Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

Women ragpickers in Delhi scavenging through a pile of refuse for recyclable material. Credit: Dharmendra Yadav/IPS

By External Source
NEW YORK, Jan 21 2020 (IPS)

Inequality is growing for more than 70 per cent of the global population, exacerbating the risks of divisions and hampering economic and social development. But the rise is far from inevitable and can be tackled at a national and international level, says a flagship study released by the UN on Tuesday.

The World Social Report 2020, published by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), shows that income inequality has increased in most developed countries, and some middle-income countries – including China, which has the world’s fastest growing economy.

The challenges are underscored by UN chief António Guterres in the foreword, in which he states that the world is confronting “the harsh realities of a deeply unequal global landscape”, in which economic woes, inequalities and job insecurity have led to mass protests in both developed and developing countries.

Income inequality has increased in most developed countries, and some middle-income countries - including China, which has the world’s fastest growing economy

“Income disparities and a lack of opportunities”, he writes, “are creating a vicious cycle of inequality, frustration and discontent across generations.”

 

‘The one per cent’ winners take (almost) all

The study shows that the richest one per cent of the population are the big winners in the changing global economy, increasing their share of income between 1990 and 2015, while at the other end of the scale, the bottom 40 per cent earned less than a quarter of income in all countries surveyed.

One of the consequences of inequality within societies, notes the report, is slower economic growth. In unequal societies, with wide disparities in areas such as health care and education, people are more likely to remain trapped in poverty, across several generations.

Between countries, the difference in average incomes is reducing, with China and other Asian nations driving growth in the global economy. Nevertheless, there are still stark differences between the richest and poorest countries and regions: the average income in North America, for example, is 16 times higher than that of people in Sub-Saharan Africa.

 

Four global forces affecting inequality

The report looks at the impact that four powerful global forces, or megatrends, are having on inequality around the world: technological innovation, climate change, urbanization and international migration.

Whilst technological innovation can support economic growth, offering new possibilities in fields such as health care, education, communication and productivity, there is also evidence to show that it can lead to increased wage inequality, and displace workers.

Rapid advances in areas such as biology and genetics, as well as robotics and artificial intelligence, are transforming societies at pace. New technology has the potential to eliminate entire categories of jobs but, equally, may generate entirely new jobs and innovations.

For now, however, highly skilled workers are reaping the benefits of the so-called “fourth industrial revolution”, whilst low-skilled and middle-skilled workers engaged in routine manual and cognitive tasks, are seeing their opportunities shrink.

 

Opportunities in a crisis

As the UN’s 2020 report on the global economy showed last Thursday, the climate crisis is having a negative impact on quality of life, and vulnerable populations are bearing the brunt of environmental degradation and extreme weather events. Climate change, according to the World Social Report, is making the world’s poorest countries even poorer, and could reverse progress made in reducing inequality among countries.

If action to tackle the climate crisis progresses as hoped, there will be job losses in carbon-intensive sectors, such as the coal industry, but the “greening” of the global economy could result in overall net employment gains, with the creation of many new jobs worldwide.

For the first time in history, more people live in urban than rural areas, a trend that is expected to continue over the coming years. Although cities drive economic growth, they are more unequal than rural areas, with the extremely wealthy living alongside the very poor.

The scale of inequality varies widely from city to city, even within a single country: as they grow and develop, some cities have become more unequal whilst, in others, inequality has declined.

 

Migration a ‘powerful symbol of global inequality’

The fourth megatrend, international migration, is described as both a “powerful symbol of global inequality”, and “a force for equality under the right conditions”.

Migration within countries, notes the report, tends to increase once countries begin to develop and industrialize, and more inhabitants of middle-income countries than low-income countries migrate abroad.

International migration is seen, generally, as benefiting both migrants, their countries of origin (as money is sent home) and their host countries.

In some cases, where migrants compete for low-skilled work, wages may be pushed down, increasing inequality but, if they offer skills that are in short supply, or take on work that others are not willing to do, they can have a positive effect on unemployment.

 

Harness the megatrends for a better world

Despite a clear widening of the gap between the haves and have-nots worldwide, the report points out that this situation can be reversed. Although the megatrends have the potential to continue divisions in society, they can also, as the Secretary-General says in his foreword, “be harnessed for a more equitable and sustainable world”. Both national governments and international organizations have a role to play in levelling the playing field and creating a fairer world for all.

Reducing inequality should, says the report, play a central role in policy-making. This means ensuring that the potential of new technology is used to reduce poverty and create jobs; that vulnerable people grow more resilient to the effects of climate change; cities are more inclusive; and migration takes place in a safe, orderly and regular manner.

Three strategies for making countries more egalitarian are suggested in the report: the promotion of equal access to opportunities (through, for example, universal access to education); fiscal policies that include measures for social policies, such as unemployment and disability benefits; and legislation that tackles prejudice and discrimination, whilst promoting greater participation of disadvantaged groups.

While action at a national level is crucial, the report declares that “concerted, coordinated and multilateral action” is needed to tackle major challenges affecting inequality within and among countries.

The report’s authors conclude that, given the importance of international cooperation, multilateral institutions such as the UN should be strengthened and action to create a fairer world must be urgently accelerated.

The UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which provides the blueprint for a better future for people and the planet, recognizes that major challenges require internationally coordinated solutions, and contains concrete and specific targets to reduce inequality, based on income.

This story was originally published by UN News

The post UN Report: Rising Inequality Affects More Than 70% of the Globe appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Colorized scanning electron micrograph of MERS virus particles (yellow) both budding and attached to the surface of infected VERO E6 cells (blue). Credit: NIAID

By Ifeanyi Nsofor
ABUJA, Jan 21 2020 (IPS)

The coronavirus outbreak — which began in Wuhan, China, and causes a pneumonia-like illness — is raging across Asia, infecting close to 300 people and killing four. It was initially known to be transmitted from animals to human, and was just confirmed to be transmitted from human to human.

The rapid nature of its origin and speed in transmission reminds us that national security is threatened when a pathogen can travel from a remote village to major cities on all continents in 36 hours. Therefore, global health security should be given the same priority as national security.

The history of infectious disease outbreak is not new. In 1918, the Spanish flu pandemic infected about 500 million people globally (a third of world’s population then) and caused the death of 20 million to 50 million victims.

The 2014 -2015 Ebola outbreak in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone infected 28,000 and killed over 11,000. By the end of the West Africa Ebola outbreak, the three nations lost a combined GDP of $2.8 billion.

Infectious diseases continue to be a huge problem. Of recent, Ebola and measles outbreaks in DRC have killed 2236 and over 6,000 respectively.

This Corona virus outbreak is happening during the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday as millions travel to visit with loved ones in country and travel abroad, making the current threat a global one. Most urgently, all countries must collaborate to contain this outbreak now

The ease of travel in today’s global community means the world must always be prepared for disease outbreaks. It is no longer whether an infectious disease outbreak would happen but when.

Globally, 100,000 aircraft carry millions of passengers from one city to the other daily. A visit to flightradar24.com puts this in perspective and shows how interconnected countries are.

International borders really do not protect against infectious disease outbreaks. This is why governments, national public health institutes, communities, private sector and global health actors must act rapidly to contain this outbreak and others happening elsewhere.

Also, processes must be put in place to prevent future outbreaks. These are four interventions to ensure response and prevention happen.

 

First, increased screening at international borders using computerized thermal cameras should be intensified. No one should be exempt from this screening no matter how highly placed they are.

In 2015, the global health community learnt the hard way the dangers of giving preference to diplomats in the way Patrick Sawyer moved freely from Monrovia to Lagos despite being already infected with Ebola.

That oversight led to a short Ebola outbreak in Nigeria which could have gotten out of hand if not for quick response mounted by Nigerian authorities and other global health organisations. Beyond international air borders, most countries have very porous and poorly manned land borders.

To overcome this challenge, communities along these borders must be properly informed about this current outbreak, its presenting symptoms and who to call when they suspect individual have symptoms.

 

Second, prepare for the spread of fake news on infectious diseases and be proactive about pushing out the right information to counter it. Community education is very important, especially at this time when the infection is raging. People are scared and can easily fall prey to fake news.

National public health institutes must take charge and disseminate the right information through different channels including TV, radio, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp and community engagements.

The experience with the spread of fake news during the Ebola outbreak in Nigeria in 2015 led to people bathing with salt water because they believed it would stop them from getting infected with Ebola. That fake news led to deaths of two victims.

 

Third, governments in consultation with national public health institutes should designate specialized centers for handling suspected cases. At the same time, they should provide the necessary drugs for treatment too.

These must be coordinated with staff at ports of entry. There should be no confusion about where to take a suspect case. If a suspected case presents at hospitals, there must be plans to immediately direct the individual to the right part of the hospital to prevent the spread of the infection.

In 2015, while evaluating the African Union response to Ebola in West Africa, I heard firsthand the harmful effect of having hospital security workers who are not well informed. At Saint John of God Hospital in Port Loko District, Sierra Leone, the wrong handling of an Ebola case by a security officer led to deaths of 10 health workers.

 

Fourth, all governments must invest in epidemic preparedness. Although it is not cheap, it is cost effective. For instance, Nigeria Centre for Disease Control estimates that it would cost 40 cents per person for Nigeria to be prepared for epidemics.

This amounts to $80 million for a population of 200 million. Not doing this and a pandemic occurs, Nigeria would lose $9.6 billion in GDP annually, according to the International Working Group on Financing Preparedness.

Every country must have a financed plan and ensure that their national public health institute gets the required funds to lead prevention, detection and response to infectious diseases. Infectious diseases spare no one.

As the World Economic Forum holds in Davos, Switzerland, business leaders must discuss ways of supporting governments to fund epidemic preparedness. It makes business sense and will protect their investments.

This Corona virus outbreak is happening during the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday as millions travel to visit with loved ones in country and travel abroad, making the current threat a global one. Most urgently, all countries must collaborate to contain this outbreak now.

 

The post Why the Coronavirus Should Worry Us All appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Dr. Ifeanyi Nsofor is a medical doctor, the CEO of EpiAFRIC, Director of Policy and Advocacy for Nigeria Health Watch

The post Why the Coronavirus Should Worry Us All appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Ms. Marlene Schiappa. Credit: UN Women/Antoine Tardy

By External Source
Jan 21 2020 (IPS)

Marlène Schiappa, Minister of State for Gender Equality and the Fight against Discrimination in France, attended the 25th year Regional Review Meeting of the Beijing Platform for Action for the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) Region last month. She highlighted why this meeting is key for advancing the gender equality agenda and the priorities for the Generation Equality Forum in 2020, a global gathering for gender equality, convened by UN Women and co-chaired by France and Mexico.

Why is the Beijing+25 Regional Review Meeting important for advancing the gender equality agenda?

We are here in Geneva in order to dedicate some time to working together, which is essential. France is pleased and proud to host the Generation Equality Forum in July 2020, which will mark the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action. This will be an opportunity for us to strengthen the commitments that were made at the time [in 1995], but also to make new commitments with concrete gender equality goals through coalitions of states.

For this meeting, what is your message to the governments and decision-makers here and also to the civil society activists, specifically the youth?

I would urge governments to engage in the Generation Equality Forum under the aegis of UN Women, because no country in the world has succeeded in achieving gender equality in all areas, whether it may be equal pay, gender-based violence, sharing of domestic tasks, or combating female genital mutilation and forced marriages.

You’re co-chairing the Generation Equality Forum in July 2020. What are your expectations for this forum, what would you like to achieve?

No country can achieve gender equality on its own, which is why I believe deeply in a collective commitment to women’s rights in the form of multilateralism, which is the rationale of the feminist diplomacy led by France. I would urge all countries to engage in the coalitions of states of the Generation Equality Forum and also to engage in the Biarritz Partnership launched by President Emmanuel Macron as part of the French presidency of the G7.

It is a partnership that aims to review the best gender equality laws in the world. We propose that states commit to implementing Appendix 1, which calls for an innovative new law for gender equality in each country. France has made this commitment and we will, therefore, work to promote the economic empowerment of women.

In your opinion, what are the gender equality and women’s rights priorities for this region, and in the broader sense for Generation Equality?

First of all, I would say that the right to control one’s body is a right that must be reaffirmed. The issue of sexual and reproductive rights seems to me to be paramount. I think it’s very complicated for a woman to be able to live her life freely if she doesn’t have control over her own body.

Secondly, the fight against gender-based and sexual violence is the priority of the President’s five-year term. Similarly, I think it is difficult to fight for equal pay if women fear physical harm in the street, when they travel, and even when they go home.

Women are victims of domestic violence and are beaten or demeaned by the person with whom they live. It is very difficult in these cases for women to have the necessary mindsets to develop their careers.

Therefore, this seems to me to be a top priority of the feminist struggle to fight for the integrity of women’s bodies against sexual violence. And then I think it’s important to fight for women’s economic empowerment, and for their ability to start businesses all over the world.

We call on all states to ratify and implement the provisions of the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence [also known as the Istanbul Convention] and its mechanisms to protect women, but also to enable women to become tomorrow’s leaders and to create and manage companies, in particular through quotas, which is a proven system in France.

I know that we are sometimes told that women are not going to be nominated just because they are women. For generations, we have been nominating men just because they are men.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has calculated that if we do not have a coercive policy, we will achieve gender equality in the year 2234. With UN Women’s support, we have the ambition to ensure that by 2020, we create the first generation that understands the importance of equality between women and men all over the world.

Courtesy UN Women

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Nomcebo Mkhaliphi posing with girls from the Kwaluseni Infantry Primary School in Eswatini. Courtesy: Nomcebo Mkhaliphi

By Mantoe Phakathi
MBABANE , Jan 21 2020 (IPS)

When 14-year-old Nomcebo Mkhaliphi first noticed the blood discharged from her vagina, she was shocked. Confused, she turned to her older sisters for advice.

“My sisters told me that they were experiencing the same every month and that they used fabric, toilet paper and newspapers as sanitary wear,” recalls the now 45-year-old Mkhaliphi. She had to follow suit and use these materials because she had no money to buy sanitary pads.

Mkhaliphi and her four siblings were single-handedly raised by their father in a poor household in rural Makhonza, south of Eswatini. Mkhaliphi’s parents had separated when she was nine, so conversations about menstruation were never had, both at home and school. 

Recounting her experience with periods invokes sad emotions for Mkhaliphi. She had three significant moments at school where her periods put her at the centre of gossip, bullying and humiliation.

At some point, she stained her tunic, followed by other incidents where a toilet paper and a newspaper she wore in the place of a sanitary pad fell to the ground after getting soaked, right in front of other learners.

“These incidents lowered my self-esteem because other students used my experience to bully me,” says the mother of two boys and a girl.

Instead of dropping out of school like other girls in a similar situation, Mkhaliphi persevered until she completed her high school education. Today, she volunteers her time to teach young girls and boys at schools and communities about menstruation, particularly the stigma associated with periods. She includes boys so that they stop seeing periods as a laughing matter but a natural occurrence for their female peers.

“There’s a lot of stigma associated with menstruation. When a woman is on her periods, she is said to be in ‘cleansing’ something that portrays her as dirty. That’s why in other families a menstruating woman is not allowed to cook, while in some churches they’re not allowed to come closer to the pastor,” Mkhaliphi tells IPS, adding that some churches order women to sit at the back and not participate in the service.

What’s worse, it’s taboo to talk about menstruation because in the Swati culture it has always been portrayed as a secret. This small landlocked southern African nation is the continent’s last monarchy, with a population of just under 1.4 million.

Through her talks, Mkhaliphi is using her story to end the stigma associated with periods and building confidence among girls by giving them the right information about their sexual reproductive health. She also gives talks to primary school children because, she says, it is important to talk to them while they are young.

“Girls open up to me about their own sad stories once they hear about my experience,” she says.

One such girl is Nomthandazo* (14) from a public school in Eswatini’s industrial town, Matsapha, who said she used to abscond from school when on her period because one day the newspaper she was wearing fell off and she was became the target for ridicule at school for a long time.

With no money to buy pads, she pretended to be going to school and would hide from her parents for about a week until her period was over.

“I now use rags. They take long to dry but they’re better than newspapers,” she tells IPS.

Some parents fail to have a conversation with their children about periods. For instance, Temphilo* from rural Sihhoye told her stepmother as soon as she saw blood, thinking that there was something wrong with her. Indeed, there was, according to her stepmother, who beat her up and accused her of having sex.

“I bled for almost a month and she didn’t even take me to hospital because she felt I brought it on myself,” Temphilo tells IPS. After that first irregular period, her periods followed the regular course of lasting 4 to 5 days.

But it took Mkhaliphi to assure her that menstruation is a natural thing that occurs to every woman and she should not be ashamed of herself because of it. So far, Mkhaliphi has reached over 3,000 girls since she started this initiative after she was retrenched from her work as a legal secretary in 2016.

“I get invited to many places where teachers and community leaders ask me to speak to learners and the youth in communities,” she says. “But it’s difficult to reach out to everyone because of lack of financial resources.”

Mkhaliphi has taken the conversation to Twitter, @nomcebo_mkhali where she now raises awareness. Twitter has exposed her to individual donors who contribute pads and a bit of money to support the girls. Given the number of places to visit and girls from poor backgrounds, she needs more assistance.

#Girls deserve #Menstruation dignity #StopTheStigma #Pads @umbrios @YonWumman @Passie_Kracht @TJVRD @RaeUK @Anyechka pic.twitter.com/x2XMou14KJ

— Nomcebo Mkhaliphi (@nomcebo_mkhali) 6 December 2019

“It’s sad that most girls are still using unsafe materials which are not only inadequate for protection but can also lead to diseases,” she says.

The 2017 Eswatini Annual Education Census recorded that 220 girls absconded from school at primary level although the education was free. Reasons were not given for the dropouts but Mkhaliphi says it could partly be lack of sanitary wear.   

“Building the girl’s confidence is not good enough if they won’t have access to the things that will preserve their dignity when they’re menstruating,” says Mkhaliphi.

Chairperson of the Ministry of Health Portfolio Committee in the House of Assembly, Mduduzi Dlamini, concurs with Mkhaliphi.

“It doesn’t make sense that sanitary wear is not provided for free both at school and at community centres,” says Dlamini.

A participant at the recent 25th International Conference on Population Development (ICPD25) in Nairobi, Kenya, he promised that the provision of free sanitary wear to girls was one of the issues that he would push for discussion in parliament.

“What I learnt from the conference is that when girls lack toiletries, like pads, they become vulnerable to sugar daddies who buy them these things,” Dlamini tells IPS. “Some girls end up getting infected with HIV by sugar daddies all because they didn’t have access to pads. Government needs to address this issue.”   

According to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) “women are disproportionally affected by HIV” in Eswatini – 120,000 of the 190,000 adults living with HIV are women. In addition, “new HIV infections among young women aged 15–24 years were more than quadruple those among young men: 2400 new infections among young women, compared to fewer than 500 among young men”.

So far, Kenya and Botswana are the only African governments on track to offer free sanitary wear by law. 

*Names withheld to protect their identity.

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School feeding programme in Togo. Credit: WFP/João Cavalcante

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Wan Manan Muda
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Jan 21 2020 (IPS)

If well planned, coordinated and implemented, a government funded school feeding programme for all primary school children can be progressively transformative. Such a programme, involving government departments and agencies working together, can benefit schoolchildren, their families, farmers and public health, now and in the future.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Such a scheme should comprehensively supply adequate food for all, especially schoolchildren, and improve their nutrition, thus overcoming hunger and malnutrition besides improving the children’s physical and mental development, and school learning, attendance, participation and performance.

School meals, well planned by nutritionists and dieticians familiar with local food practices and alternatives, using safe food grown by family farmers free of toxic agrochemicals, and hygienically prepared, will significantly improve the nutrition, health and wellbeing of the children.

 

3-pronged approach

A comprehensive and ambitious three-pronged approach to school feeding would go a long way to address contemporary malnutrition, of both micronutrient deficiencies of minerals and vitamins as well as overweight, obesity and other diet-related non-communicable diseases (NCDs).

Nutrition education for schoolchildren must promote an adequate, balanced and comprehensive understanding of health and nutrition. Teachers and the media will need to effectively share better knowledge of nutrition, health and wellbeing, and related food behaviours, dietary lifestyles and healthy living.

The programme should enable children to learn, from an early age, about food, its production, safety, preparation, consumption and effects on the human body.

Menus served can be rotated every two to four weeks to enhance dietary variety. Strict implementation and enforcement can help ensure that only healthy food is available in schools.

Learning from relevant experiences everywhere, good implementation and appropriate enforcement can also inculcate values of responsibility, equity, concern, empathy, cooperation and hygiene.

 

Nutritious school meal programme

A nutritious school feeding programme — properly designed and supervised by well-informed nutritionists and dieticians to meet school children’s micronutrient (vitamins and minerals) needs, and 25-30% of their macronutrient needs, such as carbohydrates and proteins — can go a long way.

Wan Manan Muda

The programme should meet much of the children’s dietary needs besides promoting knowledge of health and nutrition as well as healthy food habits. Menu planning should be aligned with the country’s dietary guidelines and international best practices for healthier school meals.

Meal requirements should adopt minimum standards, as stipulated in the country’s Recommended Nutrient Intake (RNI) or Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA), but modified to increase consumption of fruits, vegetables and whole grains, and to set minimum and maximum calorie intake levels.

Programme success is often partly due to active parental involvement, especially to ensure school food hygiene, safety and quality.

Children in such programmes generally have significantly better scores for both cognitive and physical development. Participating students significantly reduced their body mass indices (BMIs) even if they snacked outside school.

 

Agrarian transformation

The procurement policy for the school feeding programme offers a unique opportunity for agrarian transformation. Food procurement for the programme can be used to induce farmers to safely produce more nutritious and healthy food, especially vegetables and fruits.

With the promotion of international trade and export orientation, not many farmers produce food, typically staples, often due to subsidies from governments, aid programmes and sometimes consumers. Many of those growing cereals often remain among the poorest farmers as they cannot compete with industrially produced cereals, often imported from abroad.

Instead of large transnational companies, family or ‘homestead’ farmers should be the main source of food procured for school meal programmes. With sufficient, appropriate agricultural research and extension, the programme can not only provide safe, non-toxic and nutritious food for children, but also increase farmer incomes.

If well designed and implemented, it can strengthen or revive farmer cooperatives and organizations to better serve the farmers’ and the nation’s needs as locally grown food supplies can be more easily regulated to ensure safe and healthy food supplies.

In many countries, from Brazil to China, the quality, safety and nutrition of food supplies on local markets have improved as farmers produce more than necessary to meet procurement contract requirements for school meal programmes.

 

Scheme implementation

Three types of school feeding programmes have different implications and consequences:

• (1)

Universal

• programmes in which all schoolchildren get free meals without conditions or requirements.

 

• (2)

Targeted

• programmes in which only selected children to qualify for free meals, such as those from destitute families, or severely undernourished children, due to stunting and wasting, although qualification requirements are often abused.

 

• (3)

Local

• programmes in which all children in a designated area receive free meals, e.g., rural areas, poor urban areas, post-disaster zones,

et al

.

The experiences of Japan and other societies show that only universal programmes can achieve all the objectives of such initiatives. Unlike targeting, the universal approach reduces the shame associated with receiving free meals, encouraging more children to participate with dignity.

Most middle-income countries and some low-income countries can well afford such universal programmes, which benefit countries in several significant ways, if well designed and implemented with broad popular participation, including both parents and farmers.

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By Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts, Jan 20 2020 (IPS)

The digital revolution arrived late at the heart of ministries of foreign affairs across the Western world. Ministries latched on to social media around the time of Tahrir Square and Iran’s 2009 Green Revolution, beguiled by a vision of the technology engendering a networked evolution toward more liberal societies.

Foreign ministries scrambled to make ‘Twitter-Diplomacy’ part of their push-strategy in strategic communication and began, though arguably too slowly, to analyse US-based digital platform-generated data to inform foreign policy decisions. ‘Tech for Good’ was the universal assumption a decade ago.

Since then, the impact of hyper-connectivity and its effect on hierarchically organised, slow-moving Western foreign and development policy organisations has become clearer and far less simple.

Unbridled by legal barriers or democratic institutional control, China practices a brand of digital colonialism abroad and sells wide-scale surveillance in Africa and Asia. Russia has gone on the offence, unleashing troll armies and hacker collectives upon Europe and the United States as the new face of Moscow’s international power.

Unregulated, expressed positive intent notwithstanding, US-based tech titans end up enabling the digital amplification of human rights abuses. Deep social and political impacts are unfolding.

And yet, foreign ministries are still comparatively under-equipped with the diagnostic capacity to identify, analyse and act in an anticipatory way on the waves of information rolling through the digital realm.

How diplomacy has been changing

This digital deficit is bound to become a true Achilles heel as technological progress forges steadily ahead. Addressing the foreign policy consequences of platform action was one thing.

Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook

Now, the advent of 5G systems and the capacity to run larger volumes of data across them, to develop greater applications for artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of things, will not only have deeply disruptive impacts on our societies and the way we work — from manufacturing to services but it will also present steep challenges to how our bureaucracies manage big data and how — in the case of ministries of foreign affairs — they harness capacities for anticipatory foreign policy making.

To be sure, the advent of greater data capacities holds promises — not just challenges — for diplomacy. Well-cultivated, big data will radically improve the consular process, bolster the preparation of diplomats for complex, multi-level negotiations on trade and sanctions and boost the ability to forecast humanitarian crises linked to climate change effects from drought to flooding.

Big data aggregation could also help identify disinformation campaigns targeted against a certain country more quickly and accurately. Chat bots are already improving the more tedious aspects of consular affairs, supporting registration processes or legal aid for refugees.

Much as geo-coding and social media mapping is already helping Global Affairs Canada and the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office understand where their messages resonate most effectively, in the near-term future a bigger volume of data and increased interpretation capacities might be used to locate citizens in need and to monitor social media to predict possible consular crises.

For the core work of diplomacy — negotiation — the capacity to engage big data analytics could serve to remove bias, aggregate data on possible negotiation impacts (i.e. on large groups of national or foreign citizens or corporations) and pull together geospatial and sensor data for more objective, fact-based information gathering and generally support better, evidence-based decision making. To realise the advantages of these data streams, the data will have to be harnessed and interpreted by trained analysts and diplomats.

The financing asymmetry of AI development

So, while progress has been made on the diagnostic front and EU-internal coordination on AI in limited areas is improving, staffing and budgetary resources remain dangerous vulnerabilities in the West — both for R&D and industry, to say nothing of the bureaucratic architecture.

While China invests USD 150bn in AI development in its current five-year plan, the largest comparative player — the US with a new tripled commitment (to USD 4.9bn) — cannot even remotely compete with that kind of cross-sectoral investment. Plus, China wields strong state-control, has the Great Firewall and data harvesting capacities across the globe to power rapidly evolving AI.

Above all, a real financial commitment is needed. Until the numbers add up to building true capacity, taxpayers must assume that European (and even the US government) isn’t sufficiently serious about all elements of their national security in light of the deeply disruptive forces AI and quantum computing will bring.

Rotational tech and STEM talent placements in US and European foreign ministries help in identifying key strategic challenges but they are little more than a band-aid. For real change to occur, pressure is needed from the leadership of individual ministries, from the urgency generated by the inter-agency process (intelligence, defense, development and economic ministries together) and increasingly by the supranational level.

The German Armed Forces’ new encrypted messenger service is a perfect example: Following the close observation of the development of a similar secure, closed communications system based on Open-Source software in France (Tschap is now used in over 30 French government institutions), the German Ministry of Defense announced the implementation of its own messenger system in December 2019.

Based on the type of tech platform chosen, the system’s design could foreseeably be extended or copied such that it might facilitate the creation of similar capacities to support a seamless inter-agency process between the foreign ministry, the armed services and intelligence sources in crisis communication.

The example proves that a combination of pressure from the top, inter-European knowledge exchange and a functional dedication of resources can create digitally sovereign tools in what might seem a staid, slow-moving system.

While pooled resources in systems architecture are critical, software advances like these – though arguably late – shouldn’t be maligned. Imagine the degree of functional progress that could be possible, if the EU-27 were able to more systematically aggregate and recombine and redeploy, say, the knowledge acquired by its digital diplomats in Silicon Valley (i.e. Denmark and France), even in an environment of fiscal austerity and insufficient R&D investment.

A new transatlantic dialogue

Even though the 5G debate threatens to further fray already weakened cross-Atlantic ties, a transatlantic digital policy dialogue (beyond cyber defence) on bureaucratic systems adaptation is essential. A European — or even a transatlantic collaboration platform — could help individual EU27 systems make critical decisions with respect to design, knowledge management, personnel structure and cultural transformation and recruitment.

Here are the priorities: First, there is systems architecture. Mere data collection capacities will not allow the crafting of anticipatory foreign policy. A ‘whole-of-government’ approach is necessary.

As newly minted EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen points out, where national and supranational bureaucracies still work on a siloed, ‘need to know’ basis, current and future challenges of connectivity require a ‘need to share’ architecture: greater inter-ministerial exchange to be able to use information generated digitally.

That was a combination of on-the-ground sensor data, satellite imagery and diplomatic intelligence could forecast the next migration wave or humanitarian crisis.

On the digital front, ministries will need systems that are safe, European-sourced, internally controlled and fit-for-purpose. The inclusion of Huawei parts in the telecoms infrastructure in Germany is causing a major rift between the Chancellory and the Bundestag, while the example of mass-scale spying through Chinese technology in the African Union building stand as vivid examples of why just this type of debate is essential to a democracy in the big data age.

Who will build the diagnostic dashboards foreign ministries need to have in-house? Who will populate them with critical data flows? The annual GovTech conference in Paris, where tech developers are confronted with public policy problems points in the right direction, though more of these ‘tailor made’ solutions will be needed.

Second, there is the personnel issue. Diplomatic careers now are built on experience, on knowledge and interpretative capacity honed over time across cultural, linguistic and historical barriers. The advent of AI in diplomacy can put knowledge that takes an entire career to craft at the disposal of a relative novice.

These shifts will begin to put systems of internal evaluation, promotion, meritocracy into question: how to create foreign policy desks in HQ and in embassies abroad that best utilise the changing skills capacities of different generations of diplomats?

How to recruit the best and brightest technology-savvy minds into foreign service when they could work at triple their salaries outside of public policy? How to integrate, promote and retain top-tier talent even on short-term contracts while preventing the risks of compromise and espionage?

Here, collaborating with graduate schools of public policy in Europe and the US that focus on institutional transformation, and creating appropriate coordinating forums on the European and transatlantic level could be a critical asset, as Western, liberal foreign ministries grapple with the same issues.

This links directly to a third issue: A new ethos for public service in the digital world is needed. Where China and Russia can command next generation tech talents for their data-weaponised power-projection, Western countries cannot.

To maintain societal systems that drive an even deeper global integration and connection while bearing the hallmarks of liberal democratic order, government institutions will need to attract the best and brightest into their ranks. A new culture of the techno-talented for public service in the digital age is needed.

It is high time for the acceleration to begin.

This article first appeared in *International Politics and Society (IPS) which is published by the International Political Analysis Unit of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Hiroshimastrasse 28, D-10785 Berlin.

The post From Digital Diplomacy to Data Diplomacy appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook is a German and American national and the founding Executive Director of the Future of Diplomacy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), which examines the challenges to negotiation and statecraft in the 21st century.

The post From Digital Diplomacy to Data Diplomacy appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Credit: United Nations

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

As the United Nations commemorates its 75th anniversary this year, the financially-crippled Organization is also saddled with a rash of administrative problems, plus an ongoing cash crisis, perhaps one of the worst in history.

At a town hall meeting with Secretary-General Antonio Guterres last month, UN staffers in Geneva, led by the Staff Coordinating Council (SCC), raised several issues, including the impact of the illegal pay cut on incomes, family life, and staff morale, and the growing number of obstacles to career development.

And they also singled out the harassment and retaliation against whistle blowers, (with harassments apparently going unpunished); the “exploitation” of colleagues on temporary and consultancy contracts; “management abuse” of rules under the new delegation of authority; and the negative impact of administrative offshoring and plans for hot-desking.

And that’s only for starters.

Guterres initially “refused to meet staffers”, according to a message from SCC. The request for a meeting was made when the Secretary-General was in Geneva on Dec 4.

Reacting to the refusal, the SCC pointedly said the welfare of staff should be a prime concern for any organization.

“It’s clear from the huge number of stories we’ve received and responses to our survey that UN Geneva staff are not just angry and disaffected at the injustice of the illegal pay cut they have suffered, there have also been significant consequences for the lives of many of their families.”

“Any decent employer (read: United Nations) should want to listen to the views of their staff, however challenging. Trying to ignore such opinions and experiences hurts employees and is damaging for the wider organization, and that’s just part of why we were so disappointed to learn of the Secretary General’s refusal to meet with UN Geneva staff on the topic of equal pay”, the SCC said.

“This was a missed opportunity, but it is far from the end of the matter. The Staff Council doesn’t take no for an answer”—and it eventually pulled it off.

Perhaps reacting to the SCC attack on him, Guterres agreed to address the town hall meeting during his second visit to Geneva on December 16.

But the SCC said the Secretary General’s response for equal pay was “significant”. Guterres told staffers: “Equal pay is obviously a norm that should be respected everywhere”

“I fully understand that this system of unequal pay is unacceptable and it will have to be solved. I will do everything I can for that to happen. I fully understand how angry you are with this situation that is unfair and I’m interested in solving it,” Guterres added, according to SCC.

The SCC also said: “These are encouraging words and we will hold him to them. Whilst such a commitment is a notable step forward for our campaign, we remain concerned as he also refused to take immediate action to resolve the situation by adding: “I don’t have the power to do what you ask me to do.”

A big test will come when the UN Dispute Tribunal delivers their ruling on the issue. “We are confident they will find in favour of equal pay and, given the Secretary General’s words, staff will expect him to accept the decision and not lodge any appeal”.

“In the meantime, we will watch every move and keep up the pressure, not just on equal pay, but on the other issues that we raised and which he acknowledged,” said Prisca Chaoui, SCC Executive Secretary and Ian Richards, President.

The UN Office at Geneva (UNOG) says it serves as the representative office of the Secretary-General in Geneva, which also houses the Human Rights Council and UN agencies such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Labour Organization.

A focal point for multilateral diplomacy, UNOG services more than 10,000 meetings every year, making it one of the world’s busiest conference centres. And with more than 1,600 staff, it is the biggest duty stations outside of United Nations headquarters in New York.

Asked about the impact of the cash crunch on UN staffers, Ian Richards, who is also the Geneva-based President of the 60,000-strong Coordinating Committee of International Staff Unions and Associations (CCISUA), told IPS the General Assembly has ordered that a certain number of posts be kept vacant at any time.

“This basically has the effect of a promotion-and-recruitment freeze despite workload on the rise and the growing dangers for staff in places like Iraq and Afghanistan”.

“Staff are not happy,” he added.

Asked if the UN is in the process of eliminating short term and consultancy contracts, and also replacing overseas assignments with teleconferencing as spelled out by Guterres, Richards said these are being used much less on the regular budget, which has implications for impacted personnel.

Teleconferencing has always been there, he noted, but there are limits to its usefulness.

“You can’t conduct an investigation or research mission on the other side of the world by teleconference. And sometimes you need to get key people around the table for a solid 3 days if you want to solve a particularly complex problem”.

“You can’t do that by teleconference when people are scattered across time zones,” he declared.

Asked if regular staffers are assured of permanent stay in New York or is it mandatory for them to serve in overseas posts, Richards said the “mobility policy” is currently suspended, pending a new one.

The suspended policy turned out to be cumbersome to administer. He argued that something more simple and less top-down is required while providing staff a reassurance that if they go to the field, their service will be recognized and they have a way back to headquarters, he added.

Meanwhile, the General Assembly has postponed until spring a proposal to move some of the UN offices to Budapest, Kuala Lumpur, Mexico City and Nairobi.

“It’s been under consideration for several years and hasn’t got anywhere,” said Richards, pointing out that, ultimately, it’s not a financially viable project and many managers and member states know this.

“And as the UN’s administrative systems become ever more technology-based, the usefulness of physical service centres goes out the window. We’re in 2020 now, not 2005,” said Richards.

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@ips.org

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The United Nations on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance has recently offered her assistance to the Indian Supreme Court in a long hearing about India deporting Rohingya refugees to Myanmar. Pictured here are Rohingya refugee women in Jammu, India. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

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

University of California professor E. Tendayi Achiume, who is a United Nations Special Rapporteur, has recently offered her assistance to the Indian Supreme Court in a long hearing about India deporting Rohingya refugees to Myanmar.

The hearing, which began in 2017, has this update at a crucial time when the world’s largest democracy is reeling from citizenship rulings that explicitly exclude Muslims from certain neighbouring countries. 

Achiume, who is a U.N. Special Rapporteur on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, submitted the application to the Supreme Court on Jan. 10, according to local news agency The Wire. 

“Litigation schedules are long and complex, and the timing of my filing reflects that,” Achiume told IPS this week, in reference to why she made her application at this time. 

According to the Wire, which reviewed the application, Achiume did so in order to “aid the court in upholding India’s obligations under various international law instruments and principles to which it has committed”. 

• India, although not the most common destination for Rohingya refugees, has a large number of the population, many of whom migrate from neighbouring Bangladesh.
• At the time of reporting, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had documented 17,911 Rohingyas in India as registered with the organisation. 

In 2017, when the hearing began, the Indian government, responsible for the current crisis in Kashmir as well as the Citizenship Amendment Act, told the court that Rohingyas pose “a threat to national security”. 

Two years later, this sentiment remains relevant given the recent citizenship ruling as well as the crisis in Kashmir have stoked further anti-Muslim rhetoric in India. In the past, Indian Home Minister Amit Shah has used similar rhetoric of “threat” to national security against Bangladeshi immigrants in the country.  

Last week, at the launch of 2020 World Report Human Rights Watch (HRW), the organisation’s head reiterated that the current rulings in the country are discriminatory. 

“We are extremely concerned about the anti-Muslim drift by the Modi government,” Kenneth Roth told IPS at the launch where he also blasted Aung San Suu Kyi for her defence of Myanmar’s practices against the Rohingya population in the country.  

While the recent rulings do not directly affect Rohingyas from Myanmar, the current anti-Muslim sentiment heightened by these rulings adds another layer of complication for a community that is known to be largely Muslim and has their share of challenges already. 

As it is, the Rohingya community already is vulnerable to discrimination in India. India’s decision to deport Rohingyas “raises critical issues as to its compatibility with these instruments and principles of international human rights law,” Achiume wrote in the application. 

“In India, Rohingya face protection risks due to difficulties in obtaining legal documentation and access to basic services,” Kathryn Mahoney, Senior Communications Officer at UNHCR told IPS. “UNHCR is also aware of instances of arrest and detention of Rohingya refugees and asylum-seekers at the border.” 

This already festering sentiment against the Rohingya, when viewed under current circumstances, can prove grave for the community. 

“I believe there is strong reason to believe there are heightened concerns for Rohingya and others in the current legal and political climate that is fostering intolerance and discrimination against Muslims,” Achiume told IPS. “India’s judiciary has an important role to play in upholding the country’s human rights commitments.” 

In their statement to IPS, UNHCR reiterated the urgency with which forced repatriation efforts by India must be stopped for the Rohingya community that still remains vulnerable to violence and displacement in Myanmar. 

“UNHCR is deeply concerned by the return of Rohingya asylum-seekers from India to Myanmar, who may be at risk of serious human rights violations or persecution,” Mahoney told IPS. “UNHCR does not believe that current conditions in Myanmar are conducive to the safe and dignified repatriation of Rohingya refugees.” 

Related Articles

• The Story Behind The Gambia’s Lawsuit against Myanmar over the Rohingya Genocide
• Little Hope of Justice for Rohingya, Two Years after Exodus
• With Poor Human Rights Record, Repatriation Not Possible

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By Joseph Chamie
NEW YORK, Jan 20 2020 (IPS)

Whenever the issue of population comes up, pro-growth demographic dogma invariably dominates. Governments, political parties, businesses, the media and many others typically praise population growth and lament population slowdown, stabilization or decline. The demographic dogma basically advocates maintaining robust population growth and a larger and youthful population. 

Population declines, even slowdowns, generally inspire angst among most policymakers, military officials, business leaders, economists and others, as they see them tied to economic, political, social and cultural decline. The dogma foresees financial ruin and a loss of political influence and national power resulting from demographic declines and population aging. 

Fear of population decline and aging is promoted by many groups, especially business leaders who tend to gain the most financially from a growing, youthful population of consumers and workers.

The pro-growth demographic dogma is fundamentally a Ponzi scheme. It is a pyramid scheme that generates more money, power and influence for some by adding on more and more people through natural increase and in some cases immigration. Questions about the sustainability of long-term population growth are typically dismissed or left unanswered

For example, while Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Alibaba founder Jack Ma may disagree on many issues, they are in agreement that the biggest problem facing the world in the future is not enough people.

Although world population is projected to add 2 billion people by midcentury, the two prominent businessmen claim, “The biggest issue in 20 years will be population collapse. Not explosion. Collapse.”

In the United States, the Chamber of Commerce regularly calls for the government to continue importing foreign workers. In a recent interview, Chamber CEO Tom Donohue commenting on the ongoing labor shortage in the country said: “The fundamental issue is that the United States of America is out of people.”  

However, data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics show there is no labor shortage. In addition, automation, artificial intelligence and robots are reducing labor needs in many sectors of the US economy. 

The pro-growth demographic dogma is fundamentally a Ponzi scheme. It is a pyramid scheme that generates more money, power and influence for some by adding on more and more people through natural increase and in some cases immigration. Questions about the sustainability of long-term population growth are typically dismissed or left unanswered.

In an unrelenting public relations campaign, every effort is made to equate sustained population growth and a youthful population with economic prosperity and developmental progress. The dogma warns that population declines, even slowdowns, and demographic aging will lead to serious financial problems and a bleak future by reducing the labor force, hampering productivity growth, contracting the domestic market base, lessening public finances and increasing social costs for the elderly. 

Concerns about the environment, climate change, poverty, gender gaps, socio-economic inequalities, human rights and peace and security are either ignored or considered best addressed by a growing and youthful population. A growing and youthful population, according to the pro-growth advocates, leads to a robust expanding economy, which in turn ensures social wellbeing, cultural dynamism and political and military strength. 

With sustained rates of below replacement fertility and projections showing future population decline and aging, the governments of many countries, including Austria, China, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Singapore, South Korea and Spain, have population policies to address what they consider to be a looming national crisis (Table 1).

 

Source: United Nations Population Division.

 

Some governments are promoting marriage, childbearing and parenting through public relations campaigns, incentives and preferences. While incentives and family-oriented measures may encourage some couples to have children, those policies are costly and their overall effect on fertility is weak at best. 

The many forces pushing fertility below replacement levels are simply too powerful for governments to overcome. In short, men in power are not able to persuade women to bear more children than they desire.

Most countries experiencing population slowdowns and decline are averse to turning to immigration. While they desire higher rates of population growth, they are opposed to altering the ethnic and cultural composition of their populations through immigration. Recently, for example, Austria’s recently re-elected chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, said that illegal immigrants are as much a threat to his country as climate change. 

Even in countries with a tradition of immigration, such as Australia, Canada and the United States, opposition to additional immigration is increasing, especially from countries having very different cultures. The United States government, for example, has reduced its annual number of immigrants and imposed a travel ban restricting the entry into the country from certain countries. 

Population declines and slowdowns are frequently entangled in political, social, religious and ethnic concerns. Demographic downturns are typically perceived as losses of power, influence and standing by particular groups of individuals. 

In democratic societies population numbers are closely linked to political power, financial assistance, social influence and cultural traditions. Elections and representation in legislative bodies and the distribution of government monies, in particular, are closely tied to population numbers. 

Also increasingly in societies with serious ethnic, language, religious and cultural cleavages, population numbers and proportions are critical matters. The fear among many, especially nativist and far-right groups, is becoming a minority in their own homeland. Their primary demographic concern boils down to tribalism or  “more of us and less of them”. 

In Europe, for example, le grand replacement, or the great replacement, is a proposition originated by French author Renaud Camus that concerns the replacement of one population with another one. In this particular instance, white Christian Europeans in France are seen being replaced by non-white non-Christian immigrants and their descendants. 

The proposition in its various forms has spread among some right-wing groups, in particular white nationalists throughout Europe and in Northern America and beyond. Driven by fear over the loss of white primacy, white nationalists believe that white identity should be the organizing principle of Western society with some calling for white ethno-states.

Tapping into le grand replacement, Hungary’s prime minister, Victor Orbán, at a recent demography summit held in Budapest aimed at promoting policies to encourage procreation not immigration said: “There are political forces in Europe who want a replacement of population for ideological or other reasons.” 

Orbán’s remarks were supported by the former Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott, who added that dying populations, not climate change, were the biggest threat to western civilization. Another summit participant, Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vučić said: “Serbian people have one expression for negative population growth: the white plague.”

World population is expected to reach the 8 billion in 2023, 9 billion in 2037 and 10 billion around midcentury. Most of the nearly 2 billion addition to the world’s population over the next three decades will be taking place in the poorer countries of Africa and Asia, 60 and 33 percent of the increase, respectively (Table 2).

 

Source: United Nations Population Division.

 

Recognizing the serious consequences of this expected population growth, growing numbers of people and organizations are rejecting the pro-growth demographic dogma. For example, recently some 11,000 scientists declared unequivocally that the planet Earth is facing a climate emergency and among their six urgently needed actions included: “Stabilize a global human population that is increasing by more than 200,000 people a day, using approaches that ensure social and economic justice.”  

So, be advised: whenever the issue of population comes up, don’t be taken in by the pro-growth demographic dogma. A world soon reaching 8 billion people and an additional 2 billion in a few decades is seriously challenging humanity’s sustainability on planet Earth, which is enduring an array of human-induced calamities, including climate change, environmental degradation, fresh water depletion, deforestation, pollution and loss of biodiversity.

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A protester in the Slovak capital, Bratislava holds up a picture of murdered journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kusnirova. Hundreds of thousands of people took part in protests across the country in the weeks after the killing, eventually forcing the resignation of the Prime Minister and Interior Minister. Credit: Ed Holt/IPS

By Ed Holt
BRATISLAVA, Jan 20 2020 (IPS)

As four people appear in court in Slovakia over the murder of journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kusnirova, both 27, the trial is being seen by many as a historic moment for not just press freedom in the country but public faith in its justice system.

Miroslav Marcek, Tomas Szabo, Alena Zsuszova, and Marian Kocner have all been charged with Kuciak’s murder. A fifth person, Zoltan Andrusko, was last year sentenced to 15 years in jail for being an intermediary in the murder after agreeing a plea bargain.

On the first day of the trial last week, Marcek, a 37-year-old former soldier, admitted shooting the pair at Kuciak’s home in Velka Maca, 40 miles east of the Slovak capital Bratislava, in February 2018. Szabo, Zsuszova and Kocner have denied the charges against them.

But it is Kocner, a powerful local businessman with alleged links to organized crime and whom Kuciak had written about, who has become for many the central figure in the trial and a symbol of deep-rooted corruption at the highest levels of the state.

And the outcome of the court case is being seen as a test of not just whether the media will in future be free to hold the wealthy and powerful to account, but also whether the judiciary can do the same now.

Adam Valcek, an investigative reporter with the Slovak daily newspaper Sme, told IPS: “In terms of what this trial means for Slovakia, [what happens now] is absolutely fundamental. This what we journalists have been saying for a long time – that the state had been taken over and was being run by an elite. Also, Kocner was able to control the organs of the state.”

The killings of Kuciak and Kusnirova shocked the nation and prompted the largest mass protests in the country since the fall of communism.

Prime Minister Robert Fico and Interior Minister Robert Kalinak were forced to resign, and the head of the police service later stepped down.

Police said that the murders were related to Kuciak’s work as an investigative journalist – Kuciak’s last story had exposed alleged links between Italian mafia and Fico’s Smer party – and the subsequent investigation uncovered alleged links between politicians, prosecutors, judges, and police officers to the people involved in the killings.

Soon after the murders it also emerged that Kuciak had been threatened by Kocner.

There have been rumours of Kocner’s connection to organized crime for decades and it is alleged that his links to politicians and state officials at the highest levels, including Fico, Prosecutor General Dobroslav Trnka, and other judicial figures, meant that he could act with impunity.

He also allegedly used contacts to obtain information on people which he could then use to blackmail them.

Prosecutors in the Kuciak murder trial have argued that he did the same with the journalist. They said Kocner eventually ordered Kuciak’s killing to stop him reporting on the businessman after he had failed to uncover any information he could use to discredit the journalist.

The trial, which is set to run at least until February, has made international headlines and is being closely followed by press freedom watchdogs and international media groups.

Among the local journalism community, though, some have spoken of both hope and fear over what it could mean for their future work.

“It is alarming,” said Lukas Fila, publisher of the Slovak daily Dennik N.

He told IPS: “Government members, top prosecutors, judges, and police officers were involved in one way or another with the alleged perpetrators of these crimes. Journalists were being spied on by former members of the intelligence services. A former policeman and soldier carried out the murder. We could go on. It is now evident that working as a journalist in Slovakia is not safe.

“On the other hand, the trial provides some hope. We have learned things that we cannot unlearn. If anything can return a feeling of safety, it is only severe punishment for all those involved not only in the murder, but also all the other crimes that have surfaced as a result of the investigations.”

The court hearings are in their early stages and those following them are so far reluctant to speculate on the outcome.

In an editorial just before the start of the trial the Sme daily suggested that Kocner would probably not be found guilty. But some journalists who spoke to IPS said that the proceedings over the initial few days of hearings had led them to believe he may actually be convicted.

Whatever happens, the outcome of the trial will be, one way or another, a watershed in Slovak history.

“This is a fundamental moment which will show whether the country can clearly deal with and punish crimes designed to silence journalists uncovering the truth based on facts and whether journalists can freely do their work without fear for their lives,” one Slovak journalist told IPS.

Underlying the reticence some journalists have speaking openly about the threats to their community, the journalist, who has more than two decades of experience in Slovak media, added: “After a series of scandals and the exposure of links between dubious individuals and judges, prosecutors and police, trust in the judiciary is weak.

“For this reason, this is an equally important trial for the judiciary. We need to know that justice exists in Slovakia, and that the justice system is capable of, and determined to, act against ‘big fish’.”

Others expressed concern about what might happen if Kocner is not found guilty.

Fila said there could be “a real threat to the lives of journalists, police officers, and prosecutors, and a degree of public outrage, which could have enormous political consequences”.

“It remains to be seen which way history will go. It may be remembered as a moment when the country gained new hope, or when frustration rose to previously unseen levels,” he said.

Valcek pointed out, though, that even if Kocner was not convicted, he might not escape punishment for other crimes. He is currently also on trial over alleged forgery of promissory notes and is facing separate allegations of tax fraud.

“Kocner could end up like Al Capone – not convicted of murder, but eventually jailed for economic crimes,” said Valcek.

Related Articles

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Credit: Mahila Housing Trust

By Bijal Brahmbhatt
AHMEDABAD, India, Jan 17 2020 (IPS)

As global temperatures continue to rise, vulnerable populations around the world are facing increasingly complex climate risks – with ongoing droughts in Zimbabwe and floods devastating Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta.

From flooding and cyclones to heatwaves and droughts, the stresses and shocks inflicted by growing climate extremes are severe. And they cannot be tackled by one-track solutions, especially in resource-poor developing countries.

Instead, players in the global development space should take a more integrated approach when helping strengthen communities most at risk from climate shocks, to ensure that the interrelated challenges they face are addressed in their entirety.

For instance, in developing countries, rural poor families are often drawn to urban areas in search of better prospects, but often end up living in slums in a vicious cycle of perpetual poverty.

As well as putting greater strain on infrastructure, this displacement exposes them to unsanitary conditions – leaving them more vulnerable to illnesses and climate stresses, and often unable to work or improve their circumstances as a result.

So, for resilience-building solutions to be impactful and work for the whole community, either/or solutions will not suffice. Approaches that are either technical or social might be effective in strengthening one aspect of climate resilience – such as building flood defences, or improving access to potable water – but not more complex, interrelated issues.

It is only by integrating both social and technical approaches to resilience-building that more comprehensive, sustainable solutions can be constructed.

Developing a hybrid model is one way to achieve this, which is precisely what India-based Mahila Housing Trust has done with its mission to empower women in poor communities across South Asia to build resilience against increasing climate pressures.

Founded as an autonomous non-profit in 1994, Mahila Housing Trust has evolved into an agile social enterprise – aided in recent years by mentoring and support from the Global Resilience Partnership.

Using a combined social-technical approach to development, Mahila Housing Trust bridges the gap between poor women within high-risk contexts and mainstream institutions.

Through this hybrid model, it helps women improve their living conditions, build resilience against climate stresses and develop the leadership skills, knowledge and confidence necessary to participate in local governance.

Meanwhile, it ensures its commercial viability by training women to become agents of resilience solutions – from green energy and heat-mitigating technologies, to health interventions such as improved access to drinking water and better sanitation facilities.

The not-for-profit side of Mahila Housing Trust delivers back-end support to its empowerment and resilience-building programmes, while the enterprise side ensures the organisation and its beneficiaries are able to generate funding and income.

This hybrid model has also enabled Mahila Housing Trust to launch “Awaas Sewa” – a social enterprise dedicated to the development and implementation of innovative climate-resilient technologies.

The enterprise identifies, pilots, rates and validates new solutions, then teaches women leaders how to market them – building resilience amongst poor communities and generating a turnover at the same time.

Operating across seven cities in India, Nepal and Bangladesh, the enterprise has so far trained more than 1,500 women leaders to become “climate-saathis”, or climate partners.

In these roles, the women have conducted energy audits and helped families in more than 100 informal settlements to invest in energy-saving and climate-resilient solutions – such as heat-resistant modular roofing.

By converting this network into a sustainable enterprise, these women leaders now earn an income through promoting and selling energy-efficient, climate stress-combatting solutions – helping 27,000 others in their communities become more resilient in the process.

Plus, if women in the community need financial support to purchase and install these solutions, Mahila Housing Trust also has women-led credit cooperatives, which provides financing for climate-resilient technologies.

Yet this commercial aspect is only one small component of the organisation’s model; its sustained results so far have only been achieved through building partnerships across all different levels and sectors.

Strengthening the resilience of poor communities requires a bespoke, holistic approach that directly engages people on the ground. Maintaining a focused yet collaborative approach, Mahila Housing Trust works closely with a multidisciplinary team of partners in a united effort to improve the living conditions in poor urban communities.

With the goal of empowering women to improve their circumstances at the very heart of Mahila Housing Trust’s work, its partnerships mean the organisation can develop cross-cutting resilience solutions that address urbanisation, livelihoods and climate resilience all at once.

By adopting such an integrated approach, rather than just strengthening climate or economic resilience, development players can forge wholesale resilience amongst even the most vulnerable communities.

The post Empowering Women in Poor Communities & Building Resilience Against Climate Pressure appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Bijal Brahmbhatt is Director, Mahila Housing Trust

The post Empowering Women in Poor Communities & Building Resilience Against Climate Pressure appeared first on Inter Press Service.

A company in Pokhara has enlarged household digesters into an industrial scale plant that uses climate-friendly technology that could ultimately be scaled nationwide to reduce Nepal’s balance of trade gap.

By Kunda Dixit
KASKI, Nepal, Jan 17 2020 (IPS)

Nepal’s future may not be in hydropower, as most assume, but actually in the dung heap. A new industrial-scale biogas plant near Pokhara has proved that livestock and farm waste producing flammable methane gas can replace imported LPG and chemical fertiliser.

Over the past 30 years, Nepal has become a world leader in spreading locally-designed household biogas digesters. There are now 300,000 of them, helping reduce deforestation, improving people’s health and lifting women out of drudgery and poverty.

Now, a company in Pokhara has enlarged household digesters into an industrial scale plant that uses climate-friendly technology that could ultimately be scaled nationwide to reduce Nepal’s balance of trade gap.

Biogas has a three-fold advantage. It reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and is therefore climate friendly. It allows us to manage raw waste. And it can slash our import bill for LPG and chemical fertiliser

Kushal Gurung’s grandfather was in the British Army, and he also applied for recruitment but failed the eyesight test. So, he set up Gandaki Urja in Pokhara that works with wind, solar and hydropower, but he believes Nepal’s best option for sustainable growth lies in energy from waste.

“Nepal must abandon fossil fuels, but even among renewable energy sources biogas has a three-fold advantage. It reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and is therefore climate friendly. It allows us to manage raw waste. And it can slash our import bill for LPG and chemical fertiliser,” says Gurung. “It is a win-win-win.”

A tipper truck has just arrived from Gorkha at Gandaki Urja’s biogas plant at Kotre near Pokhara, which with its dome digester looks like a nuclear reactor. The truck tilts its container to empty 5 tons of smelly poultry waste into a pit where rotting vegetables and cow dung from a farm in Syangja are all being mixed before being fed into the 4,000 cubic meter digester that is kept inflated.

In the absence of oxygen, bacteria already in the cow dung go to work to break down the waste into methane, carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulphide. The impurities are removed by filters to produce 200 cylinders of bio-CNG a day which are sold to big hotels and restaurants in Pokhara.

Customers pay a deposit for the cylinders and pressure regulators, and usually use up about two cylinders a day. The cost per kg for the bio-Compressed Natural Gas (bio-CNG) is the same as the state subsidised Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG). However, customers prefer the biogas because it saves them up to 30% cost because it has higher calorific value than LPG, and there is no residue that goes waste.

“So far, the customers are satisfied, and we see demand growing in the future as word spreads,” says Ashim Kayastha, Director of Gandaki Urja.

Half the plant’s revenue comes from bio-CNG and the other half from the effluent which is dried and sold as organic fertiliser. The plant can produce up to 11,000 tons of fertiliser a year and is sold to surrounding farms.

The future of bio-CNG depends on scaling up the technology since any municipality generating more than 40 tons of biodegradable waste per day could have its own biogas plant. Nepal imports 500,000 tons of chemical fertiliser a year, and if each of 100 municipalities produced 5,000 tons of organic fertiliser Nepal could slash its import bill.

This could also significantly reduce the country’s annual import of Rs33 billion worth of LPG from India which grew four-fold in the past 10 years, making up 2.5% of Nepal’s total import bill. But to scale up, industrial biogas needs the same government incentives as hydro, solar and wind power.

At the moment hydropower investors enjoy a 100% corporate tax holiday for 10 years, and 50% for the next five years. There is only 1% tax on imports of equipment for solar, wind and hydropower, there is no such provision for the equipment for industrial scale biogas. Instead, there is a tax on interest, and also VAT on bio-CNG.

 

 

“The government should look at this not only as an energy project, but at its multifaceted benefits,” says Kushal Gurung of Gandaki Urja. “There is a waste-to-energy and fertiliser angle, too. If we want to make Nepal fully organic in the next ten years, projects like these need to be prioritised.”

Gandaki Urja got a boost from an unlikely source, Business Oxygen (BO2) in Kathmandu which helps entrepreneurs running Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to scale up by injecting equity and providing technical assistance.

Says Siddhant Pandey of BO2: “We are always on the lookout for climate investments, and we realised that bio-CNG would be an incredible adaptive resilience investment. It would displace imports of LPG and fertiliser. It was going to be clean, no carbon footprint, and it made business sense because it met our internal return on investment expectation.”

The challenges are ensuring reliable sources of raw material and building knowhow for the technology within Nepal.

Says Pandey: “The Pokhara plant is a drop in the ocean, it can abe replicated in all 7 provinces. We know it is scalable, and it depends how proactive provincial governments will be.”

 

This story was originally published by The Nepali Times

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Credit: UN Women

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 17 2020 (IPS)

The United States and 18 other UN member states have come under fire for denying a woman’s legitimate right to “bodily autonomy”—the right to self-governance over one’s own body without coercion or external pressure.

The Executive Director of Women’s March Global, Uma Mishra-Newbery, told IPS the United Nations has worked towards progress in fighting for women’s rights.

But many countries on the Human Rights Council continue to negotiate women’s human rights off the table, she pointed out.

In Sept 2019, she said, the world watched as the US, in partnership with 18 other member states, put forth a statement saying there is no international right to abortion.

She said UN member states have also witnessed “the continued and grave human rights violations in Saudi Arabia”, including the continued torture of imprisoned women human rights defenders like Loujain al-Hathloul.

“Yet the UN and member states fail to hold Saudi Arabia truly accountable for its actions. The UN must hold these governments accountable as they work to strip women’s rights away without repercussions”, she declared.

Beside the United States, the 18 countries singled out include Bahrain, Belarus, Brazil, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Guatemala, Haiti, Hungary, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Nigeria, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.

The member states who deny women access to safe and legal abortion represent 1.3 billion people, according to Women’s March Global.

As part of a global campaign for women’s reproductive rights, Women’s March Global has called attention to the “dangerous and alarming repeal of women’s rights to bodily autonomy, bringing international attention to these pressing issues.”

The 45 marches—the fourth annual event, with the participation of millions of women and allies – took place in Africa, Canada, Central and South America, Europe and Asia.

Purnima Mane, a former UN Assistant Secretary-General and Deputy Executive Director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), told IPS the March on January 18 to protest the inadequate progress and sometimes downright rollback of women’s right to exercise bodily autonomy through the right to abortion, “comes at a critical juncture in our history.”

She said as many as 48 of the 58 existing UN countries, signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

Nonetheless, the UN as a body, has been limited in its work on abortion, due to its exclusion as a right from human rights treaties as a result of significant opposition from many quarters, she added.

“Besides, these treaties are not legally binding and some countries specifically see these issues as covered by domestic law.”

For example, she said, the Programme of Action (PoA) of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), focuses on the obligation of governments to prevent unsafe abortion but does not refer to making abortion legal.

This obligation can of course open the door for national debates on how women’s overall health and bodily autonomy are linked. International human rights treaties which most governments have ratified, support the right of women to liberty and to health.

The UN often provides platforms to learn from examples of countries which have implemented these rights successfully, integrating women’s rights more broadly, including the right to bodily autonomy, said Mane, who is a former President and CEO of Pathfinder International.

Antonia Kirkland, a global lead at Equality Now, told IPS that UN Women, alongside the Mexican and French governments and feminists around the world, have chosen bodily autonomy and sexual and reproductive health rights as one of the Generation Equality Forum’s six Action Coalition themes to in the lead up to Beijing +25.

“This is a good sign that attention and resources are being focused in this direction and can hopefully help counteract moves towards greater restrictions on access to abortion in countries like the USA, as well as forced pregnancy and motherhood in Latin American countries”.

Kirkland said over the past few years, there has been an alarming and sustained rollback on women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights around the world.

Focusing the first women’s rights March of the new decade on bodily autonomy is about shining a much-needed spotlight on the systematic oppression that continues to prevent women and girls from exercising self-governance over their own body and reproductive choices, she noted.

Mane said abortion has, in fact, been available in many countries for years but it is heavily regulated with severe restrictions which make it difficult to access.

Over the last few years, these restrictions have grown rapidly almost globally. Animosity towards contraception complicates the situation even though there is ample evidence to show that preventing unintended pregnancies through access to modern contraception, reduces abortion rates in the first place, she added.

“The combination of restrictions in the practice of legal abortion and poor access to contraception for avoiding unintended pregnancies, lead to an increase in unsafe abortion and high rates of morbidity and mortality among women”, said Mane, who has served on boards of several international, non-profit organizations including as Governor of the Board of Governors, International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in Canada.

Mane also pointed out that women’s right to access to contraception is the first and essential step advocated by UNFPA for enhancing women’s health and reproductive rights.

“If women receive the needed education and information, have access to appropriate services and commodities, and benefit from a conducive policy and programme environment, their ability and right to make decisions concerning their own bodies will be enhanced which will benefit their health and well-being”.

She said the UN assists national governments in the process of making all of the above happen through the supportive role they play globally and nationally.

Organizations like UNFPA need all the support and encouragement they can get to do their bit in moving the world towards the goal of ensuring that women are in a position to make decisions concerning their own bodies and ultimately their own lives.”

Kirkland said the United Nations has a vital role to play in the protection of women and girls’ sexual and reproductive health and rights, and this involves working in partnership with member states to ensure that everyone is free to make their own decisions about their body, and is able to easily access family planning support, healthcare services and information.

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@ips.org

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Yu Youhan, We Will Be Better, 1995.

By Vijay Prashad
Jan 16 2020 (IPS-Partners)

On Wednesday, 15 January, China and the United States agreed to suspend their full-scale trade war. From February 2018, the United States placed tariffs on Chinese goods that entered the US market, and then China retaliated. This tit-for-tat game continued for almost two years, causing massive disruption in the global value chain. In October 2019, the International Monetary Fund’s G-20 Surveillance Note reported that the global GDP suffered by a 0.8% drop merely because of the tariffs on goods such as aluminium, steel, soybeans, and car parts between the United States and China. Western attacks on Chinese 5G technology – and on the tech firm Huawei – are part of the pressure on China to buckle before the US-led order. But China did not bend. As a prelude to the ‘phase one’ deal, the United State Treasury Department stopped calling China a ‘currency manipulator’, a term that has haunted China’s for decades.

The suspension of the trade war comes with a ‘phase one’ deal whose text includes nine chapters on topics such as intellectual property rights to financial services. Most significantly, China has agreed to stop asking firms that invest in China to share their technology; this is a major departure for the Chinese model of development. The ‘phase one’ deal is merely the first stage in an ongoing process of negotiations and confrontations, which will be expected to continue for a long time yet. If ‘phase one’ goes well, and if the implementation and dialogue mechanisms work, then the two countries will move to ‘phase two’. Chinese diplomats say that they do not anticipate an immediate return to the pre-confrontation period, namely before the trade war began in February 2018.

News of a potential trade deal immediately moved the International Monetary Fund to revise its 2020 growth forecast for China from 5.8% to 6%. US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that the GDP numbers for the United States would be boosted to 2.5% for 2020 (though the IMF continues to predict a 1.9% GDP for the United States). It is likely that the low expectations for the global economy (at 2.5% GDP growth for 2020) might also be revised upwards for the year, although predictions for a severe global contraction remain intact; Deloitte’s CFO Signals for the fourth quarter of 2019 suggests that US companies have begun to further constrain investment in anticipation of a serious downturn – but not a recession – of the economy. US firms lost at least $46 billion as a consequence of the trade war started by US President Donald Trump in February 2018. Pressure from US firms on the White House and Trump’s need to make his ‘victory’ in the trade war an election issue drove the US to the table. By the fourth quarter of 2018, China’s economic growth rate was the slowest it has been since 1990, which is why China had been willing to discuss outstanding issues since February 2018.

Shi Guorui, The Yangtze River, 2013.

In the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research Dossier no. 24 – The World Oscillates Between Crises and Protests – there is an important section on the new ‘bipolar world’. It is widely recognised that US power has dwindled since the illegal attack on Iraq in 2003 and since the world financial crisis of 2007-08; at the same time, it is hard to deny the rapid growth of China’s economy and of China’s growing importance on the world stage. A decade ago, when China and Russia joined Brazil, India, and South Africa to form the BRICS, it appeared as if the global architecture was shifting from US unipolarity (with its allies as the spokes around the US hub) to multipolarity; but, with the deepening crisis in countries like Brazil and India, the new global architecture – according to Tsinghua University’s Institute for International Relations – will be one of bipolarity, with the US and China as the two poles of the global order.

China’s growth rates since the reform era began in 1978 remain perplexing. The attempt to explain this has spawned an enormous literature, some of it only partially explanatory but most of it petrified in clichés. Professor Wang Hui of Tsinghua University suggests that China’s policy framework is not along orthodox neoliberal lines, but that it has emerged out of the Chinese Communist Party’s commitment to sovereignty, out of the immense advances in health and education in the first decades of the revolutionary period, out of the enhancement of China’s economy by the socialist commodity economy of that period, out of the sustained struggles in the countryside to transform land relations, and out of the deep pragmatism of the Communists (‘cross the river by feeling for the stones’). Professor Hui warns that the stresses of market society have begun to engender new – and dangerous – contradictions for China. One of the overwhelming contradictions is the threats from the United States.

Zhang Xiaogang, Bloodline – Big Family no. 4, 1995.

The United States – which has the habit of dominance – tried its best to both manage and to prevent the growing global role of China. To manage China means to intimidate it to remain subordinate to US economic interests: Washington accused Beijing of currency manipulation and tried to get China to revise its currency to the benefit of the United States; this did not happen, and its failure to happen is a sign that China will not bow to US authority.

Accusations about the currency were quickly followed by claims that China had forced technology transfers or had stolen intellectual property, that China prevented access to financial services, and that it would not cut its industrial subsidies. Each US President over the course of the past decade – George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump – has accelerated the accusations against China and portrayed China as having advanced entirely by deceit.

When China refused to accept the US’ demands, and when it continued to develop its economic project – the Belt and Road Initiative – the United States moved to politically and militarily threaten China along several axes, some of these developed by Wu Xinbo, Dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University.

Indo-Pacific Strategy. In 2017, the United States and India began to develop an ‘Indo-Pacific’ strategy that would bring these two countries together against China’s Belt and Road Initiative (along the land of Eurasia) and its String of Pearls Initiative (in the Indian Ocean). The first Indo-Pacific Strategy document, produced by the US Department of Defence in June 2019, points its finger at China, which it says ‘seeks to reorder the region to its advantage by leveraging military modernisation, influence operations, and predatory economics to coerce other nations’. The United States and India – alongside Japan and other smaller states – are to create a bloc to prevent the emergence of China as a continental and global power. It is with no irony that the US defence department complains about ‘influence operations’ and ‘predatory economics’, both of which are closely understood to be US policies (including the Indo-Pacific Strategy itself).

The Use of Taiwan. The Indo-Pacific document promotes the defence of Taiwan as an essential pillar in US strategy. China has long insisted on pushing for the diplomatic isolation of Taiwan and for its eventual incorporation into China. Since it does not have an embassy in Washington, Taiwan has had – since 1971 – a Coordination Council for North American Affairs and then the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office; Trump changed it to the Taiwan Council for US Affairs, a name that has incensed Beijing. Not only have Trump and his officials said that they would like to increase US-Taiwan relations; the US has sold Taiwan F-16 fighters and fully backed the re-election of Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party – which asserts Taiwan’s independence from China – in the January 2020 presidential elections.

Liu Bolin, Hiding in New York No. 9 – Gun Rack, 2013.

Hong Kong and Xinjiang. The Indo-Pacific document of the US Defence Department says that the US – and India – express ‘deep concern’ about the fate of the Muslim population in China; at the same time, the US has said that it stands with the protest movement in Hong Kong. The concern about Chinese Muslims is not credible coming from the US, where Trump’s Muslim Ban defines his own attitude, and from India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi has driven a citizenship and refugee policy that is clearly anti-Muslim. The United States and its allies use the Hong Kong and Xinjiang cases to put pressure on China; people in Hong Kong and Xinjiang would be delusional if they believe that the US actually cares about democracy and Muslims.

In 1965, at the urging of several national liberation movements and governments in eastern Africa, the People’s Republic of China began to work with them to build the Tanzam Railway or the Great Uhuru Railway. This railway cut through old colonial boundaries that isolated Zambia and kept Tanzania from the interior of the continent. Mao told Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere that – despite China’s own poverty – as a national liberation project, the Chinese Revolution was ‘duty bound’ to assist their comrades in Africa to build the longest railroad on the continent. This is what they did.

China in Africa. For the past decade, the US and the Europeans have complained that China is the new colonial power in Africa. It is true that Chinese investment into Africa has increased astronomically, but in many countries the main economic partner remains the old colonial adversary. Nonetheless, this narrative of China as a colonial power is not about facts, but it is to serve a purpose – to disparage China’s commercial strategy in the Global South and the challenge that it poses to the hegemony of the US and its allies. The actual procedure from China is well-described in the 2013 Human Development Report: ‘China is providing preferential loans and setting up training programmes to modernize the garment and textile sectors in African countries. China has encouraged its mature industries such as leather to move closer to the supply chain in Africa and its modern firms in telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, electronics and construction to enter joint ventures with African businesses’. A few years ago, I asked Tanzania’s former Foreign Minister Ibrahim Kaduma what he thought of Chinese commercial interests in Africa. ‘African states need to come up with their own assessment of their path forward’, he said; they should not be guided by Western fearmongering.

Ta Men, Snow, 2016.

From February 2018, various dispute settlement mechanisms – including the Strategic Economic Dialogue – set up by the US and China have failed to operate. The most recent ‘phase one’ deal creates new platforms for discussion and debate and provides a roadmap to settle the chaos unleashed by this trade war. But this agreement is a ceasefire – not a peace treaty. The contests will continue; instability will remain. ‘Chaos and disorder’, as the Tsinghua University scholars write, will be the way ahead.

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By PRESS RELEASE
NAIROBI, Kenya, Jan 16 2020 (IPS-Partners)

The United Nations Country Team in Kenya is deeply distressed by the rising cases of terrorist attacks on schools, teachers and learners, especially in the north-eastern regions of Kenya. While we stand in solidarity with the affected communities, we reiterate that acts of terror and hate are even more egregious when they target innocent, unarmed civilians including children.

The bombings of schools and the killing of civilians violate international humanitarian law. We wish to remind all armed groups that whatever their grievances, they must uphold their obligations and cease targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure, including schools. Key services and programmes, delivered by the government and other partners, for children and communities should not be targets of armed combat.

It is especially troubling that the most affected regions are already lagging behind in school attendance rates. We recognize that school staff who are traumatised by such incidents face the agonising dilemma of whether they should continue in the job under such threats. Acts of terrorism should not be another reason for the children in those regions to slip further behind.

As the UN Country Team in Kenya, we are determined to entrench our engagement with National and County Governments to implement the pillars of the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy, including addressing the conditions conducive to the spread of terrorism, building capacity to prevent and combat terrorism and ensuring respect for human rights and the rule of law as the fundamental basis for the fight against terrorism.”

We commit to working with other stakeholders as we pursue the UN value of making children’s human and civil rights a lived reality for all children in Kenya.

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Protesters forming the Hong Kong Way hold up their cell phone lights while standing on a busy road in Sham Shui Po, where double decker buses often passed through, on Aug. 23. Human Rights Watch has blasted China’s government for undermining global interests and interventions with regards to human rights issues. Credit: Laurel Chor/IPS

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 16 2020 (IPS)

China is currently under heavy scrutiny for its massive human rights violations across different sections, Human Rights Watch (HRW) head Kenneth Roth said on Wednesday. 

At the launch of World Report 2020, which focuses largely on China’s record of violating human rights for both its citizens domestically as well as abroad, Roth blasted the country’s government for undermining global interests and interventions with regards to human rights issues.

Roth, who was denied access to Hong Kong over the weekend, said at the launch that China is “using diplomatic clout to silence global institutions”. He also heavily criticised the United Nations Secretary General for not holding China accountable for its human rights abuses. 

“At the U.N. headquarters, a major Chinese government priority has been avoiding discussion of its conduct in Xinjiang,” he said. “U.N. Secretary General António Guterres has been unwilling to publicly demand an end to China’s mass detention of its Muslims.”

On Wednesday, Stéphane Dujarric, Guterres’ spokesperson told reporters during a briefing that the Secretary General had previously spoken out on this issue on a number of occasions and raised a number of issues with his Chinese counterparts. He reiterated the Secretary General’s position which is based on principles surrounding “full respect for the unity and territorial integrity of China,” protection of human rights in the “fight against terrorism” and the importance of “each community to “feel that its identity is fully respected.”  

He was unable to respond to specific allegations by Roth that China continues to “avoid discussion of its conduct in Xinjiang” at the U.N.  In September HRW released a report of the “Chinese government’s mass arbitrary detention, torture, and mistreatment of Turkic Muslims”. 

Suu Kyi’s ‘appalling’ efforts 

Meanwhile, Roth also echoed thoughts from experts who have previously said that one of the reasons the Security Council had not been able to take steps against Myanmar is because of pressure from China. 

In November, on the heels of a lawsuit being filed against Myanmar by the Gambia, Akila Radhakrishnan of the Global Justice Center expressed similar concerns to IPS.

“Security council has consistently failed to act because of China — there’s no possibility of any strong action,” Radhakrishnan had said, reiterating why it’s important for states to directly take action against Myanmar.  

In that regard, especially with Roth’s concerns about China “intimidation of other governments” with threats, one issue of concern would be China’s relations with the Gambia, which has grown in the past few years. 

When asked, Roth told IPS he wasn’t aware if the Gambia was going to suffer any threats from China given its actions against Myanmar, but he said Aung San Suu Kyi leading the defence in the case is “appalling.” 

“One element of this that is not generally appreciated is the initial hearing that took place a few weeks ago was actually not about the merits of the genocide case, it was about the provisional measures,” he said. 

Provisional measures in the case of international law ensures that the main concern at the centre of the suite is not destroyed while the case is pending, which in this case would mean Myanmar imposes measures to refrain from any acts of genocide against the Rohingya community, and would ensure protecting the Rohingya community still in Myanmar. 

“It was about protecting the roughly 450,000 Rohingyas who are still in Rakhine state, still within Myanmar,” Roth said. “So these are the people who are living terrified, displaced…unable to move. They are extremely at risk of the same violence that sent 730,000 compatriots fleeing to Bangladesh a couple years ago.”

He said Suu Kyi’s move implies that she isn’t just defending the past atrocities of Myanmar against Rohingya people. 

“It’s not just defending past action that she was there for,” he said, “she was defending the future.”

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Zimbabwe needs urgent economic and political reforms to transform its economy amidst a growing national crisis, researchers say as more than 7 million Zimbabwean are food insecure owing to a projected 50 percent fall in the 2019 cereal harvest. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Jan 16 2020 (IPS)

Zimbabwe needs urgent economic and political reforms to transform its economy amidst a growing national crisis, researchers say in a new study that urges swift policy changes and a sound financial framework to attract investment.

The country has been reeling from one of the worst droughts in decades, with the United Nation’s World Food Programme (WFP) identifying Zimbabwe as one of the 15 critical emergencies around the world at risk of crisis without rapid intervention.

• More than 7 million Zimbabwean are food insecure owing to a projected 50 percent fall in the 2019 cereal harvest. This month the WFP is doubling its assistance to reach 4.1 million people who are hardest hit in rural areas.

But the study, G20 Compact with Africa: No Reformers, No Compact- The Zimbabwean Case Study,  states that the G20 Compact with Africa (CwA) investment framework, initiated by the G20 countries in 2017, could support Zimbabwe’s economic transformation only if Zimbabwe was committed to undertaking reforms.

• The voluntary compact has been signed by 12 African countries to date, including Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Senegal, Togo and Tunisia. Zimbabwe is not a signatory.
• The compact seeks to stimulate economic growth, create employment and nurture investment. Through this partnership, African governments are responsible for spearheading reforms that will make their countries attractive to international investors.
• The focus of the CwA is to promote a sustainable development framework in those African countries that accepted the invitation to be part of the initiative, in an attempt to attract private investors. The framework is a three-tiered approach to reforming three economic fundamentals – macroeconomics, business and finance.

“As a reform strategy, the CwA framework has the potential to support Zimbabwe’s economic transformation agenda,” the study published last week by the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA), an independent public policy think tank, stated. It further noted that the compact was relevant to Zimbabwe’s re-engagement agenda and the Transitional Stabilisation Programme (TSP), which was introduced in 2018 as a blue print to turn around the economy.

But a crisis of governance and financial stewardship has long been stalking Zimbabwe, a Southern African nation that was once a model of economic success and democracy in Africa. Life has become difficult for its citizens who have to battle with a high cost of living and many things are in short supply from water to electricity to monetary currency, jobs, food and even political freedoms.  

The report pointed out that Zimbabwe’s economic woes are multi-faceted — a result of a combination of factors, including economic mismanagement, chaotic land reform, indigenisation policies, political instability and fiscal mismanagement driven by corruption.

Cold reception for compact

Yet despite its relevance, the compact has failed to raise enthusiasm among Zimbabwean policymakers, and few economic stakeholders are aware of it, the study found, pointing out that the Zimbabwe government is desperate and preoccupied with finding a quick solution to the economic crisis.

The study also made a note that there is no reform culture among the custodians of reforms in Zimbabwe.

Besides, the country’s multilateral debt, estimated at over $8,2 billion, has prevented any potential inroads with the international organisations involved with the compact.

“Clearance of multilateral debt arrears: the sanctions rhetoric seems to have taken the centre
stage ahead of reform implementation,” noted the study, adding that, “This behaviour has promoted corruption and stands in the way of reforms; hence there is no CwA for Zimbabwe.”

Economic analyst, John Robertson, said nobody agrees with the government on the point of economic sanctions imposed by the Western countries on individuals accused of human rights abuses in Zimbabwe.

“The sanctions are not applied to the country; the sanctions did not cause the country’s failure. The failure is caused by our decision to close down our biggest industries,” Robertson told IPS, referring to the destruction of the agriculture sector and the collapse of the manufacturing sector.

Poor policy choices

“The policy choices that we made have caused so much damage to our productive sectors starting with agriculture,” said Robertson, adding, “We imposed upon ourselves a serious handicap when we said the land in the country no longer has market value land so [people with] land can no longer borrow against ownership rights to that land because the land is now the property of the state.”

David Moore, researcher and political economist at the University of Johannesburg, told IPS that if the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) party had maintained its neo-liberal and white-farmer-friendly economic promises it might have kept the “west” on its side.

But cabals and corruption cannot be dismantled – they are the pillars of the party, he said. And so the military-party complex so tight that it cannot be untied: they are integral parts of the country’s political economy.

Academic and social commentator, Rudo Gaidzanwa, concurred saying it will take pushing to get ZANU (PF) ruling party and its military allies to undertake political and social reforms.

“The types of political and economic reforms that the civilians want will undermine the interests of the militarist elements in the state and the security sector,” Gaidzanwa, a Sociology Professor at the University of Zimbabwe, told IPS.

“ZANU won’t stand for anything that undermines their hold over the state and the society. It is not likely that any meaningful reform will occur unless dramatic social and political changes occur in Zimbabwe,” she said, adding that the ZANU PF led-government and elites have used economic sanctions as a convenient excuse to evade responsibility for economic and social crises.

Sanctions have not prevented the president and his cohorts from pillaging mineral resources. The current chaos was ideal for pillaging resources and undermining the rule of law and democracy, she said.

• Zimbabwe’s late president Robert Mugabe, who was ousted from power in November 2017, is believed to have looted hundreds of millions of dollars, though no exact figure has been given.
• Tendai Biti, Zimbabwe’s finance minister between 2009-2013, told Deutsche Welle that Mugabe and his family where not the only ones responsible for looting the state and that during his term of office some $15 billion had “disappeared through other channels”.
• Last July the country’s auditor general released a report that since Mugabe’s ouster, executives at state-owned enterprises had mismanaged millions of dollars, spending the money to their personal benefit.

“Rigged elections are an issue because they prevent the will of the people from prevailing,” Gaidzanwa told IPS. “The present situation over contested presidential elections between (Nelson) Chamisa and (Emerson) Mnangagwa is symptomatic of that struggle…These issues have dogged our elections for decades and remain unresolved hence our dire economic and political situation.”

• After Mugabe was ousted from power Zimbabweans went to the polls in July 2018 to elect a new leader, with Mnangagwa winning 50.8 percent of the voted compared to Chamisa’s 44.3 percent.
• The results were disputed.

Economist and former parliamentarian, Eddie Cross sees the situation differently, saying Zimbabwe, despite its current challenges, has a good start to turn around its economic fortunes.

“We have a fiscal surplus, government salaries are down to a third of the budget from over 95 percent, we have a balance of payments surplus and nearly $1 billion in bank accounts,” Cross said, adding that Zimbabwe’s domestic debt has been devalued and exports are highly profitable.

“[Political] Stability is no longer an issue – it’s a done deal, what is a problem is financing and this is going to be a challenge because we really have to look after ourselves,” Cross, a member of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe’s Monetary Committee, told IPS in an interview. “A couple of billion dollars would be useful. Perhaps we can persuade Mrs. [Grace] Mugabe to bring some money back from abroad.”

Cross believes Zimbabwe can benefit from the G20 CwA even though the country is a pariah state.

“I think Brexit is important and also the IMF and if we play our cards right and get on with reforms I see no reason why we cannot be in a very different place in 2021.”

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• Zimbabwe’s Resettled Farmers Hawking Cigarettes to Survive

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By Pierpaolo Grippa, Jochen Schmittmann, and Felix Suntheim
WASHINGTON DC, Jan 16 2020 (IPS)

Climate change is already a reality. Ever-more-ferocious cyclones and extended droughts lead to the destruction of infrastructure and the disruption of livelihoods and contribute to mass migration.

Actions to combat rising temperatures, inadequate though they may have been so far, have the potential to drive dislocation in the business world as fossil fuel giants awaken to the need for renewable sources of energy and automakers accelerate investments in cleaner vehicles.

But measuring economic costs of climate change remains a work in progress. We can assess the immediate costs of changing weather patterns and more frequent and intense natural disasters, but most of the potential costs lie beyond the horizon of the typical economic analysis.

The economic impact of climate change will likely accelerate, though not smoothly. Crucially for the coming generations, the extent of the damage will depend on policy choices that we make today.

Policymakers and investors increasingly recognize climate change’s important implications for the financial sector. Climate change affects the financial system through two main channels (see Chart 1).

The first involves physical risks, arising from damage to property, infrastructure, and land. The second, transition risk, results from changes in climate policy, technology, and consumer and market sentiment during the adjustment to a lower-carbon economy.

Exposures can vary significantly from country to country. Lower- and middle-income economies are typically more vulnerable to physical risks.

For financial institutions, physical risks can materialize directly, through their exposures to corporations, households, and countries that experience climate shocks, or indirectly, through the effects of climate change on the wider economy and feedback effects within the financial system.

Exposures manifest themselves through increased default risk of loan portfolios or lower values of assets. For example, rising sea levels and a higher incidence of extreme weather events can cause losses for homeowners and diminish property values, leading to greater risks in mortgage portfolios. Corporate credit portfolios are also at risk, as highlighted by the bankruptcy of California’s largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric.

In what The Wall Street Journal called the first “climate-change bankruptcy” (Gold 2019), rapid climatic changes caused prolonged droughts in California that dramatically increased the risk of fires from Pacific Gas and Electric’s operations.

Tighter financial conditions might follow if banks reduce lending, in particular when climate shocks affect many institutions simultaneously.

For insurers and reinsurers, physical risks are important on the asset side, but risks also arise from the liability side as insurance policies generate claims with a higher frequency and severity than originally expected.

There is evidence that losses from natural disasters are already increasing. As a result, insurance is likely to become more expensive or even unavailable in at-risk areas of the world.

Climate change can make banks, insurers, and reinsurers less diversified, because it can increase the likelihood or impact of events previously considered uncorrelated, such as droughts and floods.

Transition risks materialize on the asset side of financial institutions, which could incur losses on exposure to firms with business models not built around the economics of low carbon emissions.

Fossil fuel companies could find themselves saddled with reserves that are, in the words of Bank of England Governor Mark Carney (2015), “literally unburnable” in a world moving toward a low-carbon global economy.

These firms could see their earnings decline, businesses disrupted, and funding costs increase because of policy action, technological change, and consumer and investor demands for alignment with policies to tackle climate change.

Coal producers, for example, already grapple with new or expected policies curbing carbon emissions, and a number of large banks have pledged not to provide financing for new coal facilities.

The share prices of US coal mining companies reflect this “carbon discount” as well as higher financing costs and have been underperforming relative to those of companies holding clean energy assets.

Risks can also materialize through the economy at large, especially if the shift to a low-carbon economy proves abrupt (as a consequence of prior inaction), poorly designed, or difficult to coordinate globally (with consequent disruptions to international trade).

Financial stability concerns arise when asset prices adjust rapidly to reflect unexpected realizations of transition or physical risks. There is some evidence that markets are partly pricing in climate change risks, but asset prices may not fully reflect the extent of potential damage and policy action required to limit global warming to 2˚C or less.

Central banks and financial regulators increasingly acknowledge the financial stability implications of climate change. For example, the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), an expanding group that currently comprises 42 members, has embarked on the task of integrating climate-related risks into supervision and financial stability monitoring.

Given the large shifts in asset prices and catastrophic weather-related losses that climate change may cause, prudential policies should adapt to recognize systemic climate risk—for example, by requiring financial institutions to incorporate climate risk scenarios into their stress tests.

In the United Kingdom, prudential regulators have incorporated climate change scenarios into stress tests of insurance firms that cover both physical and transition risks.

Efforts to incorporate climate-related risks into regulatory frameworks face important challenges, however. Capturing climate risk properly requires assessing it over long horizons and using new methodological approaches, so that prudential frameworks adequately reflect actual risks.

It is crucial to ensure that the efforts to bring in climate risk strengthen, rather than weaken, prudential regulation. Policies such as allowing financial institutions to hold less capital against debt simply because the debt is labeled as green could easily backfire—through increased leverage and financial instability—if the underlying risks in that debt have not been adequately understood and measured.

Climate change will affect monetary policy, too, by slowing productivity growth (for example, through damage to health and infrastructure) and heightening uncertainty and inflation volatility.

This can justify the adaptation of monetary policy to the new challenges, within the limits of central bank mandates. Central banks should revise the frameworks for their refinancing operations to incorporate climate risk analytics, possibly applying larger haircuts to assets materially exposed to physical or transition risks.

Central banks can also lead by example by integrating sustainability considerations into the investment decisions for the portfolios under their management (i.e., their own funds, pension funds and, to the extent possible, international reserves), as recommended by the NGFS (2019) in its first comprehensive report.

Carbon pricing and other fiscal policies have a primary role in reducing emissions and mobilizing revenues (see “Putting a Price on Pollution” in this issue of F&D), but the financial sector has an important complementary role.

Financial institutions and markets already provide financial protection through insurance and other risk-sharing mechanisms, such as catastrophe bonds, to partly absorb the cost of disasters.

But the financial system can play an even more fundamental role, by mobilizing the resources needed for investments in climate mitigation (reducing greenhouse gas emissions) and adaptation (building resilience to climate change) in response to price signals, such as carbon prices.

In other words, if policymakers implement policies to price in externalities and provide incentives for the transition to a low-carbon economy, the financial system can help achieve these goals efficiently.

Global investment requirements for addressing climate change are estimated in the trillions of US dollars, with investments in infrastructure alone requiring about $6 trillion per year up to 2030 (OECD 2017). Most of these investments are likely to be intermediated through the financial system.

From this point of view, climate change represents for the financial sector as much a source of opportunity as a source of risk.

The growth of sustainable finance (the integration of environmental, social, and governance criteria into investment decisions) across all asset classes shows the increasing importance that investors attribute to climate change, among other nonfinancial considerations.

Estimates of the global asset size of sustainable finance range from $3 trillion to $31 trillion. While sustainable investing started in equities, strong investor demand and policy support spurred issuance of green bonds, growing the stock to an estimated $590 billion in August 2019 from $78 billion in 2015.

Banks are also beginning to adjust their lending policies by, for example, giving discounts on loans for sustainable projects.

Sustainable finance can contribute to climate change mitigation by providing incentives for firms to adopt less carbon-intensive technologies and specifically financing the development of new technologies.

Channels through which investors can achieve this goal include engaging with company management, advocating for low-carbon strategies as investor activists, and lending to firms that are leading in regard to sustainability. All these actions send price signals, directly and indirectly, in the allocation of capital.

However, measuring the impact that sustainable investments have on their environmental targets remains challenging. There are concerns over unsubstantiated claims of assets’ green-compliant nature, known as “greenwashing.”

There is a risk that investors may become reluctant to invest at the scale necessary to counter or mitigate climate change, especially if policy action to address climate change is lagging or insufficient.

The analysis of risks and vulnerabilities—and advising its members on macro-financial policies—are at the core of the IMF’s mandate. The integration of climate change risks into these activities is critical given the magnitude and global nature of the risks climate change is posing to the world.

An area where the IMF can especially contribute is understanding the macro-financial transmission of climate risks. One aspect of this is further improving stress tests, such as those within the Financial Sector Assessment Program, the IMF’s comprehensive and in-depth analysis of member countries’ financial sectors.

Stress testing is a key component of the program, with these stress tests often capturing the physical risks related to disasters, such as insurance losses and nonperforming loans associated with natural disasters.

Assessments for The Bahamas and Jamaica are recently published examples, with a scenario-based stress test analyzing the macroeconomic impact of a severe hurricane in the former and a massive natural disaster in the latter.

More assessments of this kind are in progress or planned for other countries. The IMF is also conducting an analysis of financial system exposure to transition risk in an oil-producing country.

The IMF has recently joined the NGFS and is collaborating with its members to develop an analytical framework for assessing climate-related risks.

Closing data gaps is also crucial. Only with accurate and adequately standardized reporting of climate risks in financial statements can investors discern companies’ actual exposures to climate-related financial risks. There are promising efforts to support private sector disclosures of such risks.

But these disclosures are often voluntary and uneven across countries and asset classes. Comprehensive climate stress testing by central banks and supervisors would require much better data.

The IMF supports public and private sector efforts to further spread the adoption of climate disclosures across markets and jurisdictions, particularly by following the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (2017). Greater standardization would also improve the comparability of information in financial statements on climate risks.

The potential impact of climate change compels us to think through, in an empirical fashion, the economic costs of climate change. Each destructive hurricane and every unnaturally parched landscape will chip away at global output, just as the road to a low-carbon economy will escalate the cost of energy sources as externalities are no longer ignored and old assets are rendered worthless.

On the other hand, carbon taxes and energy-saving measures that reduce the emission of greenhouse gases will drive the creation of new technologies. Finance will have to play an important role in managing this transition, for the benefit of future generations.

*This article draws on Chapter 6 of the October 2019 Global Financial Stability Report and was prepared under the guidance of Martin Čihák and Evan Papageorgiou of the IMF’s Monetary and Capital Markets Department.

The post Climate Change and Financial Risk appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Pierpaolo Grippa is a senior economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Jochen Schittmann is the IMF’s resident representative in Singapore and Felix Suntheim is a financial sector expert in the IMF’s Monetary and Capital Markets Department*.

The post Climate Change and Financial Risk appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Planeta Hatuleke, a small scale farmer of Pemba District in Southern Zambia, stands in a maize field. This year, she hopes that she will not be one of the country’s 2.3 million food insecure people thanks to the climate smart agriculture techniques she implemented while planting her crop in November. Courtesy: Friday Phiri

By Friday Phiri
LUSAKA and PEMBA DISTRICT, Zambia, Jan 15 2020 (IPS)

It is early Saturday morning and Planeta Hatuleke, a small scale farmer of Pemba District in Southern Zambia, awakens to the comforting sound of rainfall. As the locals say, the “heavens have opened” and it is raining heavily after a prolonged dry spell. 

“This is welcome after two weeks of a dry spell,” says Hatuleke with a sigh of relief. “The rainfall pattern has not been consistent so far; we could be headed for a repeat of last season” she adds pessimistically.

• The 2018/19 farming season was characterised by drought and prolonged dry spells, which, according to the government Disaster Management and Mitigation Unit (DMMU), left 2.3 million people severely food insecure and in need of humanitarian food assistance.

Hatuleke along with her 8-member family members are part of the hunger stricken population. Last farming season, the family harvested only five 50Kg-bags of maize, 10 short of their annual food requirements.

“It has not been easy to feed my family since the five bags finished. I am grateful to government for relief food support but for big families like mine, we have to supplement through other means,” says the 55-year old widow. “As a family, we have been surviving on sales from our gardening activities.”

• Statistics from DMMU show that at least 70,000 metric tonnes of relief food (maize grain and maize meal) has been distributed to the affected people between September 2019 and January 2020.
• According World Food Programme (WFP) country director for Zambia, Jennifer Bitonde, the United Nations’ food agency “requires $36 million to effectively support the government in responding to the crisis.”
• WFP is currently supporting the government’s response by delivering government-supplied maize meal, as well as by procuring and delivering pulses to ensure a nutrition-sensitive food basket. WFP is also working closely with partners to monitor food distributions and guarantee that resources reach those most in need.
  • In a statement after receiving a contribution of $3.39 million from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to help meet the immediate food needs of drought-affected people in Zambia, Bitonde added that “USAID’s contribution represents approximately 10 percent of the total needs and will allow WFP to ensure that drought-affected people will not go to bed hungry during this year’s lean season.’’
  • Other partners who have made a contribution to WFP Zambia include the Swedish government, which has contributed $2 million, and the Italian government with a contribution of $ 610,000.

Last October, the three U.N. food agencies—the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and WFP—called for urgent funding to avert a major hunger crisis and for the international community to step up investment in long-term measures to combat the impact of climate shocks and build the capacity of communities and countries to withstand them.

They warned that a record 45 million people across the 16-nation Southern African Development Community would be severely food insecure in the next six months starting from October 2019.

At the time, they reported that there were more than 11 million people experiencing “crisis” or “emergency” levels of food insecurity (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Phases 3 and 4) in nine countries: Angola, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Zambia, Madagascar, Malawi, Namibia, Eswatini and Lesotho. 

“Late rains, extended dry periods, two major cyclones and economic challenges have proved a recipe for disaster for food security and livelihoods across Southern Africa,” said Alain Onibon, FAO’s Sub-Regional Coordinator for Southern Africa.

“As it could take many farming communities at least two to three growing seasons to return to normal production, immediate support is vital.  Now is the time to scale up agricultural emergency response. We need to ensure farmers and agro-pastoralists take advantage of the forecasted good rains, assuming they happen, as this will be crucial in helping them rebuild their livelihoods.”

While Southern Africa has experienced normal rainfall in just one of the last five growing seasons, persistent drought, back-to-back cyclones and flooding have wreaked havoc on harvests in a region overly dependent on rain-fed, smallholder agriculture.

Interestingly, Zambia is experiencing both climate extremes at the same time. While farmers in the southwestern parts of the country are anxious about the rainfall pattern that has been erratic so far, their counterparts in the northeast are battling flash floods, adding pressure on the already overstretched resource base.

Over 300 families have been reported as being affected by floods in the Mambwe and Lumezi districts of Zambia’s Eastern Province.

And Zambian President Edgar Lungu, continues to urge government technocrats to work at finding a lasting solution to the climate problem.

“So as we provide relief, I think that we should put our heads together. My Permanent Secretaries are here so we can work together to find a lasting solution,” said Lungu when he toured and interacted with flood victims on Jan 9.  

• It is unanimously agreed globally that climate change is due to human activities that cause damage (either directly or indirectly) to the environment. Such activities include overexploitation of natural resources, pollution and deforestation, among others.

Experiencing a critical energy deficit, with over 2 million food-insecure people to feed due to a climate-induced droughts and flash floods in a single year, are key lessons for leaders and ordinary people alike.

This December, at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP25), Zambia’s Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources Ndashe Yumba highlighted the adverse effects of climate change on his country’s natural resource-sensitive sectors, such as energy and agriculture, and how the country was moving away from a business-as-usual approach.

“There is still increasing evidence that climate change is negatively impacting critical sectors of our country,” said Yumba during a high-level event at COP25.

“In the recent past, drastic reduction in precipitation and rising temperatures in Zambia has led to a reduced agricultural productivity by about 16 percent and subsequently slowed down our economic growth. While Zambia is still pursuing her aspirations on socio-economic development, it is mindful of the need to maintain a healthy environment in order to achieve sustainable development…a recipe to a healthy climate is a healthy environment,” he added.

Back in Pemba District in Southern Zambia, Hatuleke is hoping that climate smart agricultural principles which are routed in sustainable environmental management, and which she has recently implemented, will bring her a better harvest this year. 

“I ripped my field and planted early; just after the first rains in mid-November and as you can see, my maize is at tussling stage,” she says. “I am hopeful of a good harvest, provided it consistently rains in the remaining half of the season.”

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A U.S. soldier stands watch at the Kindi IDP Resettlement Center near Baghdad, Iraq, Nov. 16, 2009. Credit: U.S. Navy Photo

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 15 2020 (IPS)

Pat Buchanan, a senior advisor to three US Presidents and twice candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, once infamously described the United States Congress as “Israeli-occupied territory” -– apparently because of its unrelentingly blind support for the Jewish state.

Never mind post-1967 Gaza, West Bank and the Golan Heights.

And now, with Iraq threatening to “kick out” the US military and the Trump administration refusing to leave the country, is Iraq turning out to be “US occupied territory”?

Last week the Iraqi parliament demanded, in a vote mostly by Shia legislators, that US troops numbering over 5,200 leave Iraq.

But the Trump administration has refused to concede to the demand prompting Iraq to accuse the US of violating sovereign territory and perhaps the UN charter.

Stephen Zunes, Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco who has written extensively on Middle East politics, told IPS: “This is a clear violation of Iraqi sovereignty”.

Having foreign forces within a country’s international border against the wishes of the host government and without a treaty commitment allowing them to be there is in effect a foreign military occupation and would give the Iraqis the legal right to use military force against them, said Zunes who serves as coordinator of the program in Middle Eastern Studies.

Currently, the US has several military bases in Iraq, most of them described as Forwarding Operating Bases (FOB) going back to 2003.

These include Contingency Operating Base (COB), Contingency Operating Site (COS), Combat Outpost (COP), Patrol Base (PB), Outpost, Logistic Base (Log Base), Fire Base (FB), Convoy Support Center (CSC), Logistic Support Area (LSA) and Joint Security Station (JSS).

Perhaps most vital is the Green Zone a 10-square-kilometer (3.9 sq mi) area in central Baghdad, that was the governmental center of the Coalition Provisional Authority during the occupation of Iraq after the American-led 2003 invasion and now remains the center of the US and international presence in the city.

When the Iranians retaliated against the drone-killing of Major General Qassim Suleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force, they hit the US military base Ayn Al Asad in western Iraq with a barrage of missiles last week.

That base hosts the largest number of US troops in Iraq.

And Iraq accused both the US and Iran of violating its national sovereignty with dual military attacks on Iraqi territory.

Since the US invasion of Iraq by the Bush administration in 2003, there have been more than 200,000 civilians who have been killed or injured—an invasion described as Washington’s greatest foreign policy disaster since Vietnam.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has threatened to impose sanctions on Iraq if it continues to demand US withdrawal from the country.

“If they do ask us to leave, and if we don’t do it on a friendly basis” President Trump was quoted as saying, “we will charge them sanctions, like they’ve never seen before ever. It will make Iranian sanctions look somewhat tame.”

The US also argues that its military presence in Iraq is to help Iraqis fight ISIS designated a “terrorist group” by the US State Department.

Norman Solomon, founder and executive director of the Washington-based Institute for Public Accuracy (IPA), a consortium of policy researchers and analysts, told IPS “history shows that respect for Iraqi sovereignty has never figured into the U.S. government’s calculations.”

“Rhetoric has sometimes sounded nice, but the actual policy has revolved around the precept of “might makes right“

What’s happening now is consistent with that policy, sometimes more gracefully implemented with liberal verbiage from the White House, he pointed out.

The latest dynamics involve an approach to geopolitics that reflects a belief in Washington that the United States has the right to work its will on the world as much as feasible, said Solomon, IPA’s coordinator of its ExposeFacts program.

Zunes said Trump’s refusal to consider a withdrawal is not surprising, however.

Republicans, along with some leading Democrats and prominent media pundits, insisted that President Obama should have kept U.S. troops in Iraq beyond the 2011 deadline by which President Bush and the Iraqi government had agreed to complete the withdrawal.

This would have also been illegal. Obama was roundly criticized for his insistence on living up to the agreement and international law.

“It will be interesting to see how Congress and the media react to Trump’s defiance”, said Zunes, who is also senior policy analyst for the Foreign Policy in Focus project of the Institute for Policy Studies .

Asked if there was a possible intervention by the UN, Solomon said what the United Nations can do about such matters is contingent on the extent to which the UN can extricate itself from U.S. veto power and intimidation of governments with political, military and economic blackmail.

“There is little that’s coherent about U.S. policies beyond flagrant self-interest for its extreme arrogance and military-industrial complex”, said Solomon, author of “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death”

Asked about the issue of sovereignty and violation of the UN charter, UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told reporters January 13: “ The status… as far as I understand, the status of US forces in Iraq is under a Status of Forces Agreement, which is negotiated bilaterally between Iraq and the United States, and those discussions should take place between the United States and Iraq.”

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