maldivians take their faith seriously, and the government, can ill- afford to ignore this fact in the long run. This is emerging as a major structural problem in BJP-led India’s regional external policy.

So tiny Maldives may be entering a new phase in its policies where powerplay of large global actors will have a role that might grow bigger with time. Its future, as that of many other countries in comparable milieu will be shaped by how deftly it is able to handle this evolving situation.

Dr Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury is Principal Research Fellow at the Institute of South Asia Studies, National University of Singapore. He is a former Foreign Advisor (Foreign Minister) of Bangladesh and President of Cosmos Foundation Bangladesh. The views addressed in the article are his own. He can be reached at: isasiac @nus.edu.sg

This story was originally published by Dhaka Courier.

 

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President Gotabaya Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka. Credit: Permanent Mission of Sri Lanka to the United Nations

By Asoka Bandarage
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, Aug 31 2020 (IPS)

On August 5, 2020, a new government was elected in Sri Lanka, bringing down the previous regime associated with the Central Bank bond scam, the Easter Sunday bomb attacks and controversial international agreements.

The new government has come into office with a two thirds majority in parliament, promising to bring prosperity, security and communal harmony to the beleaguered country. The achievement of these goals depends to a large extent on how neocolonialism and sovereignty are addressed.

Colonialism involves control of a less powerful country by a powerful country to exploit resources and increase its power and wealth. Essentially, neocolonialism involves the same factors: militarism, external expropriation of natural resources, deception and manipulation, collusion with local elites, incitement of ethnic and religious differences (and other forms of balkanization and destabilization) and consequential local resistance to external aggression.

Neocolonialism and Geopolitical Rivalry

Today, strategically located in the ancient east-west Indian Ocean maritime trade route, Sri Lanka faces a competition for control by China on one side and the U.S.-led Asia-Pacific Quadrilateral Alliance (including India, Japan and Australia) on the other.

The new Sri Lankan government says it will reconcile competing external interests. Speaking on behalf of Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the recently appointed Foreign Secretary, Retired Navy Commander, Prof. Jayanath Colombage states: ‘Sri Lanka should be a neutral country. Sri Lanka does not want to be caught up in the power game. Sri Lanka wants to develop friendly international ties with everybody. Sri Lanka should have Sri Lanka-first policy.’

Is Sri Lanka’s current foreign policy moving in this direction?

Chinese Expansion

Sri Lanka has been a participant in China’s $4 trillion Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) since 2005. In January 2017, the previous Sri Lankan government granted an 85 percent stake of the Hambantota port, in the most strategic central point in the Indian Ocean, to the China Merchant Port Holding Company in a 99-year lease.

China is Sri Lanka’s largest creditor and has provided generous support during the Covid-19 pandemic. Given local concerns over the Hambantota port deal, President Gotabaya has previously stated that, on election, he would revisit the lease agreement and renegotiate it.

More recently, he has stated that his government is not planning to amend the commercial terms of the agreement, but wishes to amend agreements concerning port security.

While Sri Lankan activists have been protesting the environmental and social impact of expanding Chinese projects, the Quadrilateral Alliance is seeking to involve Sri Lanka in countering Chinese expansion in Asia, making Sri Lanka a key battleground of geopolitical rivalry.

Allaying the fears of India and the U.S. that the Hambantota port could become a Chinese military base, the new Sri Lankan government has stated that the port should be ‘…limited to commercial activities only. It is zero for military purposes…Sri Lanka will not afford any particular country to use Sri Lanka as a staging area to do anything against another country- especially so India.’

But how would the Quadrilateral Alliance respond if there is real or perceived military activity? It is not hard to imagine a dangerous military situation escalating far beyond Sri Lanka’s control.

Indian Expansion

The policy of the Sri Lankan President, articulated by Foreign Secretary Colombage is that ‘…as far as strategic security is concerned, Sri Lanka will always have an India-first approach. That means Sri Lanka will not do anything harmful to India’s strategic security interests. As far as economic development is concerned, we cannot depend on one country. We are open to anyone.’

However, India’s political and military involvement during the separatist war, especially its impositions of the 13th Amendment on the Sri Lankan Constitution and the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) on Sri Lankan soil, have left fear and antipathy towards India.

The Indo-Lanka Accord that introduced these developments was hammered out in secrecy and signed without parliamentary consultation on July 29, 1987 during a 24-hour curfew. It faced massive resistance and ushered in one of the most violent and anarchic periods in the island’s modern history.

Despite India’s failure to curb Tamil militancy and the failure of the Provincial Council system, India wants Sri Lanka to maintain the 13th Amendment and the provincial councils that it introduced to appease Tamil separatist sentiments.

However, the new Sri Lankan government is under increasing domestic pressure to abrogate the 13th Amendment and to assert Sri Lanka’s sovereignty and political independence from India.

Concerned at Chinese encroachment at the Hambantota port, India is pursuing control over Sri Lanka’s other strategic seaports and to develop the British colonial era Oil Tank Farm in the eastern seaport town of Trincomalee, through a subsidiary of the Indian Oil Corporation, despite protests by Sri Lanka’s petroleum trade unions.

Port Power

External powers are also keen to gain control over the Colombo port, one of the busiest in South Asia, and an important transit hub in the region. Japan is keen for access given its high dependency on energy supplies via the Indian Ocean. There is now a push by the U.S. and India to privatize the Colombo port’s Eastern Container Terminal (ECT) and hand it over to an Indian company.

The Sri Lankan President remains committed to honor a memorandum of understanding signed in 2019 by Sri Lanka, India and Japan on the ECT. According to Foreign Secretary Colombage, ‘the policy of the President was that no national asset would be given in total control to any country’ and the MOU is being honored because it is ‘an arrangement between the two countries. The only thing is that there is opposition to it from port workers.’

On July 31, 10,000 Colombo port workers resisting the privatization of state assets began a strike blocking all roads into and inside the port, completely paralyzing it. President Rajapaksa refused to talk to the unions. Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, the President’s brother, did meet with union leaders and indicated that their key concern was to not antagonize India. Is this an indication of further Sri Lankan subservience to external power, at the cost of local agency and sovereignty?

U.S. Expansion

Given the history of U.S. hegemony and foreign interventions, there is a justified fear in Sri Lanka of U.S. interference in local governance and control of resources. Unsurprisingly, the country is experiencing intense pressure via multiple U.S. military, and economic development treaties.

On Nov. 6, 2019, ten days before the elections that brought Gotabaya Rajapaksa to power, the Government Medical Officers Association filed a Fundamental Rights Petition seeking to halt progress of three pending treaties with the U.S.: the MCC (Millennium Challenge Corporation) Compact on infrastructure development, and two military treaties; the ongoing ACSA (Acquisition and Cross Service Agreement) and new SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement).

The petitioners stated that the MCC compact would violate fundamental Sri Lankan sovereignty and independence, clearly upheld by the constitution. There is also concern at the irreversible nature of such far-reaching treaties.

Among other objectives, the MCC Compact seeks to privatize and commodify state land for investors, including foreign corporations. Gotabaya Rajapaksa promised to discard the MCC Compact during his election campaign, and since in office his government appointed the Gunaruwan Committee to study the issue. Its final report in June raised serious issues on its implications to social, economic and security interests of the country.

The Sri Lankan government plans to submit the report to the cabinet and then to the parliament for debate on a compromise, i.e., as Foreign Secretary Colombage indicates, the government plans to go ahead with the MCC Compact in some form or other.

There have also been clear reports that, whether or not the compact is signed, certain elements will proceed regardless. For example, ‘the e-land registry, cadastral mapping, parcel fabric map, deed registry scanning and digitizing, state land information & valuation are being outsourced to multiple private parties selected by the U.S. embassy Colombo.’

Are external pressures so great that they will inevitably find a way to mold Sri Lanka’s future?

Military engagement with Sri Lanka is considered vital to U.S. objectives in the region. The Acquisition and Cross Services Agreement (ACSA) signed by the previous Sri Lankan government on Aug. 4, 2017 provides the basis to set up a U.S. ‘logistic hub’ in Sri Lanka to secure support, supplies and services at sea.

Similarly, the proposed Status of forces Agreement (SOFA) would allow U.S. military personnel to operate in any part of Sri Lanka, without restriction. Sri Lankans fear that SOFA would make “the whole island … a US-controlled super state operating above the Sri Lankan laws and state….” A Cabinet spokesman suggested on July 1 that the SOFA has already been signed but the new government has made no denial or retraction. Meanwhile the Sri Lankan public is left completely in the dark.

‘Sri Lanka First’

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa have been voted in with the faith and respect of most Sri Lankans, not least for their roles in ending the thirty-year war with the LTTE. Most do not doubt their devotion to the country. Their exemplary management of the Covid-19 pandemic has reinforced this respect.

However, there is a growing sense in the country that the overt and covert pressures from external powers, exemplified by these impending agreements, are so great that a path of neutrality will require deep resolve and conviction. It is, then, the democratic responsibility of Sri Lankans to stay informed, see through the bias of power, and exercise their freedom of expression non-violently.

Our ancestors sacrificed their blood, sweat and tears to safeguard the sovereignty and independence of our country, and it has no price. A luta continua.

Footnote: A luta continua was the rallying cry of the FRELIMO movement during Mozambique’s war for independence. The phrase is in the Portuguese language a slogan coined by the first president of FRELIMO, Dr. Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane, which he used to rally the population in the liberated zones of Mozambique during the armed struggle against Portuguese colonial rule. Following his assassination in 1969, his successor, Samora Machel, continued to use the slogan to cultivate popular support during …

* Asoka Bandarage’s new book ‘Colonialism in Sri Lanka” examines the political economy of 19th century British Ceylon and includes a discussion of the neocolonialism that has followed and continues. It is available as an ebook or paperback here from September 14th

 

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Excerpt:

Asoka Bandarage* is a scholar and practitioner, has taught at Yale, Brandeis, Mount Holyoke (where she received tenure), Georgetown, American and other universities and colleges in the U.S. and abroad. Her research interests include social philosophy and consciousness; environmental sustainability, human well-being and health, global political-economy, ethnicity, gender, population, social movements and South Asia.

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Greta Thunberg (right), Climate Activist, speaks at the opening of the UN Climate Action Summit 2019. Credit: UN Photo/Cia Pak

By External Source
Aug 31 2020 (IPS)

At the end of her first week on strike in August 2018, Greta Thunberg handed out flyers that said: “You grownups don’t give a shit about my future.” Her appearance at the 2019 UN Climate Summit capped a year in the spotlight for the teenage climate activist. Delegates at the summit gave her a standing ovation, but the sound of their applause couldn’t mask Greta Thunberg’s deep frustration.

“This is all wrong,” she said. “I shouldn’t be up here … yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!”

Everything from posters to children’s picture books have captured the inspiring example of Thunberg’s bravery and determination. But adults, even supportive ones, still shirk the opportunity to really pay attention to the remarkable movement she is a part of – its history, its present and its visions for the future.

Young climate activists today tend to perceive climate change as the symptom of a broader systemic problem, connected to the same economic and political roots that produce other forms of violence, injustice and inequality, including racism. They do not advocate making these systems sustainable. Their demand is climate justice, and a new, more just, global system.

In doing so, they miss the significance of the last two years. The climate strike movement has grown into a network of global campaigns focused on systemic change to tackle the climate crisis. In the process, young people have outgrown the mainstream environmental movement. They don’t want recognition in the world of today. They want a new world, and they are building it.

 

System change not climate change

Why is Thunberg frustrated? For one thing, adult leaders have applauded young activists before. In 2014, the then 25-year-old Marshallese poet and climate campaigner Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner addressed the opening of the UN Climate Summit, and delegates were in tears. In 2018, she published a poem with another young indigenous activist, Aka Niviana, which captured their disillusionment with the failing international leadership on climate change.

We demand that the world see beyond

SUVs, ACs, their pre-package convenience

Their oil-slicked dreams, beyond the belief

That tomorrow will never happen

The celebration of Thunberg’s speech by adults in power overlooks the oratory of Jetñil-Kijiner and others who came before. It’s an open wound for young climate activists who hear adults applaud them for having a voice, but continue to act as if the catastrophe scientists warn is already here will never come.

Certainly since 2018, the youth climate movement has outgrown the search for applause. The environmentalist Bill McKibben famously said that environmentalists won the argument on climate change long ago, but need to win the fight.

The youth climate movement that continues to build on Thunberg’s strike doesn’t aim to give adults hope that the world can be saved. They say the world that adults knew is gone. In its place, young people are determined to build a better one.

 

A movement of movements

This movement is run by young people, learning from young people, and for young people. Thunberg explained that her climate strikes were inspired by student walkouts for gun control in Parkland, Florida.

Those school strikes, in turn, learned from young people who had gone before, not least the activism of young people of colour in the US civil rights movement in the 1960s and 70s. This included the 1966 Seattle School Boycott and the work of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), founded by Ella Baker in 1960.

The young climate movement’s links to the fight against systemic racism aren’t just tactical. Mainstream environmental movements led by adults tend to focus on changing policies so that the world as it currently exists can be made sustainable.

A good example is the slogan “listen to the science”, popularised by Extinction Rebellion. It imagines change as a process of pressuring politicians to improve existing economic, social and political systems.

Young climate activists today tend to perceive climate change as the symptom of a broader systemic problem, connected to the same economic and political roots that produce other forms of violence, injustice and inequality, including racism. They do not advocate making these systems sustainable. Their demand is climate justice, and a new, more just, global system.

For instance, Extinction Rebellion activist Daze Aghaji explained in 2019 that young people are in their own, distinct branch of Extinction Rebellion that’s distinct because young people focus on “talking about indigenous communities… the global south… and climate justice”.

Another young activist called Aneesa Khan said at a demonstration ahead of the 2018 UN climate summit that this new wave of climate activism is being led by the people who bear the brunt of climate change – or will in the future. These are young people, women, indigenous people, people who suffer under racist oppression or who live in places that were conquered and colonised by European empires. Essentially, those who bear historical traumas and continue to be impoverished by an unfair global economy.

Khan said:

From environment defenders in Latin America to the Standing Rock Sioux in the US to the anti-coal activists in the Philippines and right here in Poland, we’re here, we’re rising, we’re resisting, we’re fighting, but where are you?

In research with young climate activists, we have found that many young people are inspired by Greta Thunberg, and by other icons of the movement. But they also tend to share her sense of the problem – that “our biosphere is being sacrificed so that rich people in countries like mine can live in luxury.”

On the second anniversary of Thunberg’s first strike, young climate activists were probably not looking at 2018 as the start of their movement. They will have placed her strike in broad sweep of other movements for justice, past and present, and they will be planning for the future. Most of all, they will be sharing with other young people their visions of a new world.

Benjamin Bowman, Lecturer in Politics, Manchester Metropolitan University

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

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An independent UN human rights expert is calling for greater scrutiny of emerging digital technologies which she said are being used to uphold racial inequality, discrimination and intolerance. So, why skip scrutiny of the United Nations?. Credit: ITU/D. Procofieff

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 31 2020 (IPS)

When two recent staff surveys, one in Geneva and the other in New York, revealed widespread racism at the United Nations, it triggered the obvious question: why shouldn’t the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) probe these charges?

http://www.ipsnews.net/2020/08/staff-surveys-reveal-widespread-racism-united-nations/

Currently, the UN has a veritable army of over 80 independent experts, described as “Special Rapporteurs” appointed by the HRC and mandated to undertake “fact-finding missions” to investigate human rights abuses worldwide.

The litany of abuses include torture, arbitrary detentions, involuntary disappearances, contemporary forms of slavery, and most importantly, “racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.”

Do revelations at the UN, warrant a Special Rapporteur to probe racism in international organizations? Or shouldn’t the Human Rights Council widen the mandate of the existing Special Rapporteur to include the UN?

Louis Charbonneau, United Nations Director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), told IPS the results of the UN staff survey are extremely worrying.

“The UN leadership should practice what it preaches and work to end racism across the UN system,” he said.

He pointed out that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has spoken out against racism in the U.S. and around the world.

“He should continue to work on ensuring that the UN itself is a solution to — not part of– the problem.”

As for the idea of a new special rapporteur, Charbonneau argued, there’s a special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism– and looking at racism in the UN system is certainly something that could fall within that mandate.

“If member states feel a new position would be useful to investigate racism in international organizations and come up with recommendations to deal with the problem, we would certainly not object. Anything that helps combat racism is a good thing,” he declared.

Citing his personal experiences in overseas peacekeeping operations, Roderic Grigson, a former Peace Keeping Officer and a twelve-year veteran of the UN, told IPS: “When I arrived in Ismailia, which was where the UN Emergency Force (UNEF II HQ) was located, the UN compound was a mixture of both civilian and military staff. The international civilians, like me who came from overseas, were treated very differently to the local Egyptian staff in many ways”.

For example, he said, the locals who were disparagingly called ‘gyppos’ were not allowed into the international mess (club) in the compound unless they were cooks, waiters or barmen.

“If I wanted to bring a local into the bar for a meal– even if it was someone who worked right next to me during the day– I would be refused entry”, said Grigson, author of the ‘Sacred Tears’ trilogy: a historical fiction set during the civil war in Sri Lanka.

This attitude towards the locals, he noted, “extended across all the UN peacekeeping operations I visited during my time in the Middle East– whether in Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, or Cyprus, it did not matter.”

“The International UN staff in all the UN missions treated the locals like lackeys. And they hated us for it. And I felt very uncomfortable working in this environment,” he said.

“Even though I was considered an ‘international’ having been recruited in New York, I was from Sri Lanka and felt I was a ‘second class’ international given the European clique that was predominant at the time”.

Having grown up in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), which was once a British colony, “I had experienced first-hand what it felt like to be treated as one of the colonial masters on the island”.

“My grandfather who was Scottish, lived with us. He worked in a senior management position in the British colonial administration of the island. He had a position of privilege given his race and colour which extended down to his family. Working for the UN felt exactly like that,” Grigson declared.

Somar Wijayadasa who worked in multiple UN agencies, including the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told IPS the UN is awakening to the issue of “racism” after 75 long years.

Racial discrimination (so discreet & subtle) was always there – especially in UN’s Human Resources Departments, headed mostly by white folks, who were also heads of departments and organizations.

This was on top of the rampant nepotism where unqualified and incompetent relatives of world politicians of all colors were appointed to professional P-level positions.

“That is worse than racial discrimination,” said Wijayadasa who also served with the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and was Representative of UNAIDS from 1995 to 2000.

Wijayadasa also said: “it’s high time the UN Human Rights Council appointed a Special Rapporteur to investigate charges of racism at the UN, and more importantly, for the UN to provide iron-clad protection to whistle blowers who complain about racial discrimination in their offices– and not be punished for speaking out. ”

Asked about the UN’s role in probing racial discrimination, Grigson said: “Yes, I think the UN should investigate these charges, but I also think that the UN is just a microcosm of what takes place in individual countries around the world.”

He said racism begins at home, and by calling out those who indulge in it, however famous or well-connected they might be, is the place to start.

The history of racist ideas can be traced back to those European societies that wanted to rule the world and used slaves to grow their wealth and influence, he noted.

“Slavery was only abolished in the world between 150-200 years ago which means that we are only three or four generations away from the time when people were used as chattels.”

“We saw that happen in Ceylon, and here in Australia, where I live. But what I don’t want to see is an international organization like the UN, which does so much good around the world, become elitist and superior as they have already become to some extent, in the execution of their mandate,” he declared.

Meanwhile, in a message to UN staff on August 27, the Office of Human Resources and the Office of the UN Ombudsman and Mediation Service, said a “United Nations Survey on Racism” was sent on August 19 to all staff members, as part of the Organization’s campaign of dialogue and action to eradicate racism and promote dignity within the United Nations.

“The survey has been taken offline following a number of legitimate concerns raised by staff on some of the content of the survey and we regret any pain and distress it has caused. We fully understand their frustration and acknowledge the need to further approach the issue of race and ethnic identity with greater sensitivity and awareness.”

In its original survey, the UN asked staffers to identify themselves either as “black, brown, white, mixed/multi-racial, and any other”. But the most offensive of the categories listed in the survey was “yellow” – a longstanding Western racist description of Asians, including Japanese, Chinese and Koreans.

The new message said: “Taking into account the genuine concerns expressed by staff, we are reviewing the content of the survey and will communicate when the survey will be relaunched.”

“We take this opportunity to thank staff for their frank feedback as part of a deep and open discussion on the issue of racism and racial discrimination in the United Nations.”

Responding to a question, UN Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told reporters August 27: “Racism is something that needs to be addressed in every society, whether in the United States, whether… in any country, anywhere around the world, it is an issue, and within organizations, including our own.”

What is important, he said, “is that racism be fully investigated and that people need to also be able to express themselves peacefully, and whether that is through collective action, as we’ve seen through sports figures, or other ways, that is their right.”

People have a right to express themselves when they feel strongly about injustice, he declared.

But we’re seeing the issue of racism come up again and again in many, many countries, and this is something that… needs to be an open and frank dialogue on addressing, not only the issue of racism but all the inequalities and injustices that flow from that everywhere, Dujarric declared.

The post Racism at the UN: Practice What You Preach appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The UN’s Security Council, in particular, is suffering from a dysfunctional decision-making method that grants the five victors of the Second World War and official nuclear powers not only a permanent seat but also a veto right. Credit: United Nations

By Daniel Jositch and Andreas Bummel
BERLIN / BERNE, Aug 28 2020 (IPS)

The people of the world need to seize the moment and bring about a democratic global revolution. It is time for a global parliament and real representation.

More than 21 million people got infected with the novel coronavirus and over 770,000 have died. Never before did the world witness similar collective lockdowns of social and economic activity that had to be enforced to contain the pandemic.

For many, the corona-related global crisis exacerbates a situation that was already critical before the outbreak of the virus.

The climate crisis is unfolding with record temperatures in Siberia, Greenland, the Antarctic and other places like the Middle East. The new climate apartheid is characterized by whether you can afford to shield yourself from such heat or not. Most cannot.

135 million people are facing crisis levels of hunger. There are currently more than 70 million displaced people who have fled war, persecution and conflict. It’s the worst humanitarian and refugee crisis in seventy years.

There is a global inequality crisis. Productivity gains and globalization disproportionately benefit the affluent. Financial assets in the trillions are hidden in offshore accounts from tax authorities. The world’s 26 richest billionaires own as much as the poorest 3.8 billion people on the planet.

While global surveys confirm that people across all world regions strongly believe in democracy, there is in fact a democratic retreat. Confidence in the actual performance of democratic governments is waning. Populist nationalism and authoritarianism has been advancing, aided and abetted by social media platforms and the internet. Major arms control treaties are crumbling, geopolitical tensions are rising and multilateralism is under attack.

Civil society and citizens across the world are fighting back, though. Pro-democracy movements are at an all-time high as widespread protests in dozens of countries now and in recent times demonstrate. Freedom and justice have lost no appeal. At the same time, millions of citizens joined climate protests around the world and called for quick and effective action in this critical field.

The present issues are symptoms of a crisis of global governance. There is a scale mismatch between a political world order that is based on 200 states and territories and issues that demand decisive global action.

As the UN celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, the organization continues to lose significance and impact. The UN is only as strong and effective as its member states allow it to be. The same applies to all intergovernmental organizations and forums, including the World Health Organization that had to launch an investigation into its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The UN’s Security Council, in particular, is suffering from a dysfunctional decision-making method that grants the five victors of the Second World War and official nuclear powers not only a permanent seat but also a veto right.

If long-lasting solutions are to be achieved, this scale mismatch must be tackled. It is not enough to call on individual governments to change their policies. The way how the world is governed must be changed. What is needed is a new vision of a democratic world order that is based on shared sovereignty on global issues, a clear commitment to human rights, the principle of subsidiarity and complete disarmament.

When the UN was founded it was recognized that this should only be a beginning and that changes would be required. Article 109 of the Charter provides that a conference to review the Charter should be held by 1955. The UN’s member states did not deliver on that promise. Now is the time to hold them to account.

The world’s people need an actual say in global affairs that is not intermediated by national governments and their diplomats. The key ingredient of a new UN should be a democratically elected world parliament that complements intergovernmental bodies such as the UN General Assembly.

The creation of a new democratic world organization that has actual powers seems to be a gigantic project that raises numerous questions. How is a global democracy to be created while major states themselves are not democratically organised? Can decisions of a world parliament be enforced against the will of individual states? How is it possible that states will agree to the creation of a superior political unit?

These questions show the way forward: The people of the world themselves need to embrace and call for global democracy. Eventually, they are the sovereigns not only in their individual states but on the planet as a whole, too.

A global democratic revolution needs to push for a legitimate, inclusive and representative global body that will deal with these questions in a serious way. The creation of a UN Parliamentary Assembly could be an important stepping stone to launch a global constitutional process and a transformation of global governance.

This global democratic revolution will be peaceful because it is not about destroying structures or conquering territories, but about opening up a political level that is lying idle. Supranational integration cannot be imposed by force. It will happen because the people want it.

If existing movements in the fields of climate, environment, peace, disarmament, democracy, social justice and others join forces, the global democratic revolution will become very real.

This may sound visionary. But the big issues troubling this planet and its people will remain, and worsen, unless the root cause is addressed. A democratic global government is not a mind game in some ivory tower. It is the most important question on the agenda of humanity today.

 

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Excerpt:

Daniel Jositsch is a Member of the Swiss Senate and President, Democracy Without Borders-Switzerland, and Andreas Bummel is Executive Director, Democracy Without Borders. Twitter: @democracywb

The post It is Time for a Democratic Global Revolution appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Amnesty International says that magistrates in Madagascar have failed to effectively play their role in limiting the length of pre-trial detention and preventing or ending arbitrary detentions. Courtesy: CC by 2.0/Jared Rodriguez / Truthout

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 28 2020 (IPS)

The recent killing of 22 prisoners in Madagascar during a prison escape on Sunday, Aug. 23 has brought the extraordinary situation of the country’s prisons under a spotlight. Human rights watchdog Amnesty International has condemned the killings, criticising the current judicial system that has led to Madagascar’s prisons holding more people awaiting trial than convicted criminals.

News sources have reported the death of 20 inmates in a shootout by police and the army during the prison break on Sunday, during which 88 prisoners attempted to escape Farafangana prison. Thirty seven were eventually captured, with the remaining 31 inmates still at large, according to the reports.

Tamara Leger, Amnesty International Madagascar programme advisor, told IPS that the current judicial process requires anyone, even those accused of a crime, to be put behind bars until trial.

This means, many of them “can be waiting for a trial for years, with little or no information on their cases,” she said. “This has led to the extraordinary situation where Madagascar’s prisons hold more people who have not been convicted than those found guilty.”

Amnesty International’s report on the issue claims that the escape was in protest of the “squalid” living conditions, prolonged pre-trial detention, or getting pre-trial for minor offences such as “theft of a toothbrush”, among other issues.

Mass prison breakouts are not uncommon in Madagascar, and human rights experts say the squalid living conditions in the prisons don’t make it easy on those being detained.

Leger said that 75 percent of the children who are currently being detained in prisons across Madagascar are in the pre-trial phase. She added that the authorities’ use of “unjustified, excessive and prolonged arbitrary pre-trial detention” leads to a range of human rights abuse: right to liberty, presumption of innocence, and to be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person.

Excerpt of the full interview below. Some parts have been edited for clarity purposes.

Inter Press Service (IPS): How does Madagascar’s criminal justice system affect its vulnerable communities?
Tamara Leger (TL): The majority of pre-trial detainees were men (89 percent), who are affected more directly by the lengthy and inhumane conditions of detention and the severe overcrowding. Even though women constitute about six percent of the prison population, and children make up five percent, they are disproportionately affected by some of the system’s consequences through gender-based and aged-based violations.

For example, pregnant women and women with babies do not have access to appropriate healthcare. Children often do not have access to any educational or vocational activities, in violation of Madagascar’s own laws.

The government has failed to prioritise much-needed support for the criminal justice system, which has resulted in poor allocation of human and material resources. Most prisons visited lacked basic resources, critical to the functioning of the prisons, including transport, furniture, sufficient food for detainees and even sheets of paper.

In addition to the severe lack of resources, the lack of training of staff, the poor coordination among the judiciary and the prison institutions, the slow pace of police investigation, and delayed judicial disposal of cases has meant that thousands of people continue to remain detained in prisons for months and years without a trial. Magistrates have failed to effectively play their role in limiting the length of pre-trial detention and preventing or ending arbitrary detentions. Instead, they have adopted a punitive approach — deliberately sending people to pre-trial detention, on a weak and twisted defence of “being seen to be doing justice”, and a conservative approach to using alternatives to detention.

It is mostly economically and otherwise disadvantaged people – the uneducated and underprivileged from rural areas – who are subjected to unjustified, excessive and lengthy pre-trial detentions. The majority of them spend long months or years in prison for non-violent, often petty offences like simple theft, fraud and forgery. With little knowledge or awareness of their rights and even less means to defend themselves, the poor and the marginalised are also the most likely to suffer the most from their detention.

IPS: How have prisoners been affected during the pandemic and what kind of services were provided to them?

TL: According to our research, the pandemic has made the conditions of detention, which were already extremely difficult, even more unbearable. Our sources on the ground report that detainees can no longer receive visits from their relatives and lawyers, which constituted for many their lifeline. Indeed, most detainees relied on their families to receive adequate food during their imprisonment, as the food provided by the prison administration is often extremely poor in quality and quantity.

In addition, detainees fear becoming infected with COVID-19. The overcrowding is such that it is very difficult for the government to implement the necessary measures to prevent the spread of coronavirus within the prisons. Pre-trial detainees and sentenced detainees are held all together in big, cramped rooms by lack of space (international law provides that these two categories must be separated), so it is hardly possible for detainees to practice social distancing. Furthermore, detainees fear that if they do fall sick, they will not have access to appropriate healthcare. 

IPS: The report also claims “We have warned the authorities time and again that the squalid detention conditions in Madagascar, compounded by overcrowding and a lack of resources, would lead to tragedy.” Were these conditions squalid even before the pandemic?

TL: Yes, absolutely. Amnesty International has documented the conditions of detention in our report published in 2018, which you can find here. Amnesty International’s visits to the nine prisons revealed the appalling conditions in which pre-trial detainees are held. Dark and with little ventilation, most cells are extremely overcrowded, posing serious risks to the detainees’ physical and mental well-being.

In 2017, 129 detainees died in Madagascar’s prisons, 52 of them pre-trial detainees. According to prison authorities, the main causes of death are respiratory problems, cardiovascular diseases, and what they describe as a general bad state [of health]. Prisons are dilapidated, ill-equipped, with lack of financial, material and general support. Prison staff complained about the lack of resources, ranging from sheets of paper, to computer equipment, furniture and transportation.

None of the prisons visited provide any separation between pre-trial and sentenced prisoners, as provided in international human rights law and standards, with three not even appropriately separating boys from men. The prison administration reported that only 24 out of 42 central prisons have a separate section for minors, and that more than a hundred minors were held with adults, in violation of international and national laws. Girls were not separated from adult women, and even in new prisons being built, the separation between girls and women is not being planned. Across all the prisons visited, researchers observed poor sanitation, absence of healthcare, lack of adequate food, educational or vocational opportunities and limited access to families.

IPS: It appears that prison breaks are not uncommon in the country. Has it always been met with this level of violence from the state?

TL: Unfortunately, prison breaks aren’t uncommon because of the lack of resources and overall, the lack of prioritisation of the prison system in the country. There is an acute shortage of key staff within the criminal justice system, ranging from the number of judiciary police officers, to magistrates, lawyers and prison staff. The budget allocated to the prison administration and the judiciary is insufficient to enable effective functioning of the criminal justice system. While this has been a particularly violent response from the state, security forces in Madagascar unfortunately often resort to excessive and disproportionate use of force, including lethal force, particularly in their fight against alleged ‘dahalos’ (cattle thieves).

 

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Without the daily commute it is not hard to see both productivity and financial benefits. Expect a reduced need for big, expensive, downtown offices. Credit: Universidad de Chile

By Gary Rynhart
PRETORIA, Aug 28 2020 (IPS)

In the last 100 years there have been seven crises that have had a truly global impact. Two global wars (1914-18 & 1939-1945); two global health pandemics, the Spanish Flu (1918) and HIV/AIDS (1980s onwards); one major political crisis (1989 – the end of the cold war); and two financial crises (1929 and 2008).

All these crises emerged in unique circumstances, with multiple causes. Yet we can draw some tentative conclusions that are relevant to our situation today.

First – hardly a news flash – is that health crises lead to innovation in health care. Penicillin was discovered in 1926 in a decade that was marked by medical advances. The groundwork for the modern pharmaceutical industry was laid in this decade. The focus on hygiene led to the emergence of new companies, like Unilever and Procter&Gamble.

Gary Rynhart, Specialist, Employers’ Activities, DWT/CO-Pretoria

In general, innovation follows health, political and (especially) military crises. The periods after both world wars were filled with innovations based on wartime technology. However, innovation does stall after an economic crisis.

If we take patents in the US as a proxy, we can trace significant slowdowns after the 1929 and 2008 crisis. And, these two financial crises were also followed by periods of political disruption, the 1930s especially, which saw violent nationalism leading to global war.

Social progress usually follows a crisis. Any crisis. The 1920s and ’30s saw vast amounts of international labour law created (28 ILO Conventions adopted in the 1920s and 39 in the 1930s). Women’s voting rights increased post World War I.

The UN system and the Declaration of Human Rights emerged after World War II. HIV/AIDS forced conversations about sexuality, and many believe it laid the groundwork for the marriage equality that followed in the 2000s.

So, based on the experience of previous crises, what can we expect for the 2020s?

A crisis and the reaction to it are times of great ideas – political, economic, social, and scientific. Some of these led to innovations that made life better for millions of people, others to conflict and war. Whatever we can expect in the coming decade, we can with certainty expect one thing. Change

Let us start with the obvious; because of the nature of this crisis, we can probably expect innovation in the pharmaceutical and health sectors.

More broadly, economies will change. New sectors and companies emerge or expand and older ones will go under. In the 1920s, aviation took off and management consultancy emerged as a mainstream business (McKinsey was formed in 1926); in the 1930s it was health and the modern pharmaceutical sector; modern tourism in the 1950s (Best Western Hotels was founded in 1946 and Holiday Inn followed in 1952).

At the time of the 2008 global financial crisis, the top five companies were Exxon, General Electric, Microsoft, AT&T and P&G. Only two of them are in the top 10 today. The five largest companies today are Apple, Google, FB, Microsoft and Amazon.

What else? People like to let their hair down after a crisis. Jazz and rock and roll emerged after the world wars. New art movements emerged (Bauhaus and Art Deco) in the 1920s. So, expect bursts of creativity to flow into expanded arts and entertainment sectors.

The global disruption to supply chains caused by the pandemic seems likely to encourage firms to limit their risk exposure. This will probably result in much more use of automation and artificial intelligence, not least because these technologies can make it easier to produce goods closer to the buyers that want them. This has major implications for employment.

We have also seen that major policy decisions have been made quickly and have been successful.

Take for example working from home (WFH). Without the daily commute it is not hard to see both productivity and financial benefits. Expect a reduced need for big, expensive, downtown offices. It may not be the end of the office, but it is the end of the old way of viewing the office.

This has wider implications. If white collar workers (perhaps up to half of them) do not need to sit in the office every day then they do not need to live in expensive cities. So while cities may not totally empty of prime office real estate, they will need less of it. That opens the way for cities to reimagine their business model. They could become creative centres, living spaces and entertainment hubs.

But, one thing that makes great cities great might be missing. Migrants.

COVID-19 brought almost all migration to a halt. Some political leaders will see current migration restrictions as an opportunity to reinforce broader, longer-term agendas, riding a public mood that was already going in that direction. This could mean cities may lose this key, yet often underappreciated, ingredient that makes them great.

A crisis and the reaction to it are times of great ideas – political, economic, social, and scientific. Some of these led to innovations that made life better for millions of people, others to conflict and war.

Whatever we can expect in the coming decade, we can with certainty expect one thing. Change.

This article was originally published by Work in Progress

The post Looking Back to Look Forward: What Does the Next Normal Look Like? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Gary Rynhart, Specialist, Employers’ Activities, DWT/CO-Pretoria, International Labour Organization (ILO)

The post Looking Back to Look Forward: What Does the Next Normal Look Like? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

A rural settlement in the state of Pernambuco, in Brazil's semiarid ecoregion. Tanks that collect rainwater from rooftops for drinking water and household usage have changed life in this parched land, where 1.1 million 16,000-litre tanks have been installed so far. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 27 2020 (IPS)

After centuries of poverty, marginalisation from national development policies and a lack of support for positive local practices and projects, the semiarid regions of Latin America are preparing to forge their own agricultural paths by sharing knowledge, in a new and unprecedented initiative.

In Brazil’s semiarid Northeast, the Gran Chaco Americano, which is shared by Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay, and the Central American Dry Corridor (CADC), successful local practices will be identified, evaluated and documented to support the design of policies that promote climate change-resilient agriculture in the three ecoregions.

This is the objective of DAKI-Semiárido Vivo, an initiative financed by the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and implemented by the Brazilian Semiarid Articulation (ASA), the Argentinean Foundation for Development in Justice and Peace (Fundapaz) and the National Development Foundation (Funde) of El Salvador.

DAKI stands for Dryland Adaptation Knowledge Initiative.

The project, launched on Aug. 18 in a special webinar where some of its creators were speakers, will last four years and involve 2,000 people, including public officials, rural extension agents, researchers and small farmers. Indirectly, 6,000 people will benefit from the training.

“The aim is to incorporate public officials from this field with the intention to influence the government’s actions,” said Antonio Barbosa, coordinator of DAKI-Semiárido Vivo and one of the leaders of the Brazilian organisation ASA.

The idea is to promote programmes that could benefit the three semiarid regions, which are home to at least 37 million people – more than the total populations of Chile, Ecuador and Peru combined.

The residents of semiarid regions, especially those who live in rural areas, face water scarcity aggravated by climate change, which affects their food security and quality of life.

Zulema Burneo, International Land Coalition coordinator for Latin America and the Caribbean and moderator of the webinar that launched the project, stressed that the initiative was aimed at “amplifying and strengthening” isolated efforts and a few longstanding collectives working on practices to improve life in semiarid areas.

Abel Manto, an inventor of technologies that he uses on his small farm in the state of Bahia, in Brazil’s semiarid ecoregion, holds up a watermelon while standing among the bean crop he is growing on top of an underground dam. The soil is on a waterproof plastic tarp that keeps near the surface the water that is retained by an underground dam. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The practices that represent the best knowledge of living in the drylands will be selected not so much for their technical aspects, but for the results achieved in terms of economic, ecological and social development, Barbosa explained to IPS in a telephone interview from the northeastern Brazilian city of Recife, where the headquarters of ASA are located.

After the process of systematisation of the best practices in each region is completed, harnessing traditional knowledge through exchanges between technicians and farmers, the next step will be “to build a methodology and the pedagogical content to be used in the training,” he said.

One result will be a platform for distance learning. The Federal Rural University of Pernambuco, also in Recife, will help with this.

Decentralised family or community water supply infrastructure, developed and disseminated by ASA, a network of 3,000 social organisations scattered throughout the Brazilian Northeast, is a key experience in this process.

In the 1.03 million square kilometres of drylands where 22 million Brazilians live, 38 percent in rural areas according to the 2010 census, 1.1 million rainwater harvesting tanks have been built so far for human consumption.

An estimated 350,000 more are needed to bring water to the entire rural population in the semiarid Northeast, said Barbosa.

But the most important aspect for agricultural development involves eight “technologies” for obtaining and storing water for crops and livestock. ASA, created in 1999, has helped install this infrastructure on 205,000 farms for this purpose and estimates that another 800 peasant families still need it.

There are farms that are too small to install the infrastructure, or that have other limitations, said Barbosa, who coordinates ASA’s One Land and Two Waters and native seed programmes.

The “calçadão” technique, where water runs down a sloping concrete terrace or even a road into a tank that has a capacity to hold 52,000 litres, is the most widely used system for irrigating vegetables.

A group of peasant farmers from El Salvador stand in front of one of the two rainwater tanks built in their village, La Colmena, in the municipality of Candelaria de la Frontera. The pond is part of a climate change adaptation project in the Central American Dry Corridor. Central American farmers like these and others from Brazil’s semiarid Northeast have exchanged experiences on solutions for living with lengthy droughts. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

And in Argentina’s Chaco region, 16,000-litre drinking water tanks are mushrooming.

But tanks for intensive and small farming irrigation are not suitable for the dry Chaco, where livestock is raised on large estates of hundreds of hectares, said Gabriel Seghezzo, executive director of Fundapaz, in an interview by phone with IPS from the city of Salta, capital of the province of the same name, one of those that make up Argentina’s Gran Chaco region.

“Here we need dams in the natural shallows and very deep wells; we have a serious water problem,” he said. “The groundwater is generally of poor quality, very salty or very deep.”

First, peasants and indigenous people face the problem of formalising ownership of their land, due to the lack of land titles. Then comes the challenge of access to water, both for household consumption and agricultural production.

“In some cases there is the possibility of diverting rivers. The Bermejo River overflows up to 60 km from its bed,” he said.

Currently there is an intense local drought, which seems to indicate a deterioration of the climate, urgently requiring adaptation and mitigation responses.

Reforestation and silvopastoral systems are good alternatives, in an area where deforestation is “the main conflict, due to the pressure of the advance of soy and corn monoculture and corporate cattle farming,” he said.

Mariano Barraza of the Wichí indigenous community (L) and Enzo Romero, a technician from the Fundapaz organisation, stand next to the tank built to store rainwater in an indigenous community in the province of Salta, in the Chaco ecoregion of northern Argentina, where there are six months of drought every year. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

More forests would be beneficial for the water, reducing evaporation that is intense due to the heat and hot wind, he added.

Of the “technologies” developed in Brazil, one of the most useful for other semiarid regions is the “underground dam,” Claus Reiner, manager of IFAD programmes in Brazil, told IPS by phone from Brasilia.

The underground dam keeps the surrounding soil moist. It requires a certain amount of work to dig a long, deep trench along the drainage route of rainwater, where a plastic tarp is placed vertically, causing the water to pool during rainy periods. A location is chosen where the natural layer makes the dam impermeable from below.

This principle is important for the Central American Dry Corridor, where “the great challenge is how to infiltrate rainwater into the soil, in addition to collecting it for irrigation and human consumption,” said Ismael Merlos of El Salvador, founder of Funde and director of its Territorial Development Area.

The CADC, which cuts north to south through Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, is defined not as semiarid, but as a sub-humid region, because it rains slightly more there, although in an increasingly irregular manner.

Some solutions are not viable because “75 percent of the farming areas in the Corridor are sloping land, unprotected by organic material, which makes the water run off more quickly into the rivers,” Merlos told IPS by phone from San Salvador.

“In addition, the large irrigation systems that we’re familiar with are not accessible for the poor because of their high cost and the expensive energy for the extraction and pumping of water, from declining sources,” he said.

The most viable alternative, he added, is making better use of rainwater, by building tanks, or through techniques to retain moisture in the soil, such as reforestation and leaving straw and other harvest waste on the ground rather than burning it as peasant farmers continue to do.

“Harmful weather events, which four decades ago occurred one to three times a year, now happen 10 or more times a year, and their effects are more severe in the Dry Zone,” Merlos pointed out.

Funde is a Salvadoran centre for development research and policy formulation that together with Fundapaz, four Brazilian organisations forming part of the ASA network and seven other Latin American groups had been cooperating since 2013, when they created the Latin American Semiarid Platform.

The Platform paved the way for the DAKI-Semiárido Vivo which, using 78 percent of its two million dollar budget, opened up new horizons for synergy among Latin America’s semiarid ecoregions. To this end, said Burneo, it should create a virtuous alliance of “good practices and public policies.”

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The post Semiarid Regions of Latin America Cooperate to Adapt to Climate appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By External Source
Aug 27 2020 (IPS-Partners)

The Pacific Partnership to End Violence Against Women and Girls (Pacific Partnership) programme has launched a poetry anthology publication comprising a collection of Pacific poems and artworks about human rights and social justice suitable for students in Years 7-13.

The publication titled Rising Tide has been produced as part of the Pacific Partnership’s Social Citizenship Education (SCE) Programme led by the Pacific Community’s (SPC) Regional Rights Resource Team (RRRT).

Working towards implementing human rights work in schools and communities, SPC RRRT, with the support of The University of the South Pacific’s (USP) Oceania Centre for Arts, Culture, and Pacific Studies (OCACPS), embarked on this project with editor, Dr Francis Mangubhai, a notable Fiji-born educator and researcher in applied linguistics to collate this poetry anthology which will be used as a teaching and learning resource for schools students and young people in the Pacific.

Acknowledging how changes occur in our Pacific communities like everywhere else in the world, the anthology is titled Rising Tide, due to climate change which is a social justice issue and a topic in which Pacific communities lead the world. It is also an expression that is used metaphorically – there is a rising tide of change occurring in our societies, including changes related to equality, inclusion, and ending violence against women. Young people who will be the next generation of adults, can, through their attitudes, values and voices, contribute to this rising tide of change.

Speaking at the launch of the anthology, the Head of Political, Trade and Information at the Delegation of the European Union for the Pacific, Galia Agisheva said, ‘Human rights and social justice are the core values of the European Union, which is founded on engagement to promote and protect human rights, democracy and rule of law. The EU views all human rights as universal, indivisible and interdependent.

As such, we are delighted to be able to collaborate with SPC RRRT, UN Women and the Pacific Islands Forum (PIFS) to support the anthology Rising Tide. This collection of the Pacific poems, will undoubtedly generate inspiration for the young generation for which it is aimed. This young generation is the rising tide of the Pacific, can become the true fundamental agents of change of attitudes – in their lives, in their families, in their communities, in their countries, and also globally’’.

According to RRRT Director, Miles Young, the ‘Rising Tide’ is an essential, evocative and unique anthology featuring Pacific poets and artists expressing their voice on social justice issues that exist in our Pacific societies.

“The poems in this book challenge us to think and take action on issues pertinent to the Pacific and globally such as inequalities, discrimination, injustices and violence against women, girls and children,” Young said.

He added that through this creative interplay of art, words and rhythm, it is hoped that Pacific children, who are the present and future of the region will be inspired to rise like the tide and create and model change that will make Pacific communities, just, safer and more peaceful.

USP’s Vice Chancellor and President, Professor Pal Ahluwalia said the University was proud to have partnered with SPC RRRT in the publishing of this anthology of Pacific Poetry on human rights and social justice through engagement of the Oceania Centre.

“This collaboration is significant not just as an example of CROP collaboration but also given the long history of Pacific Publications through the Institute of Pacific Studies, now Oceania Centre for Arts, Culture and Pacific Studies,” Professor Pal said.

He added that the collaboration is a reminder of the importance of arts and culture, and pacific-led and home grown arts and recognition of artists. This is something that the University has committed to, not just through the Oceania Centre but also through the School of Languages, Arts and Media’s Pacific Writing Forum which has encouraged emerging Pacific island writers through publication, readings and SLAMS.

“I believe that there are discussions for the collection to be made available through the USP Book Centre and I am very pleased to hear that an exhibition of the same title “Rising Tides” will continue over the next week at the Oceania Centre, featuring the artworks in the collection and select poems,” Professor Pal stated.

The poetry anthology is available on the SPC RRRT website here.

Source: Pacific Community (SPC)

The post Pacific Partnership launches human rights and social justice-themed poetry book for children appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Maisa Guajajara, march of indigenous women, Brasilia, 2019. Image courtesy Marquinho Mota/FAOR.

By Rosamaria Loures and Sarah Sax
NEW YORK, Aug 27 2020 (IPS)

On an early December morning last year in the state of Maranhão, Brazil, half a dozen members of the Indigenous Guajajara people packed their bags with food, maps and drone equipment to get ready for a patrol. They said goodbye to their children, uncertain when, or whether, they would see them again. Then, they hoisted their bags over their shoulders and set out to patrol a section of the 173,000 hectares (428,000 acres) of the primary rainforest they call home.

This is the Caru Indigenous Territory, where the Amazon peters out toward the northeastern coast of Brazil, and it contains some of the last stretches of intact, contiguous forest in Maranhão. It is also under increasing threat: this part of Brazil has been ravaged by some of the country’s highest rates of deforestation and land conflicts over the past decade.

Patrols led by Indigenous groups like theirs, known often by the moniker of “Forest Guardians,” have been instrumental in enforcing protections and preventing loggers from entering Indigenous territories.

Patrols and their enforcement tactics, which have been ramping up over the past decade, have also resulted in community members being threatened, attacked, and killed — as in the case of Paulo Paulino Guajajara last year, who was murdered in a neighboring Indigenous territory.

Called guerreiras da floresta in Portuguese, this is the name these women have given themselves. They are in many ways an embodiment of what policymakers, politicians and scholars around the world say is a necessary shift toward gender equality in environmental movements

But members of the patrol that set out through the forest last December don’t call themselves guardians; they prefer warriors. And they differ in one other notable aspect: they are all women.

“Why did we take the initiative? Because we are mothers. If we don’t act, there would be no forest standing,” said Paula Guajajara, one of the “women warriors of the forest,” in a public event last year.

Called guerreiras da floresta in Portuguese, this is the name these women have given themselves. They are in many ways an embodiment of what policymakers, politicians and scholars around the world say is a necessary shift toward gender equality in environmental movements.

And they are contributing not just womanpower to the patrols — they are also helping to diversify the tactics and forge new partnerships.

In Brazil in particular, where protecting intact forests is one of the cheapest, easiest and most effective solutions for combating climate change, the work they are doing is literally saving the world.

 

Creating a space and finding their voice

Actively patrolling their land for invaders is nothing new to the Guajajara; Indigenous people have more than 500 years of experience in this. Today, they use satellite technology and coordinate efforts with outside law enforcement to achieve their goals. This approach is relatively new, but its use has been on the rise in recent years.

“Across the country more of these groups are forming because of government inaction — or worse, because the government is actively trying to exploit their lands,” Sarah Shenker, campaign coordinator for Survival International’s Uncontacted Tribes team, said in an interview.

These groups are primarily men, although women are sometimes included in the patrols. But according to Shenker, as well as other experts interviewed for this article, to have “forest guardian” groups made up solely of women is unique.

The women warriors were formed six years ago, an offshoot of a program developed by Indigenous organizations and the Brazilian government and implemented by the Ministry of the Environment to enhance the territorial and cultural protection of Indigenous people, called Projeto Demonstrativo de Povos Indígenas (PDPI) in Portuguese.

At the time, the predominantly male forest guardians were attempting to end illegal logging and the sale of wood from their territory — a task that was proving extremely difficult. Seeing this, the women stepped in and formed their own group consisting originally of 32 women.

“In order not to let the project end, we, the Guajajara women, entered and took over the project,” Cícera Guajajara da Silva, one of the women warriors, said in an interview.

But the path to being taken seriously and treated as equals has been long.

“To seek partnership, we walked, talked, slept on the floor — all in order to seek improvement for our community,” Paula Guajajara said, recalling the initial difficulty in being heard and taken seriously inside and outside of the communities.

Their patience has paid off, and the women are quick to point out the support and close collaboration of the male forest guardians that has allowed them to combat the greater goal of stopping illegal logging. “Today we have the women warriors who work together with the forest guardians,” Paula Guajajara said. “We’ve already evicted a lot of loggers. If we hadn’t acted, there would be no forest standing.”

Many of the married women had already been acting independently, accompanying their husbands in some activities, according to Gilderlan Rodrigues da Silva, the Maranhão coordinator of the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI), a Catholic Church-affiliated organization, who has worked with the women warriors. “But, from the moment they created the women’s group, they gained strength and visibility,” he said in an interview. “Once they were formed, there was this very strong change. Both in the context of decreasing the invasions and waking up to the collective awareness to protect the territory.”

 

The direct and indirect impacts of greater inclusion

The results are clearly visible. In 2018, there was only 63 hectares (156 acres) of deforestation in the reserve, compared to 2016, when deforestation reached a high of 2,000 hectares (4,940 acres), according to Global Forest Watch. “The biggest achievement I see today in my village is because of the territorial protection, there are no loggers within our territory, and we managed to combat the sale of wood,” Cícera Guajajara da Silva said.

The women’s association has also been instrumental in connecting with other Indigenous groups similarly seeking to protect their territories, such as the Ka’apor, Awa-Guaja, and other Guajajara communities.

“There are 16 Indigenous territories in Maranhão — we have to seek unity to move forward in our struggle,” said Maísa Guajajara, one of the original women warriors. Through coordination with other women’s groups, like the Articulation of Indigenous Women of Maranhão (AMIMA), they were able to bring 200 Indigenous women from around the state together for the first time in 2017 to talk about various issues, including territorial protection, reforestation, and environmental education.

“This whole movement is extremely important because it shows this strength, and that women have a lot to contribute to the movement because they are part of the territory and are concerned with it, and with future generations,” Rodrigues da Silva told Mongabay.

They don’t just coordinate with other Indigenous groups; they also conduct training with neighboring communities about the importance of environmental conservation. “Not all women do surveillance work because we know it is dangerous work, but there are always some who do,” Maísa Guajajara said.

“The warriors generally do more surveillance activities outside the territory, we give lectures around our territory to talk about the invasions within our territory, and we raise awareness in the villages by talking about the importance of keeping nature standing.”

For example, the women warriors are partners in the Mãe D’água (Mother of Water) project that, together with the Brazilian NGO Fórum da Amazônia Oriental (FAOR), provides support for Indigenous women to strengthen their collective actions against ongoing deforestation and water pollution.

These actions include visits to nearby riverine communities in which the women warriors explain their ways of living, such as hunting and rituals, to their neighbors. For the women warriors, the more that their neighbors know about Guajajara culture, the more they will respect their actions to defend their territory.

 

Why women are key to forest conservation

In Brazil, and around the world, Indigenous women are increasingly at the forefront of environmental movements.

“The struggle of Indigenous women happens in different ways, day by day. If I am here today, I am the fruit of the women who came in front of me,” Taynara Caragiu Guajajara, a member of the Indigenous women’s collective AMIMA, said during a live online event in April. “In the context of the world we live in today, we have been conquering space inside and outside the community.

We Indigenous women have not always had that voice … but today the struggle is driven by Indigenous women, we are the ones who are in charge of the struggle.”

Women are increasingly leading the struggle on issues like climate change, but their voices are heard much less often then men’s — to the detriment of everyone. This is partially a byproduct of gender bias in journalism itself.

In 2015, of every four people interviewed, mentioned or seen in the news worldwide, only one was a woman, according to a report by the Global Media Monitoring Project, which releases its findings every five years. A closer look at the data shows that even when women are interviewed, it is for personal quotes, rather than for their expertise. It’s a figure that seems to have barely budged over the past few years, although some newsrooms are starting to actively change that.

Studies show that, in general, women receive greater exposure in newspaper sections led by female editors, as well as in newspapers whose editorial boards have higher female representation. But men are disproportionately represented from editors through to reporters, meaning that critical issues for women often go unreported. One of these areas is precisely the connection between conservation solutions and gender equality.

Women are disproportionately affected by climate change and environmental degradation. Mounting evidence shows that gender gaps and inequalities, such as inequitable land tenure and women’s reduced access to energy, water and sanitation facilities, negatively impact human and environmental well-being. The climate crisis will only make gender disparities worse.

Gender-based violence against women environmental human rights defenders in particular is on the rise, and increasingly normalized in both public and private spheres, making it more difficult for women to get justice. As Indigenous communities are often on the front lines of defending their territories, resources and rights from extractive projects and corporate interests, Indigenous women in particular face a two-headed beast of gender-based violence and racism.

“We fought to defend our territory against invasions and we sought this autonomy to fight for rights,” Taynara Caragiu Guajajara said in an interview. “Being a woman is difficult within the macho society, but being an Indigenous or black woman becomes even more difficult, because the prejudice is so great.”

Having more women involved in everything from environmental decision-making to climate politics benefits society at large. Higher female participation in policymaking increases the equality and effectiveness of climate policy interventions; evidence shows that high gender inequality is correlated with higher rates of deforestation, air pollution and other measures of environmental degradation.

Yet less than 1% of international philanthropy goes to women’s environmental initiatives, and women are continuously left out of decisions about land and environmental resources.

“The global community cannot afford to treat nature conservation and the fight for women’s equality as separate issues — they must be addressed together,” said Grethel Aguilar, the acting director-general of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), on international women’s day this year.

 

Why the fight for Indigenous territorial rights in Brazil matters to conservation

Tracking tree cover loss in Maranhão over the past two decades shows the crucial importance of Indigenous territories in protecting intact forest. Viewed from space, as the forest cover rapidly disappears, the outlines of Indigenous territories become more and more distinct.

“These Indigenous territories are islands of green in a sea of deforestation in one of the worst deforested places in Brazil,” Shenker said.

The Caru Indigenous Territory, for example, has seen 4% forest loss in comparison to the state of Maranhão, which has lost almost a quarter of its tree cover since 2000, according to Global Forest Watch data. Alongside the various other benefits that come with forest preservation, the forests in the Caru Indigenous Territory are also home to some of the last uncontacted Awá people; video of of two Awá men taken in the neighboring Araribóia Indigenous Territory made international headlines last year.

These patches of intact, tropical forests are also the crux of “natural climate solutions” protection. These solutions essentially entail stopping deforestation, improving management of forests, and restoring ecosystems, and could provide more than one-third of the cost-effective climate mitigation needed between now and 2030 to stabilize warming to below 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit).

According to one of the seminal papers on natural climate solutions, the single most effective approach in the tropics has proven to be actively protecting intact forests. Protecting intact forests offers twice as much of the cost-effective climate mitigation potential as the second best pathway, reforestation.

The Amazon as a whole plays a vital role in mitigating climate change by absorbing and storing carbon dioxide in its forests. When cut down, burned, or degraded through logging, the forest not only ceases to fulfill this function, but can become a source of carbon emissions.

“Protecting and or conserving intact ecosystems is the number-one priority,” said Kate Dooley, a research fellow at the Australian-German Climate & Energy College at the University of Melbourne, who has authored several papers on the potential of forests as a natural climate solution. “Way-way-way down the line is planting trees. And even then, it needs to be the right kind of trees.”

Of all the countries in the world with some kind of tropical rainforest, Brazil holds more mitigation potential than 71 of the 79 countries combined, according to a recent paper on this topic. It isn’t too hyperbolic, then, to say that groups like the women warriors are protecting humanity’s last best hope for a livable future.

“Plenty of research showing that forests are more intact in collectively held lands,” Dooley said. “With or without secure land tenure those lands are more intact and less degraded.” According to a report in 2018 by the Rights and Resources Initiative, almost 300 billion metric tons of carbon are stored in collectively managed lands across all forest biomes, and numerous studies have found that the best way to protect forests is to empower the people who live in them, granting them land rights and legal standing.

This is especially true for Indigenous-held lands in places like Brazil. Between 2000 and 2015, legally designated Indigenous territories in Brazil saw a tenth the amount of forest loss than non-Indigenous territories. Brazil is home to approximately 900,000 Indigenous citizens from 305 peoples, most of who live in Indigenous territories. Even so, more than half of the locations claimed by Indigenous groups have not yet received formal government recognition.

“Surveillance and inspection by Indigenous peoples is extremely important, as they are the ones who know the territory and the region best,” Rodrigues da Silva said. “On the other hand, unfortunately they are left alone, the Indigenous body responsible for inspection ends up not fulfilling the role and leaving only the Indigenous people.”

 

Prevailing amid growing threats

Despite an increasingly hostile government, the women warriors say they are committed to continuing their monitoring, surveillance and educational activities, and are hoping to inspire other groups to do the same.

“Today women act 100% in defense of the territory,” Paula Guajajara said. “Today we are serving as an example.“

But the work is daunting.

Brazil has the rights of Indigenous people written into its constitution of 1988, and is a signatory to the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention. Yet, the current administration of President Jair Bolsonaro has made it clear that Indigenous peoples won’t be allowed to comment on infrastructure projects affecting Indigenous territories in the Amazon. Bolsonaro’s administration has also proposed opening up Indigenous territories to extractive activities — something the constitution specifically prohibits.

Hundreds of people have been killed during the past decade in the context of conflicts over the use of land and resources in the Amazon — many by people involved in illegal logging — according to the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), a Catholic Church-affiliated nonprofit that follows land conflicts.

But perpetrators of violence in the Brazilian Amazon are rarely brought to justice.

Of the more than 300 killings that the CPT has registered since 2009, only 14 ultimately went to trial. Maranhão, where the Guajajara live, is among the most dangerous states for Indigenous people in Brazil: more attacks on Indigenous groups were reported here than anywhere else in 2016, according to data from the CPT.

The coronavirus poses an additional threat to Indigenous peoples throughout the Amazon and especially in Brazil, where the death rate from COVID-19 is much higher than the national rate.

“The surveillance expeditions are stopped by the pandemic, we are not doing surveillance, to care for everyone in the village,” Cícera Guajajara da Silva said. “Especially in order to protect our health, because nobody knows who the types of people [invaders] are inside the forest, they may even be infected with the virus, the invader himself can bring the virus to our territory, and that’s why we stopped [the expeditions], we are now only sheltering in the village.”

But despite the mounting difficulties, the women warriors are committed to continuing their work.

“We have the courage to defend our territory,” Maisa Guajajara said. “I am a woman and I will fight against all the threats that are in our territory.”

This article was first published on Mongabay. Read the original here.

 

The post Amazon ‘Women Warriors’ Show Gender Equality, Forest Conservation Go Hand in Hand appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Women and children are the primary victims of indoor air pollution in poor, rural areas of India. Credit: Athar Parvaiz/IPS

By Neha Jain
HONG KONG, Aug 27 2020 (IPS)

Usage of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) in rural Indian households has surged, partly due to India’s flagship clean cooking programme, but beneficiaries of the scheme consume less LPG than general customers per year, reports a new study.

Household air pollution from burning solid fuels such as coal, charcoal, wood, dung and agricultural waste poses a major environmental health risk. This is especially true for women and children in India, who have a disproportionately high mortality and disease burden due to air pollution, which is second only to malnutrition as a risk factor for disease, according to a Lancet Planetary Health report.

The Indian government’s clean cooking policy launched in 2016, the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY), provides subsidised LPG for the world’s largest clean cooking energy programme of its kind

The Indian government’s clean cooking policy launched in 2016, the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY), provides subsidised LPG for the world’s largest clean cooking energy programme of its kind — more than 80 million poor households had benefited by September 2019.

The study, published this month in the journal Environmental Research Communications, found that beneficiaries of the PMUY scheme consume on average almost two large LPG cylinders (14.2 kilograms each) less annually than their general customer counterparts, even after controlling for baseline socioeconomic and demographic differences.

“Wealth, education, caste, household size, and experience with LPG have been commonly suggested as reasons for the consumption gap between PMUY beneficiaries and general customers,” Carlos Gould, a doctoral candidate at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and lead author of the study, tells SciDev.Net. “But our findings suggest that there are other important factors driving the consumption disparity.”

Gould and his colleagues analysed two waves of a survey of over 8,500 households across six of India’s energy-poor states — Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal — to evaluate the drivers of LPG adoption and its use. The first wave was conducted prior to the scheme in 2015 while the second took place in 2018.

Laudable strides in the ownership of LPG connections from 2015 to 2018 were documented, partly owing to the PMUY scheme. In 2015, 75 per cent of households lacked LPG; this figure dropped to 45 per cent in 2018. Around 40 per cent of new LPG owners in 2018 were enrolled through PMUY.

 

The blue lines indicate LPG use as a cooking fuel in rural households states covered by the study, while grey lines show the rest of states in India over the same time period.
Image credit: Carlos F Gould, Xiaoxue Hou, Jennifer Richmond, Anjali Sharma, Johannes Urpelainen/Environmental Research Communications.

 

But in 2018, 83 per cent of the 9,072 survey participants continued to burn solid fuels, mainly firewood, for at least some of their cooking. This practice of using multiple fuel types, termed fuel stacking, has been noted in other studies.

One potential barrier to LPG consumption is the distance travelled to obtain cylinder refills. Fewer PMUY beneficiaries have refills delivered to their doorstep than general customers. An exploratory analysis showed that PMUY beneficiaries tended to live in remote villages.

“Increased travel distance may discourage individuals from obtaining LPG and encourage them to ration their existing LPG resources,” explains Gould. Consequently, polluting solid fuels that are easier to collect are likely used to fill the gaps.

“Efforts to reduce the distances required to get an LPG cylinder refill could increase LPG consumption among households that use both LPG and solid fuels,” Gould says, adding that a customer-centred policy design process focusing on improving usability could be considered.

Gould says that greater support should be given to households that do not use LPG often and continue to use solid fuels. Among other measures, the authors suggest increasing the number of local distributors to shorten the travel distance to acquire refills in remote rural areas.

Ajay Pillarisetti, assistant professor of environmental health at Emory University in the US, says that the results are “reassuring” as numerous studies have reported that the consumption levels of PMUY customers are lower than those of general customers.

He stresses that barriers to the exclusive usage of LPG must be identified and overcome to achieve and maintain healthy behaviours.

Future work, says Pillarisetti, should target supply constraints such as by “provision of a low-cost second cylinder connections of either five or 13 kilograms, more broad networks of LPG providers including potential ‘mini’ distributors”. Linkages with other social welfare schemes could target additional subsidies to the rural poor, he adds.

This story was originally published by SciDev.Net

The post Firing Up India’s Clean Cooking Fuel Plan appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Picture courtesy: Fridays for Future.

By Moutushi Sengupta
NEW DELHI, Aug 26 2020 (IPS)

India ranks third in terms of absolute levels of carbon emissions after China and the United States. In a business as usual scenario, by 2030, emission levels are predicted to reach more than 4.4 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (GTCO2) equivalent of greenhouse gas—up from 3 GTCO2 today—overtaking the United States as the second-largest emitting country.

At the same time, India’s per capita energy consumption levels are about one-third of the world average and in 2018, central government data indicated that 17 percent of households did not have access to electricity.

To meet the dual objectives of environmental sustainability and economic growth, the path of development must focus on being clean and green. This is more of a necessity than a matter of choice for the country.

We, at the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation, have been working on climate change in India for the last five years and we have seen this space evolve considerably. Several international development agencies have come forward to support policymaking and action aimed at enabling India to achieve its climate goals.

There has also been a substantial increase in the number of research institutions working on issues related to climate change mitigation. Moreover, the role of market-linked interventions has expanded considerably, as evidenced from the rapid spread of distributed renewable energy networks, addressing issues around access and efficiency.

“…people need to understand climate change as a narrative, containing their own language and shaped by their own values and experience. Most climate change language, however, is dry, technical or too based in the campaign culture…”

We are also seeing citizens becoming more concerned about climate change and wanting to do more. All this represents significant positive developments, but the sheer magnitude of the challenge requires us to do much more.

Before we analyse what can be done, it’s important to call out for whom this can (and needs to) be done. All the measures we take in our work on climate change need to first be rooted and built within the values of equity and social justice.

Our efforts to create a clean and green future can be fully endorsed only if and when they become a reality for everyone in India, including those households and marginalised communities that currently exist on the fringes, or below the boundaries set by official poverty lines. This will require special attention at the stages of design and execution of climate change policies and practices.

As we move forward to strengthen action on climate change mitigation, here are four critical areas—each worth a separate study, in my opinion—that philanthropies, nonprofits, policymakers, and corporates need to consider.

 

1. Engage new champions for climate change

It is critical to bring in new actors to expand and deepen the climate movement in India. So far, research and knowledge generation on ways to mitigate the adverse impact of climate change has remained largely limited to a small group of think tanks located in and around Delhi—the policymaking centre for India.

These think tanks have closely engaged with policymakers at the centre to establish a framework of policies that have pushed India to invest in renewable sources of energy.

Going forward, the country needs sub-national level actors, beyond the public infrastructure, to effectively execute the centre’s renewable energy policies, and where necessary, refine them to make these policies more contextual.

State-based think tanks, progressive corporate houses, social opinion-makers including youth leaders, activists, environmental and social scientists, and research institutions must feature prominently among potential partners to take this discourse forward. Identifying and engaging champions in these institutions and in communities, will provide the much-needed tailwind to India’s mitigation movement.

In the recent past, we have seen a set of new champions adding their heft to the movement. Notable examples include Extinction Rebellion, the Fridays for Future movement, and the People’s Climate Movement where youth leaders are taking to the streets to shine a light on the issue.

 

2. Support technology innovations for clean energy adoption

The BP Energy Outlook 2019 mentions, “India’s share of total global primary energy demand is set to roughly double to 11% by 2040 [from 2017 as a base], underpinned by strong population growth and economic development.”

To fulfil its growing requirement for energy while meeting its climate mitigation goals, the country will need to identify and adopt technology innovations that address both these objectives.

Work is underway in research and development centres that the government has established, including in national institutions such as the Indian Institute of Technologies, the National Institute of Solar Energy, the National Institute of Wind Energy, and the National Institute of Renewable Energy, to test and develop technologies that will enable faster adoption of clean energy and/or reduce energy consumption through higher levels of efficiency.

As a key member of the global Mission Innovation (MI), India has several successful innovations to showcase. For example, with support from the MI secretariat, in 2018, Swedish company, Aili Innovation, collaborated with Tata Trusts to develop efficient solar-driven water pumps for small-scale farmers in India. Replacing diesel pumps, the solar pump system provides water for irrigation, and power for lighting and charging of smaller devices such as cell phones or fans.

Recognising the importance of technological innovations in the clean energy space, several private incubators have also come forward to nurture ideas and interventions that rely on state-of-the-art technologies. Incubators such as Social Alpha, Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship, and Villgro have supported early-stage ideas and interventions that use technology as the key tool for disruption.

However, while there are many promising clean energy technology options available today, most are too expensive to access, lack the technical reliability needed for widespread deployment, or both.

Currently, comparatively high costs, inadequate supply chain support, and insufficient operating experience constrain the deployment of these technology options at the scale needed for climate change mitigation. Future funding strategies should focus on resolving these constraints to enable these technologies to reach the right audiences.

 

3. Strengthen support from domestic funders to step in and expand this movement

Action on climate mitigation by nonprofits in India is currently largely supported by the international philanthropic community. To sustain the movement, it is essential that domestic funders come forward and strengthen the mitigation efforts that are so acutely required.

They can help by designing and executing interventions—at an ecosystem-and institution-level—that aim to expand the funding pool for nonprofit players. Establishment of the India Climate Collaborative is an exciting development in this respect.

Over the last few months, the collaborative has managed to leverage commitment and support from a diverse group of domestic philanthropists in providing a strong push for action against climate change.

While philanthropic support has helped support a range of research organisations, most climate think tanks are still in the early stages of evolution. If the discourse on climate change mitigation has to sustain beyond the life of individual projects, building capacity is critical.

This requires continued support to these institutions to define their purpose; running audits of existing technical, analytical, and behavioural skills; identifying gaps; and finding creative solutions.

 

4. Build, share, and promote local narratives

To quote a 2017 study jointly conducted by Climate Outreach, Climate Action Network- International, and Climate Action Network-South Asia, “…people need to understand climate change as a narrative, containing their own language and shaped by their own values and experience. Most climate change language, however, is dry, technical or too based in the campaign culture…”

There is available evidence to indicate growing levels of awareness and concern around climate change in India. For instance, results from a recent 12-country-based survey by IPSOS indicate that there is, “widespread support for government actions to prioritise climate change in the economic recovery after COVID-19 with 65 percent globally agreeing that this is important.”

In India, 81 percent of participants from the same study said that they would support a ‘green’ recovery package, much higher than the global average of 65 percent. The survey provides interesting insights on behavioural choices that individuals have either made or are willing to make, in support of their conviction that a lot more needs to be done to reduce the adverse impact of climate change in the future.

Going forward, helping create narratives based on local values, norms, and customs and where possible, local languages, will prompt many more to take personal responsibility for change.

 

We need to act now

The good news is that most likely, the tipping point is yet to be reached, affording us a tiny window of opportunity to take decisive action. The not so good news is that the window seems to be rapidly disappearing. It is no longer a matter of choice on whether we should attend to global warming or not. The question forward is how hard and how persistently can we push on the pedal to achieve our objectives?

 

Moutushi Sengupta heads the India office of the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation

 

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

The post What Will It Take to Prioritise Climate Change? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Credit: Barinedum AGARA/IOM Lagos

By Chylian Azuh
LAGOS, Aug 26 2020 (IPS)

‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away’ is a common and seemingly harmless saying. But what happens when commonly eaten foods like pepper, garlic and ginger are wrongfully said to prevent COVID-19? What can we do to fight harmful misinformation?

During the first two weeks of the lockdown in Lagos, Nigeria, a lot of people were afraid of contracting the virus. They wore gloves, face masks and practised physical distancing as instructed by the World Health Organization (WHO).

For some, the conspiracy theories being peddled on social media and among neighbourhood discussions are the reasons for the disbelief in the virus’s existence

By the third week of the outbreak, people seemed to fall into two categories; those who believed in the existence of the virus and followed all instructions to combat its spread, and those who didn’t believe the virus exists or believed that it exists in some parts of the world but not in Nigeria. This second category was mostly responsible for the spread of myths and misinformation about the pandemic.

Tosin Wurola, a foodstuff trader in her early fifties at Ojodu Berger, Lagos, explained to me that if she does not see a COVID-19 positive case in her circle, then the virus does not exist. Sadly, she has probably succeeded in convincing most of her customers to think the same. This type of misinformation is common and could explain why there is little to no physical distancing observed in the markets.

For some, the conspiracy theories being peddled on social media and among neighbourhood discussions are the reasons for the disbelief in the virus’s existence. Peace Ejechi, one of my neighbours, who runs a provision shop at Ojodu Berger, in Lagos, said the lockdown was for the government to successfully install the 5G network and not to flatten the curve.

Another myth is that the virus cannot survive in Nigeria due to the nature of the Nigerian weather. Nigeria is a tropical climate and has its annual average temperature at 25.7 degrees Celsius. A returned migrant, Teniola Olatunji, who lives in Ogba, Lagos told me:

“It’s possible that the virus reached Nigeria, but I am sure it is gone for good. If it is in the country, there’s no need to worry or fret, because our weather is too hot for the symptoms to manifest.”

This cannot be further from the truth. According to WHO, COVID-19 spreads irrespective of the temperatures in the region. By mid-June, there were over 15,000 confirmed cases of the virus in Nigeria with about 4,800 recoveries. Several survivors have shared accounts of their experiences at treatment centres and isolation wards in the country.

There remains a belief that certain concoctions prevent and cure COVID-19. During my last awareness raising campaign at the General Market, Ipodo, Ikeja, some women shared home-made remedies, such as drinking alcohol or blended ginger and garlic, which they believe has kept them safe during the pandemic.

Bola Ibiyemi, a trader at Ipodo Market Ikeja said, “I’ve been cooking my food with ginger and garlic, using face mask and maintaining physical distance.”

While these foods have tremendous nutritional and health benefits, there is no proven research to show that they can cure or prevent COVID-19. Self-medication is a real problem practised by many. Some families used herbs and unprescribed malaria drugs to keep the infection at bay. This was not part of WHO’s instructions. Sadly, they didn’t stop at using these substances but shared false information with everyone who wanted to know more.

Unverified information continues to spread quickly in Nigeria as with most countries because of fear and reluctance to fact check information. The United Nations recently set up ‘Verified’, its fact checking initiative to tackle the spread of misinformation and fake news on COVID-19, increasing access and dissemination of trusted and accurate information. The Verified campaign provides reliable information about COVID-19.

However, there is still misinformation lingering in many communities. This is why offline and online campaigns work effectively hand-in-hand. Initiatives such as Migrants as Messengers (MaM), a regional peer-to-peer programme is carrying out activities through radio, television, in markets and other public spaces to raise awareness of COVID-19 among communities.

As a MaM volunteer, I recently participated in a campaign in Ipodo market, Ikeja Lagos to inform women market traders about the prevention of COVID-19. I had the privilege to speak with women in my neighbourhood on the importance of following WHO’s instructions on preventive measures.

As a whole, these initiatives can help tackle misinformation in Nigeria. It is crucial that those spreading these myths and misinformation desist from doing so to avoid putting the lives of those they love in great danger; the first recipients of this information are usually family and friends. People need to check any information about COVID-19 before believing it or passing it on.

For reliable information about the virus, visit the regional West Africa website on coronavirus

 

Chylian Azuh is a writer and public speaker from Nigeria who trained as a MaM volunteer in 2018. She is the founder of ‘Female Returnee Forum,’ an organisation for female returnees which supports a large network of female returnees involved in awareness raising about unsafe migration and challenging the stigma often faced by migrants who have not reached their intended destination and return to their place or origin. She informs young people about safe migration and volunteers with the ‘Stop Trata’ project to produce awareness campaign videos highlighting the dangers of irregular migration and human trafficking.

Chylian is an entrepreneur with a background in architecture. Upon her return, she was reintegrated into the soft drink business under the EU-IOM Joint Initiative, and now works in the fashion industry, selling hair and bags.

The post Standing Up to Myths and Misinformation in Nigeria During the Pandemic appeared first on Inter Press Service.