Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Anis Chowdhury
KUALA LUMPUR and SYDNEY, Oct 22 2019 (IPS)

Public or state development banking will be vital to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, argues UNCTAD’s Trade and Development Report 2019 (TDR 2019).

Ongoing World Bank led efforts seek to leverage private finance via shadow banking by using public money to guarantee handsome returns managed by giant investment houses. Such financialization introduce new costs and risks to financing investments for sustainable development, decent work and renewable energy.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

TDR 2019 is critical of financialization, which encourages speculation at the expense of productive investments in the real economy. Instead, public banking is far more likely to promote productive investments, and should be enabled to do so.

Development banks different
Public banks are different from private banks, and more likely to serve the long-term public interest, investing in sectors and locations that private commercial banks are more likely to ignore.

Unlike other kinds of state-owned financial institutions, such as state-owned commercial banks or insurance companies, public development banks (PDBs) usually have specific mandates to be more than mere financial institutions.

Certain social and economic objectives are identified to guide their operations. Their achievements are typically due to successfully pursuing positive externalities over the medium and long-term, rather than focusing on short-term returns alone.

Thus, PDBs are supposed to generate both financial returns as well as ‘development dividends’. Sustainable development oriented investments generally involve benefits which are not only commercial, which tends to be the main, if not sole criterion of commercial banking.

PDBs also help counteract the pro-cyclical nature of private finance, which typically fails to adequately finance small enterprises, however innovative, infrastructure as well as environmental projects urgently needed to make economies more dynamic, inclusive and sustainable.

Generally successful, but underappreciated
Despite constant discouragement and many PDB closures as well as ‘commercializations’, PDBs survive in many developing countries. In recent years, Southern-led and Southern-oriented banks and funds have added hundreds of billions of dollars to such finance.

A recent book found PDBs in China, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Peru generally successful. The PDBs studied served as efficient instruments of national development strategies, helping to overcome major ‘market failures’ flexibly.

Anis Chowdhury

Researchers have also found that PDBs can be both profitable and efficient while being socially proactive and progressive in appropriate institutional settings. Others have shown that PDBs can better avoid inefficient credit allocation as commercial banks cannot fully internalize benefits from publicly desirable projects.

Potential not realized
UNCTAD notes that most public banks, especially development banks, are insufficiently capitalized to be effective in their publicly assigned roles. Nevertheless, some PDBs are very significant, e.g., the China Development Bank’s outstanding loan portfolio is over 13.4% of China’s GDP, while the Korean Development Bank’s is 10.5% of Korea’s GDP.

But PDBs in other countries — including India, Russia, South Africa, Mexico and Malaysia — have modest loan portfolios amounting to less than 2% of their countries’ GDPs.

Many PDBs’ low loan-to-equity ratios are due to imposed requirements to raise resources in capital markets, both at home and abroad. Thus, the scale of such PDB lending is limited by how markets view them, typically through the credit ratings’ lens.

Appropriate policy support crucial
TDR 2019 argues that greater policy support is necessary to enable public development banking to achieve its potential including by:

• Providing development and other public banks with more capital to scale up lending, including through direct financing;
• Supporting development banking with clear government mandates, performance indicators and accountability mechanisms valuing other criteria besides financial ones.
• Preventing PDBs from being subordinated to short-termist commercial criteria, or guaranteeing private investment returns, as recommended by the OECD and World Bank.
• Encouraging sovereign wealth funds, with assets estimated to be US$7.9 trillion, to direct resources in support of PDBs;
• Ensuring that bank regulators treat public banks, especially PDBs, more appropriately; development banks should be regulated suitably, recognizing their distinctive mandates, roles and operations;
• Reconsidering some governments’ insistence that their PDBs achieve high credit ratings; this task should be done by a credible international body of development finance institutions as credit rating agencies cannot be expected to challenge their own criteria;
• Using multilateral development banks to support green investments in developing countries as ‘green credit’ creation (including by quantitative easing’) is unlikely to be feasible in developing countries for fear of provoking exchange-rate and balance-of-payment crises;
• Freeing central banks from their typically narrow focus on price stability, usually by ‘inflation targeting’ in recent decades, to take on bolder, pro-active development roles. This should include creating and directing credit for sustaina

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By External Source
GENEVA, Oct 22 2019 (IPS)

In June 2019, the Secretary-General of the UN, António Guterres, launched the UN Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech. Respect for human rights, without any form of discrimination is one of the core fundamentals of this strategy.

In a recent interview with the UN Human Rights Office,  UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide Adama Dieng discussed how to combat the rising issue of hate speech. 

 

OHCHR: You are leading the UN’s new strategy to counter hate speech. What are some concrete measures that we will take to “tackle the whole life cycle of hate speech, from its roots causes to its impact on societies”? 

The UN Strategy and Plan of Action to address hate speech set out 13 commitments. These commitments will have to be implemented globally, but also at the national level. They include a wide range of actions, including:

• increasing understanding and monitoring of hate speech and its impact on societies
• identifying and devising programs to address the drivers and root causes of hate speech
• supporting alternative and positive narratives to counter hate speech.

There are many ways in which societies can stand up against hate speech and its impact. The most important way is by ensuring that populations are resilient against hate speech and the divisions it seeks to achieve.

This is a huge program, which will require the involvement of Member States, civil society, the media, tech companies and other relevant stakeholders. It is also the responsibility of each and every individual.

 

OHCHR: There’s a radical contestation of what constitutes hate speech today.  But is hate speech really too subjective to be defined? Can you offer a definition of hate speech? Or is it impossible without endangering freedom of expression that is under global attack?

Let me first say that there is no international legal definition of hate speech. The characterization of what is hateful is controversial and disputed. However, the United Nations, has developed a working definition, not an international legal definition.

At the UN, we understand the term “hate speech” any kind of communication in speech, writing or behaviour, that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language with reference to a person or a group on the basis of who they are, in other words, based on their religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, colour, descent, gender or other identity factor.

This is often rooted in, and generates intolerance and hatred and, in certain contexts, can be demeaning and divisive.

At the UN, we also believe that freedom of opinion and expression is sacred; and that hate speech should never ever be confused with suppression of this freedom. Addressing hate speech does not mean limiting or prohibiting freedom of opinion and expression. It means keeping hate speech from turning into something more dangerous, particularly, incitement to discrimination, hostility and violence, which is prohibited in the international law, through the commitments set out in the Strategy and Plan of Action.

 

OHCHR: What are some of the most effective and powerful forms of social mobilization that you have seen against hate speech? What can we learn from them?

There are many ways in which societies can stand up against hate speech and its impact. The most important way is by ensuring that populations are resilient against hate speech and the divisions it seeks to achieve.

States are also responsible for ensuring that policies and programs of non-discrimination, inclusion and human rights are adequately applied. Other actors such as the media, religious actors, and every individual have a role and a responsibility to contribute to peaceful and inclusive societies. We need to mobilize the youth and invest in education.

We need to assert that diversity is richness, not a threat. In the 1930s, when hate speech was rising in Europe, no action was taken to tackle it. The result was the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews were killed.

We saw it also in Rwanda, where, within 100 days, nearly one million people were killed because of their ethnicity, because they were Tutsis. We saw it again in Myanmar, where over 700,000 Rohingya had to flee their country and find refuge in Bangladesh because the violence they faced. The instances of extreme violence were also preceded by hate speech.

 

OHCHR: What can every person do to combat hate speech? How can we better support everyone who is fighting it? 

We all have a role to play in countering hate speech. Today, many of us are connected through the internet. And even if we are not the targets of that hate speech, we need to get involved in addressing it, simply because we need to stand in solidarity with those who are being targeted.

We need to make sure that whoever is being subject to hate speech, feel supported. We need to come together to empower the voices of those victims.

We also need to include in the curricula in various schools around the world the emphasis on human rights and on prevention. One of the commitments of the Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech is for the the United Nations will convene an international conference on Education for Prevention with focus on addressing and countering hate speech which would involve Ministers of Education.

Watch Adama Dieng explain more about why hate speech is not protected in the video below.

 

 

 

This story was originally published by Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights

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By African Development Bank
WASHINGTON DC, Oct 21 2019 (IPS-Partners)

Rapid urbanization has provided most cities in the world with opportunities to provide more sustainable, vibrant, and prosperous centers for their citizens. But they must first address challenges such as inadequate infrastructure investments, pollution and congestion, and poor urban planning, according to a new report released today.

The report, Creating Livable Cities: Regional Perspectives, looks at urbanization trends across emerging and developing economies in Africa; Asia and the Pacific; Eastern Europe, Southern and Eastern Mediterranean; and Latin America and the Caribbean. It is a joint publication by four regional development banks (RDBs) operating in these regions—African Development Bank (AfDB), Asian Development Bank (ADB), European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

“Cities offer access to key infrastructure, institutions, and services for a good quality of life,” ADB President Takehiko Nakao said. “They can be centers of innovation for a more livable future for all. But realizing that potential requires forward thinking and flexible planning, adequate capacity at the municipal level, and good governance.”

Nakao took part in a launch event at the IDB headquarters today in Washington, D.C., with the presidents of the other three development banks: Mr. Akinwumi Adesina of the African Development Bank, Suma Chakrabarti of EBRD, and Luis Alberto Moreno of IDB.

The world’s urban population has grown from just 750 million in 1950 (or 31% of the total population) to 4.2 billion in 2018 (55% of the total population)—a number that is estimated to reach 5.2 billion in 2030 (60% of the total population). While the majority of leading economic hubs are still in advanced economies, the center of economic activity is moving toward the developing and emerging markets, the report says. Asia and Africa will account for 90% of urban population growth between 2018 and 2050, with more than a third of this growth to happen in just three countries—the People’s Republic of China (PRC), India, and Nigeria.

Although large and still dominant, megacities of more than 10 million people and national capitals are not the fastest-growing urban areas. Urban areas with fewer than 1 million residents account for 59% of the world’s urban population and are experiencing a faster growth rate across the regions, the report says.

President of the African Development Bank, Akinwumi Adesina said, “We are helping to open up rural areas to development as a means of reversing migration trends. To do this, we are investing in skill upgrades, creating jobs, providing access to SME finance for young men and women. Ultimately, we need to create livable and workable cities for the younger generation.”

Cities need large scale investments to develop and maintain infrastructure and services such as urban transport, water supply, sanitation, and solid waste management. In the face of rapid growth, overstretched services, skills shortages, and increased vulnerabilities to disasters are adding to cities’ environmental stress.

The publication examines the types of policy interventions and approaches needed to promote competitive, inclusive, equitable, and environmentally sustainable and climate-resilient cities—four factors that taken together make cities “livable.”

“RDBs play an important role in identifying, distilling, and diffusing knowledge and actions that can accelerate progress toward creating more livable cities,” the report says. Making cities more livable is one of the seven operational priorities of ADB’s Strategy 2030. ADB’s Livable Cities approach puts people and communities at the center of urban development, and promotes strengthening urban institutions through holistic and participatory urban planning and sustainable financing, and use of data and digital technologies to improve urban services to the residents.

Adesina called for increased regional development bank cooperation in information sharing, shared learning from existing diagnostic tools, and a joint action plan and collective effort to help create sustainable and livable cities.

Contact: Emeka Anuforo, Communication and External Relations Department, African Development Bank, email: a.anuforo@afdb.org

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A highly original research on poverty reduction has won the Nobel for economics.

By Raghav Gaiha
MANCHESTER, Oct 21 2019 (IPS-Partners)

I met late professor T.N. Srinivasan (popularly known as TN) a couple of months before he passed away in November 2018. Despite his original contributions to trade theory, ¬development economics, inequality and poverty, he never won the Nobel in economics. His colleague at Yale had once ¬remarked that TN would get not one but two Nobels. I was too much in awe of TN to ask this question but my friend asked him directly if he could think of an Indian economist who might win the Nobel for economics in the near future. He said, “Abhijit but not so soon”. He was right but not entirely.

After studying at University of Calcutta, Abhijit Banerjee went to Jawaharlal Nehru University and Harvard, where he completed his doctoral research. He then took up faculty positions at Princeton and in quick succession at Harvard and later at MIT, where he is the Ford Foundation inter¬national professor of economics.

He is that rare economist who moves effortlessly from abstruse aspects of information theory to applied microeconomics in different regions of the developing world. Although highly regarded in all fields that he has worked in, he (along with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer) is best known for pioneering research in formulating, refining and extending randomised control trials (RCTs) to understand and shed light on alleviation of global poverty. He and Duflo set up the Poverty Action Lab at MIT in 2003, which later became the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. This network has engaged in impact evaluation, policy outreach and capacity building in 81 countries.

They planned, refined and ¬extended ¬randomised control trials to alleviate global poverty.

What is an RCT? Borrowing an example from Abhijit’s research, take an experiment to examine the impact of textbooks on students’ test scores. The textbook is distributed to half the class randomly on a certain day. Say, six months later, a test is held and students are graded. If the score of the treatment group—the students who got the textbook—is higher than that of those who did not, it is valid to infer that the higher score is due to the textbook. Neither textbook distribution nor adding teachers improved the performance of the students. The failure of these two variables to influence the results is neither interesting nor surprising. However, scant attention is given to teacher absenteeism, which is rampant in rural schools.

Another widely cited example is the randomised evaluation of a group-lending microcredit programme in Hyderabad. A lender worked in 52 randomly selected neighbourhoods, leading to an 8.4 percentage point increase in take-up of microcredit. Small business investments and profits of pre-existing businesses increased, but consumption did not significantly grow. Two years later, after control areas had gained access to microcredit, but households in the treatment area had borrowed for longer and in larger amounts, very few significant differences persisted. But whether these findings are generalisable to other contexts is doubtful. So the verdict that microcredit is not the miracle it is claimed to be seems doubtful.

Is RCT the magic wand it is widely believed to be? Multi¬lateral agencies, governments and donors were quick to embrace it as it offered a simple tool to ¬assess policy impact. It is not uncommon to get ¬seduced by the charms of RCTs if you are not aware of their limitations.

Angus Deaton, another Nobel laureate, made a succinct appraisal of RCTs. Consider hypertension. There are two different drugs that ¬improve the condition. In clinical trials, one performs better than the other on average. However, management of hypertension may be more difficult in some cases and thus, a drug that is more effective on average may not be in those instances. So, while it is useful to know which drug is better on average, it is not so helpful where specific treatment is required.

Failure of the two educational experiments is attributed to limited learning of the students. Instead of relying on this ex-post observation, it would have been more helpful to embed these experiments in a theory of learning. There are also serious concerns about the spillover effects of an experiment in one village. By word of mouth, good practices may spread to the control group and neighbouring villages, compounding the difficulty of attribution to an intervention. Scaling up may depend on how an intervention is implemented and the context. Macro interventions (such as interest rate ¬reductions to revive the Indian economy), however, are not amenable to RCT as there is no control group.

These comments are not meant to denigrate Abhijit’s highly original and pathbreaking research. He is a worthy recipient of the Nobel. The claim, however,that RCTs have saved millions from abject poverty is exaggerated, if not misleading.

(The author is [Hon.] Professorial Research Fellow, Global Development Institute, Manchester. Views are personal.)

This story was originally published by Outlook

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Excerpt:

A highly original research on poverty reduction has won the Nobel for economics.

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Nigerian activists lobby African Finance ministers meeting. Credit: ActionAid

By Manuel F. Montes
NEW YORK, Oct 21 2019 (IPS)

Four years ago, UN member states proclaimed their ambitions for development in a document named “Transforming Our World”, also known as Agenda 2030.

Today, according to several assessments including of the UN’s inter-agency task force on financing for development (FfD) transformation has fallen off-track. It has received too little money, political commitment and action to change the workings of the global economy. Agenda 2030 spells out the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) needed to ‘transform our world’.

A cottage industry has arisen to produce estimates of the financial resources required, ranging from $1 trillion to $3 trillion per year. A second industry has emerged around the question of where to get the money.

By one UN estimate, global public and private investment amounts to around $22 trillion a year. It would take a redeployment of about 14% of that to meet the high-end estimate of $3 trillion. Many have questioned whether there is enough money and more have lamented that international aid flows appear insufficient. They miss two critical issues.

First is how to make sure that available resources are used for actual investments in the real world. Second is how to make sure that the investments that get funded advance goals of ending poverty, fighting climate change, and providing decent work. As things stand, vast sums are invested in ways that work against these goals.

This is especially true of private investment, much of which is directed at ‘securitization’, or the buying of other financial assets to turn a quick profit rather than supporting longer-term endeavors that boost jobs, welfare, and the environment.

Securitization is the result of decades of financial deregulation and tax cuts on capital gains and is driven by the thirst for large, instantaneous profits. To persuade the private sector to partner in long-term projects with real world benefits involves offering such enticements as a return of 10% or more.

Meeting such guarantees involves subsidies from public resources diminishing the public sector’s ability to make its own SDG investments. This unfortunate logic propels efforts at “impact investing,” “blended finance,” and “private-public partnerships”; Efforts which consume precious public-sector time and analytical resources, and where returns go to private finance, and risks are dumped on the public sector…

For the most part, the global financial system remains a part of the problem and not a partner in socially or environmentally sound development. What is to be done? The global financial system must be transformed to give priority to real investments in environmentally sound, employment-creating, long-term projects.

Private finance must be freed from the tyranny of asset price-driven financial markets. The logic of short-termism and of offloading risk onto others needs to be overturned. This kind of systemic reform once championed by academics and NGOs is now even taken on by the Financing for Sustainable Development Report, the UN’s ‘bible’ on financing.

Even as private finance begins to evolve to embrace new kinds of risk governments – for all their flaws – will retain the central role in identifying, designing, financing, and completing projects. This means that public finances need to be shored up. The best source of public money is taxation.

ActionAid research shows that where this is through an increase in value-added or other consumption taxes – it may unfairly burden poorer citizens, who spend larger portions of their incomes on buying goods and services.

What needs to be done involves multinational corporations with operations in developing countries. Capital flows need to be regulated to staunch the siphoning off of resources generated in developing countries; amounting to – according to ActionAid research for example – $147 million in Burundi in 2018.

The current investment regimes endorsed and enforced by the International Monetary Fund and others need to be upended.

Investment treaties and so-called free-trade agreements should no longer protect investors and corporations that make short-term loans (mostly searching for quick profits derived from high interest rates) to developing countries and those who gamble in international markets, using massive sums of money taken from the developing countries. How multinational companies hosted by developing countries are taxed also need to be changed to make possible the ‘reshoring’ of domestic resources.

Rules that allow or encourage companies to shift profits to rich countries or tax havens must be scrapped. Developing countries have faced significant resistance in pursuing global financial and tax reforms, not only from some of the world’s most powerful banks and companies, but also from the governments of the wealthy countries in which those enterprises are headquartered.

But rich-country governments need to become part of the solution. From climate change to widespread poverty and inequality, the problems confronting us are immense and the actions embodied in the SDGs are urgent. Systemic changes are vital to build the foundations on which to ‘transform our world’ in keeping with the vision of Agenda 2030.

*The views expressed in this article are his own.

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Excerpt:

Manuel F. Montes is the former Permanent Observer to the UN for and Senior Advisor on Financing and Development of the South Centre

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Pauline Ades-Mevel, Head of European Union and Balkan desk at Reporters Without Borders, warns that press freedom in Europe is declining. Courtesy: Reporters Without Borders

By Ed Holt
VIENNA, Oct 21 2019 (IPS)

Rising populism, anti-media rhetoric from politicians, cyber-harassment of journalists and physical attacks are among the reasons why press freedom in Europe is on the decline, according to the global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

As it released its annual Press Freedom Index earlier this year, the group warned that Europe was “no longer a sanctuary for journalists”, pointing to the murders of three journalists in Malta, Slovakia and Bulgaria in the space of a few months  and warning that “hatred of journalists has degenerated into violence, contributing to an increase in fear… the decline in press freedom in Europe… has gone hand in hand with an erosion of the region’s institutions by increasingly authoritarian governments”.

IPS spoke to Pauline Ades-Mevel, Head of European Union & Balkan desk at RSF about why press freedom was deteriorating across the continent and how, while threats to press freedom in Central and Eastern Europe often make headlines, the situation is far from trouble free in Western Europe. Excerpts of the interview follow. 

Europe is “no longer a sanctuary for journalists”, says Reporters Without Borders, pointing to the murders of three journalists in Malta, Slovakia and Bulgaria in the space of a few months  and warning that “hatred of journalists has degenerated into violence, contributing to an increase in fear”. Pictured here is a 2018 mass protest in Slovakia in the wake of the killing of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancee Martina Kusnirova led to the resignation of the country’s Prime Minister, Interior Minister and head of police. Credit: Ed Holt/IPS

Inter Press Service (IPS): RSF’s most recent surveys and reports suggest that media freedom is on the decline generally in Europe. Is this decline specific for Europe or part of a global trend?

Pauline Ades-Meve (PAM): When working on our most recent Global Press Freedom Index, we looked to see if there was a trend of deterioration of press freedom just in Europe or elsewhere. We found that it was actually a global trend, that we could see that trend in many regions. We looked at why this was the case and, while there are some different reasons in different countries, what we saw in general was that there was a climate of fear in which many journalists were working in. This is why there is this general deteriorating trend. Fear has been causing the most problems for journalists.

In Europe specifically a number of countries have fallen down the Index. This is for a number of reasons and comes with rising populism, anti-media rhetoric from politicians, cyber-harassment of journalists, physical attacks.

IPS: Threats to media freedom in central and eastern Europe and the Balkans have made a lot of headlines in recent years, perhaps understandably due to the nature of those threats, but RSF has made clear that media freedom in western Europe is also declining. What kind of threats are media facing in western Europe today?

PAM: We have seen threats to journalists emerge in recent years in Western Europe. For instance, in Spain, during the Catalan independence protests, leaders of the movement delivered rhetoric which undermined trust in journalists. They did not think journalists were covering the situation properly, or at least not in the way they wanted, and they viewed journalists who were not supporting their cause as people who were working against it and trying to prevent independence.

We recently published a report on the pressures faced by journalists in Spain and people don’t realise that, at the moment, Spain is no longer a heaven to be a journalist when you cover politics.

And then another example is Italy where there are 20 journalists who have around the clock police protection because they are facing threats from criminal networks.

Journalists in Europe are facing cyber-harassment – journalists covering protests in Spain and in France have been attacked online.

There is also a trend we are seeing in Western Europe of journalists being attacked when covering protests themselves. This is because part of the population no longer trusts the media anymore – protest leaders have portrayed them negatively, as untrustworthy, because they are not happy with the coverage. Journalists sometimes face violence and terrible threats from protestors. We have had cases of female journalists being threatened with rape. And sometimes, when they cover demonstrations, journalists are sometimes targeted by both the protestors and the police, which makes their mission even harder. 

IPS: Are these threats growing or changing in nature?

PAM: They are growing and new threats are emerging. One of these is growing legal harassment of journalists. Governments and businessmen are chasing journalists legally, through lawyers and courts, trying to stop them reporting and doing their jobs. This is extremely worrying.

IPS: How do they differ, if at all, from the threats faced by media in central and eastern Europe and the Balkans?

PAM: In some ways the threats are the same. There is a lot of legal harassment of journalists in central and eastern Europe and the Balkans. There is also physical intimidation of journalists and cyber-harassment too, while in some countries the independence of public media is under threat as well with governments trying to interfere in editorial independence, to influence them. We tend not to see this in Western Europe.

IPS: Physical intimidation of journalists is not a new phenomenon, especially in some countries in Europe, e.g. Russia or Ukraine. Is it becoming more common in western Europe, though, and if so, who is doing the intimidation?

PAM: Western Europe is certainly not free of this. Journalists in Western European states do face physical intimidation. Places like France, Spain, Italy, fascist groups in Greece. And it is only a few months ago that a journalist, Lyra McKee, was killed in Northern Ireland. Western Europe is not without this problem, even today.

IPS: There have been cases of journalists being attacked by protestors, and sometimes police, at demonstrations in parts of Western Europe in recent years e.g. in France. While this is not a problem specific to just western Europe, or Europe as a whole, in the past press were generally seen as neutral observers at such events and as such, left alone. Is that changing, are journalists now being seen as ‘fair game’ by certain groups?

PAM: One thing we have noticed in recent years is that due to social media and some ‘media’ which frankly should not be labelled as media, people are losing trust in media in general and this has galvanised certain people in certain movements and groups to attack journalists. As an example, when asked many of the Gilets Jaunes protestors in France said that their favourite TV station for news was the Russian state-sponsored channel RT, or people’s Facebook pages where they could read stories. We could then see at protests that protestors were attacking journalists with rocks because they were not happy with them, they did not trust them, did not think they were portraying the protests the way they wanted them to. So they just attacked them and destroyed their things, like cameras.

IPS: Online hatred towards journalists, including incitement to violence against them, appears to have become more of a problem in recent years. Is this the case in Europe and if so, what do you think is driving this rise?

PAM: This is a problem across Europe, but not just Europe. It is worldwide. Being online means that the attacked can remain anonymous and that anonymity emboldens them, makes them feel stronger. Their hatred also makes them feel powerful. Cyber-harassment is one of the major problems facing journalists in a lot of countries in Europe, both in Western Europe and the rest of the continent.

Much has been reported about authoritarian governments in parts of central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans trying to crack down on critical media so they can cement their power e.g. Hungary, Poland, Serbia. Do you think public perception of western Europe with its historical traditions of democracy and freedoms, particularly freedom of speech, means that people can sometimes mistakenly assume that this could never happen in western Europe?

I am often reminded of conversations between journalists in France who remind themselves of how they work in an environment where they are protected by legislation, by institutions, and have the freedom to do their jobs. But while the West is seen as having traditionally good, strong democracies to protect journalists, the situation with press freedom is not as good as it has been. Populist movements have spread across Europe, including Western Europe. We have seen problems with, for example, independence of public media in Spain.

IPS: Would you say there are greater legal or constitutional safeguards against an erosion of media freedom in western European states than in other parts of Europe?

PAM: I think that Western European states may have a greater sense of European values and respecting those values. This includes respecting the freedom of the media and some governments in Western Europe have moved to specifically protect journalists, even giving them a special status – in Portugal, there is a legal statute protecting journalists so that if someone attacks a journalists it is actually more serious a charge than attacking a normal member of the public.

Overall the situation in Western Europe with regard for respect of the institution of press freedom is better than in other parts of the Europe. This is why we have seen an erosion of press freedom in places such as Hungary, or Bulgaria, because in those countries there is not the same tradition, or sense of, European values.

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Excerpt:

IPS Correspondent Ed Holt speaks to PAULINE ADES-MEVEL, Head of European Union & Balkan desk at RSF

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Migrants arriving at Lampedusa, Italy. Credit: Ilaria Vechi/IPS.

By External Source
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 21 2019 (IPS)

A landmark UN migration study published on Monday shows that 93 per cent of Africans making the journey to European countries along irregular routes, would do it again, despite facing often life-threatening danger.

The UN Development Programme (UNDP) report, Scaling Fences: Voices of Irregular African Migrants to Europe, sets out to find out why those who put themselves in the hands of people smugglers, and put themselves in other vulnerable positions to cross borders, make the decision to leave home avoiding formal immigration procedures, in the first place.

The report, which interviewed 1,970 migrants from 39 African countries in 13 European nations, all of whom declared that they had arrived in Europe through irregular means and not for asylum or protection-related reasons, reaches some counter-intuitive conclusions.

 

Migrants often hold steady jobs, better educated

A gender pay gap which favours men in Africa, “resoundingly reverses in Europe, with women earning 11 per cent more, contrasting with previously earning 26 per cent less, in Africa”

It finds that getting a job was not the only motivation to move; that not all irregular migrants were ‘poor’ in Africa, nor had lower education levels. Around 58 per cent were either employed or in school at the time of their departure, with the majority of those working, earning competitive wages.

But around half of those working said they were not earning enough.

In fact, for two-thirds of those interviewed, earning, or the prospect of earning in their home countries, did not hold them back from travelling. The respondents also spent at least three years more in education than their peers.

“Scaling Fences highlights that migration is a reverberation of development progress across Africa, albeit progress that is uneven and not fast enough to meet people’s aspirations. Barriers to opportunity, or ‘choice-lessness’, emerge from this study as critical factors informing the calculation of these young people,” said Achim Steiner, UNDP Administrator.

“By shining a light on why people move through irregular channels and what they experience when they do, Scaling Fences contributes to a critical debate on the role of human mobility in fostering progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals and the best approaches to governing it,” he said.

 

Migrants, in their own words

Here’s what some of the migrants interviewed told UNDP researchers – their last names were not given to help protect their identities.

• “If you have a family, you have to ensure they have food, shelter, medicine, and education. I have a young daughter. People may ask what kind of father I am, to leave behind my wife and infant daughter. But what kind of a father would I be, if I stayed and couldn’t provide them a decent life?” – Yerima
•  “The idea to try and reduce the weight of migration is to look at the causes. It is… the governing policies that entrench people in poverty, that don’t develop anything. Schools that don’t exist, failing health and corruption, repression. That pushes people to emigrate.” – Serge
• “In five years’ time, I see myself in my home country. For a good five years, (my family) haven’t seen each other. So one day will come when we will see each other. And when I go back to my home country, I don’t think I will come back” – Mahamadou
• “It was all to earn money. Thinking of my mom and my dad. My big sister. My little sister. To help them. That was my pressure. That’s why Europe.” – Drissa

 

 ‘Shame’ of not providing, keeps African migrants in Europe

The apparent shame of failing in their “mission” to send sufficient funds back home, emerged as a major factor keeping migrants working in Europe, according to UNDP.

Around 53 per cent had received support from family and friends, in order to make the journey, and once in Europe, around 78 per cent, were sending money back.

The report also found key differences between men and women in terms of the migrant experience. A gender pay gap which favours men in Africa, “resoundingly reverses in Europe, with women earning 11 per cent more, contrasting with previously earning 26 per cent less, in Africa”, said UNDP.

A higher proportion of women were sending money back – even among those not earning.

But when it comes to crime, women are suffering more, with a higher proportion falling victim to a crime in the six months prior to being interviewed, than men, and significantly higher instances of sexual assault.

 

Opportunity and choice must expand at home

UNDP describes Scaling Fences as “a clarion call to continue to expand opportunity and choice in Africa while enhancing opportunities to move from ‘ungoverned’ to ‘governed’ migration, in line with the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration.”

It is the second in a series of UNDP reports documenting the journeys of young Africans, with the first, exploring what drives some into the arms of violent extremism.

 

This story was originally published by UN News

The post More than 90 per cent of Africa Migrants Would Make Perilous Europe Journey Again, Despite the Risks appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Female subsistence farmers, who according to the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa form more than 70 percent of farmers in Africa. Last week USAID announced $70 million of investment into research for new seeds and methods to reduce the impact of droughts and disease on crops across the developing world. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By James Reinl
DES MOINES, United States , Oct 21 2019 (IPS)

Experts vaunted new strains of seeds, drone aircraft and other technological breakthroughs as solutions-in-the-making for farmers in Africa, where hunger, drought and food price hikes are continent-wide problems.

At the gathering of nutritionists in the 2019 Borlaug Dialogue International Symposium, held annually in Des Moines, Iowa, in the United States, hopes were pinned on a new generation of so-called ‘agro-entrepreneurs’ in Africa.

At the event, USAID administrator Mark Green announced $70 million of investment into research for new seeds and methods to reduce the impact of droughts and disease on crops across the developing world.

“Humanitarian assistance, including food assistance, is treatment, not cure,” said Green. “We must develop new technologies and partnerships that will not only assist displaced families in crisis settings, but offer them livelihood opportunities wherever they can find them.”

The three-day gathering, which ended on Friday, saw some 1,200 experts, policy chiefs, executives and farmers from more than 65 countries tackle food scarcity and price hikes — blights that disproportionately hurt sub-Saharan Africa.

Jennifer Blanke, vice president for agriculture human and social development at the African Development Bank (AfDB) said Africa “missed out” on the green revolution that bumped up harvests across Asia and Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s.

But with new technologies — from unmanned “drone” aircraft to new strains of more resilient crop seeds — coming online, African farmers and policymakers have an opportunity to get agriculture back on track and boost harvests.

“You can do so many things with technology,” said Blanke.

“With drones, you can survey your fields in a minute, which would have taken hours and hours previously. You can spray pesticides. Satellite technology allows you to see what’s happening to weather systems. Basic mobile technology helps farmers in rural areas know what prices they can get for their food.”

In the coming months, Blanke aims to bring together researchers, policymakers and investors to foster helpful policies and roll out schemes to buy and spread technology as well as training farmers and officials how to use it.

Dozens of young African entrepreneurs traveled to Des Moines to network, woo investors and brainstorm ideas for addressing Africa’s worrying problem of producing enough food for a growing population.

They included Ifeoluwa Olatayo, from Nigeria, who was awarded a fellowship from the World Hunger Fighters Foundation, for building small hydroponic farms on rooftops in Ibadan, in Oyo State, for growing lettuce, cucumbers and other vegetables

“Since we’re planting in close proximity to consumers, we’re able to create fast and easy access to nutritious foods while at the same time lessening the impact of transportation on the whole agricultural value chain,” said Olatayo.

“It’s important that people have access to nutritious foods, as affordable and as fresh as possible.” 

Other agro-entrepreneurs are tackling another problem for African farmers — the fact that, thanks to bad roads, poor transport and other woes, entire harvests rot beside the fields they were grown in and never reach market.

Other start-ups involve distributing new varieties of seeds that are more resilient to insects and disease, yield bigger harvests, provide more nutrients, and in some cases taste better than the crops they are replacing.

Lourena Arone Maxwell, from Mozambique, which has been ravaged by disease and droughts since cyclones Idai and Kenneth killed more than 600 people earlier this year, is focussed on fighting crop diseases.

“Plant diseases can reduce the amount of food that farmers have and the solution is a very affordable and environmentally-friendly method to control them,” Maxwell said on the sidelines of an event to honour the first batch of fellows.

Related Articles

• Ghana’s Grains and Groundnuts Face Increasing Contamination Amid Increasing Temperatures
• How to ‘Fix the Business of Food’ and Save the Planet

The post Agro-tech Offers Answers for African Farmers at Iowa Meet appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Kingston Reif and Shannon Bugos
WASHINGTON DC, Oct 18 2019 (IPS)

The Trump administration is reportedly on the verge of withdrawing from the 1992 Open Skies Treaty, according to lawmakers and media reports. Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, first sounded the public alarm in an Oct. 7 letter to National Security Advisor Robert C. O’Brien.

“I am deeply concerned by reports that the Trump Administration is considering withdrawing from the Open Skies Treaty and strongly urge you against such a reckless action,” Rep. Engel wrote. “American withdrawal would only benefit Russia and be harmful to our allies’ and partners’ national security interests.”

Slate columnist Fred Kaplan reported Oct. 9 that former National Security Advisor John Bolton pushed for withdrawing from the treaty before departing the administration.

Following Bolton’s departure in September, White House staff continued to advocate for withdrawal and convinced President Trump to sign a memorandum expressing his intent to exit the treaty. The Omaha World-Herald reported that the signed document directed a withdrawal by Oct. 26.

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), and Senate Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Jack Reed (D-R.I.) joined Rep. Engel in an Oct. 8 letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper denouncing a possible withdrawal.

The lawmakers wrote that “pulling out of the Open Skies Treaty, an important multilateral arms control agreement, would be yet another gift from the Trump Administration to Putin.” They also noted that the treaty “has been an essential tool for United States efforts to constrain Russian aggression in Ukraine.”

The United States and several allies in December 2018 conducted an “extraordinary flight” over eastern Ukraine under the Open Skies Treaty. The flight followed a Russian attack in late November 2018 on Ukrainian naval vessels in the Black Sea.

Republican lawmakers also expressed concern about ditching the treaty. In an Oct. 8 statement, Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) stated that he has “yet to see a compelling reason to withdraw from Open Skies” given the “valuable access to Russian airspace and military airfields” the United States gains from the treaty.

Signed in 1992, the Open Skies Treaty permits each state-party to conduct short-notice, unarmed, observation flights over the others’ entire territories in order to collect data on military forces and activities. The treaty entered into force in January 2002 and currently has 34 states-parties, including the United States and Russia.

According to the treaty, states-parties must give one another 72 hours advance notice before conducting an overflight. At least 24 hours in advance of the flight, the observing state-party will supply its flight plan, which the host state-party can only modify for safety or logistical reasons.

No territory is off-limits under the treaty. Each participating country is assigned a quota of overflights it can conduct and a quota, based on its geographic size, of overflights it must accept every year.

Since 2002, there have been nearly 200 U.S. overflights of Russia and about 70 overflights conducted by Russia over the United States. After the overflight, the information collected must be provided to all states-parties.

In recent years, disputes over implementation and concerns from some U.S. officials and lawmakers about the value of the treaty have threatened to derail the pact.

For example, Washington has raised concerns about Russian compliance with the treaty, citing, in particular, Russia’s restricting of observation flights over Kaliningrad to no more than 500 kilometers and within a 10-kilometer corridor along Russia’s border with the Georgian border-conflict regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

In response, the United States has restricted flights over the Pacific Fleet in Hawaii and the missile defense interceptor fields in Fort Greely, Alaska.

The House-passed version of the fiscal year 2020 defense authorization act included a provision that would reaffirm Congress’ commitment to the treaty and prohibit the use of funds to suspend, terminate, or withdraw from the agreement unless “certain certification requirements are made.”

The Senate version of the bill did not include a similar provision. The House and Senate continue to negotiate a final version of the bill.

The post Trump Poised to Withdraw from Open Skies Treaty appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

KINGSTON REIF is director of disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association and SHANNON BUGOS, research assistant.

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By Metropolitan Emmanuel Adamakis, Moscow, Rabbi David Rosen, Jerusalem,Dr. Nayla Tabbara, Beirut, Dr. Vinu Aram, India and Rev. Kosho Niwano, Tokyo
MOSCOW, JERUSALEM/BEIRUT/NEW DELHI/TOKYO, Oct 18 2019 (IPS)

On the 8th of October, the United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned that the organisation is running out of money by the end of October – “member States have paid only 70 percent of the total amount needed for [our] regular budget”.

This is the same institution, whose Charter first took effect on October 24, 1945, after a world war where an estimated total of 70–85 million people perished (i.e. about 3% of the 1940 world population).

The United Nations was created to “reaffirm faith … in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small… and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom…”

It is often forgotten that the purposes of the United Nations, are in alignment with the values of all faith traditions. It is also forgotten that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was predicated upon the values shared by all faith traditions.

As faith leaders, we have our temples, mosques, churches, synagogues and countless related institutions – and pulpits – which, as history has proven time and again, are impossible to replace. Indeed, our religious institutions significantly predate most member states of the United Nations.

Our faiths call upon us to believe in that which is transcendental and otherworldly, and to serve every living being to live in peace and dignity. Through centuries of existence, we have learned to appreciate the value of coming together on what we agree, to serve all regardless of any, and all, differences.

And in the countless efforts to do so, we appreciate and respect the challenges of convening the diversity of Divine creation around a set of shared values and purposes.

That is why we appreciate and respect the United Nations system.

The United Nations was created, is maintained, and serves, governments (and those with observer status). Governments are critical rights’ holders of members of their respective societies. Governments themselves know that to uphold the rights and serve their peoples – even within national boundaries – requires transcending their own singular capabilities.

There is a humility – and a grandeur – of human spirit, which is impossible to capture in any institution. Yet it is precisely that humility and grandeur which is required by “we the peoples” – as stated in the UN Charter – to appreciate and honor an institution built to represent and serve 193 governments and political representations.

The World Health Organization, a specialized agency of the UN, led the charge in the eradication of smallpox; UNICEF, the UN division focused on child welfare, says it has helped save the lives of more than 90 million children since 1990.

Over the last two and a half decades, the UN has assisted in efforts to help more than 1 billion escape extreme poverty, 2.1 billion people access improved sanitation facilities, and 2.6 billion people access improved sources of drinking water. These accomplishments matter for billions of people.

As people of faith, and as pragmatists who lead respective institutions, we must ask ourselves: who else is willing and able to serve these very same responsibilities – at comparable scale? Our faith institutions have long served those needs. But the lesson learned time and again, is that our religious institutions, also, are necessary, but insufficient.

Our faiths call upon us, in different ways, essentially, “to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security…” – the very same words of the UN Charter.

Precisely because we are faith leaders, from all faiths, from different corners of the world, with the longest legacy of serving communities, we can say with utter conviction, that our world needs a United Nations.

Today, perhaps more than ever – as winds of war and countless conflicts continue to sweep our shores, as massive fires scorch or flood our ecosystem, as the largest number of displaced people ever, stand at the gates of many of our nations while multitudes perish seeking life – today, the need for this unique multilateral space, is a moral imperative.

As leaders representing the only platform of all faith institutions, from all over the world, we, members of Religions for Peace, on the eve of our own 50th year, humbly – and yet determinedly – and with one voice, call upon the governments who owe their dues, to uphold the rights of all peoples, by honoring the commitment towards the only world institution that represents – and serves – the peoples of the world.

The post Religious Leaders’ Plea to Member States: Honour Your Commitment to the UN appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

The authors represent RELIGIONS FOR PEACE—the world’s largest and most representative multi-religious coalition from several faiths, including Judaism, Orthodox Christianity; Islam; Hinduism and Buddhism

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Africa Investment Forum 2018

By Farhana Haque Rahman
ROME, Oct 18 2019 (IPS)

Headwinds are blowing amid IMF warnings of a “synchronised slowdown” in global economic growth, yet Africa’s investment drive is still gathering pace, supported by intense international competition in development finance.

Despite the global slowdown, 19 sub-Saharan countries are among nearly 40 emerging markets and developing economies forecast by the IMF to maintain GDP growth rates above 5 percent this year. Particularly encouraging for Africa is that its present growth leaders are richer in innovation than natural resources.

While Akinwumi Adesina, president of the African Development Bank, admits to sleepless nights over the “headwinds” to African growth – primarily the US-China trade war – he remains excited over the continent’s prospects as the AfDB gears up for its annual Africa Investment Forum.

The November 11-13 gathering in Johannesburg follows major milestones achieved in 2019, notably the coming into force of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement, described by Adesina as a “phenomenal development”.

In May, 54 of Africa’s 55 countries became signatories to the initiative which aims to eliminate 90 percent of tariffs on goods and significantly reduce non-tariff barriers. The free trade area means to integrate Africa into a unified market with a population of over one billion and output of $1.3 trillion.

The AfDB does not gloss over the enormous challenges ahead, however, noting that 120 million Africans remain out of work, 42 percent of the population live below the $1.25 poverty line and about one in four in sub-Saharan Africa are undernourished. Africa is also most vulnerable to the global climate crisis, although it is the world’s least contributor to carbon emissions.

Akinwumi Adesina

Under Adesina, appointed in 2015 and backed by his native Nigeria for a second term, the AfDB has responded to such challenges by scaling up investment in five priority areas dubbed the High 5s: electricity and energy; food; industrialisation; integration, and improving the quality of life.

At the UN climate crisis summit in September, Adesina announced the AfDB would double its climate financing to emerging economies to $25 billion from 2020-2025. Half would be aimed at helping governments adapt to the impacts of climate change, such as droughts and rising sea levels.

“Poor countries didn’t cause climate change, they shouldn’t be holding the short end of the stick,” the AfDB president said.

The bank will invest $20 million to help fund the Sahel’s new Desert to Power solar scheme, with Adesina seeing renewable energy as a driver of economic development and replacing all of Africa’s coal-fired power stations.

During his term the bank has increased the renewable power share of its energy portfolio to 95 percent from about 60 percent. Off-grid solar-powered energy is seen as key to connecting the 50 per cent of African households without access to electricity.

Last year’s inaugural Africa Investment Forum generated $38.7 billion in “investment interest” in infrastructure projects, and the multilateral lender is setting a target of $60 billion this year to close what it sees as Africa’s “infrastructure gap” amounting to $108 billion. As an investment marketplace which attracts heads of state, the AfDB says it will work at the Forum in conjunction with all commercial banks across Africa, as well as development finance institutions, global sovereign wealth funds and pension funds.

China’s presence at the Forum is sure to come under close scrutiny given Beijing’s focus on Africa, with President Xi Jinping’s flagship Belt and Road Initiative pledging $60 billion in financing for projects across the continent. China’s trade with Africa has soared over the past 20 years from about $10 billion to close to $200 billion. In a reflection of shifting balances of power, an analysis by Quartz found that nearly twice as many African leaders attended the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in Beijing in September than the UN General Assembly in New York two weeks later.

Not to be outdone, Russia has invited over 50 African leaders to its first Russia-Africa summit in Sochi in late October, the culmination of a strategic push that marks Moscow’s re-entry into the continent, with its focus on military deals and oil and gas contracts. With trade and investment replacing aid, US and European multilateral lenders are also directing more funds towards Africa.

The Africa Investment Forum may also enjoy the glow of more favourable headlines for the continent in recent weeks: Mozambique held relatively peaceful presidential elections in mid-October, which followed the signing in August of a peace deal between the ruling Frelimo party and former civil war rivals Renamo; and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was awarded the Nobel peace prize for his role in resolving the border conflict with Eritrea, as well as promoting peace and reconciliation in Ethiopia and the wider East African region.

Farhana Haque Rahman

Mozambique sees itself on the brink of substantial investments following its discovery of huge gas reserves while, as commentators noted, Abiy’s first official state visit outside Africa after coming to office last year was not to the traditional western capitals or even Beijing, but to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, major investors in his ambitions to transform Addis Ababa.

With foreign investors and multilateral institutions gathering at the door, the AfDB’s president is addressing fears that Africa is piling up debt and mortgaging its future.

“What’s important is that African countries get into deals that are transparent with terms of engagement that are clear,” he told Bloomberg in September.

“If there were cases where some folks got away with deals in the past because others aren’t around the table to help negotiate well — that’s changing. I don’t think any African nation should trade away its future for immediate gains. We want fair and transparent transactions.”

Farhana Haque Rahman is Senior Vice President of IPS Inter Press Service; a communications expert, she is a former senior official of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

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An aerial view of settlements in the middle of the desert in the surrounding area of Timbuktu, North of Mali. Courtesy: UN Photo/Marco Domino

By Issa Sikiti da Silva
BAMAKO, Mali/COTONOU, Benin , Oct 18 2019 (IPS)

Abdoulaye Maiga proudly displays an album showing photos of him and his family during happier times when they all lived together in their home in northern Mali. Today, these memories seem distant and painful.

“We lived happily as a big family before the war and ate and drank as much as we could by growing crops and raising livestock,” he tells IPS.

“Then the war broke out and our lives changed forever, pushing us southwards, finally settling in the region of Mopti. Then we went back home in 2013 when the situation stabilised,” Abdoulaye explains.

In 2012, various groups of Tuareg rebels grouped together to form and administer a new northern state called Azawad. The civil strife that resulted drove many from their homes, with communities often fleeing with their livestock, only to compete for scarce natural resources in vulnerable host communities, according to the United Nations.

• In Mali, three-quarters of the population rely on agriculture for their food and income, and most are subsistence farmers, growing rainfed crops on small plots of land, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the U.N.

After the security situation began to improve in 2013, many returned home to rebuild their lives and livelihoods.

But soon it was the turn of the expanding Sahara Desert, drought and land degradation that became the next driver of their displacement.

“As time went by, the land became useless and we found ourselves having no more land to work on. Nothing would come out that could feed us, and our livestock kept dying due the lack of water and grass to eat, ” Abdoulaye recalls.

“Drought across the Sahel region, followed by conflict in northern Mali, caused a major slump in the country’s agricultural production, reducing household assets and leaving many of Mali’s poor even more vulnerable,” FAO says.

“We used to move up and down with our livestock, looking for water and grass, but most of the times we found none. Life was unliveable. The Sahara is coming down, very fast,” Abdoulaye says emotionally.

In the end, the Maiga family had to leave their home and broke up; Abdoulaye and his brother Ousmane heading to Benin’s commercial capital Cotonou in 2015, after a brief stint in Burkina Faso, as the rest of their family headed for Mali’s capital, Bamako.

Malian girls stand in the shade in Kidal, North of Mali. Photo MINUSMA/Marco Dormino

Threatened with creeping desertification …

The U.N. says nearly 98 percent of Mali is threatened with creeping desertification, as a result of nature and human activity. Besides, the Sahara Desert keeps expanding southward at a rate of 48 km a year, further degrading the land and eradicating the already scarce livelihoods of populations, Reuters reported.

The Sahara, an area of 3.5 million square miles, is the largest ‘hot’ desert in the world and home to some 70 species of mammals, 90 species of resident birds and 100 species of reptiles, according to DesertUSA. And it is expanding, its size is registered at 10 percent larger than a century ago, LiveScience reported.

The Sahel, the area between The Sahara in the north and the Sudanian Savanna in the south, is the region where temperatures are rising faster than anywhere else on Earth. 

The cost of land degradation is currently estimated at about $490bn per year, much higher than the cost of action to prevent it, according to UNCCD recent studies on the economics of land desertification, land degradation and drought.

Roughly 40 percent of the world’s degraded land is found in areas with the highest incidence of poverty and directly impacts the health and livelihoods of an estimated 1.5 billion people, according to the U.N.

In a country where six million tonnes of wood is used per year, reports say Malians are mercilessly smashing their already-fragile landscape, bringing down 4,000 square kilometres of tree cover each year in search for timber and fuel.

Lack of rain has also been making matters worse, especially for the cotton industry, of which the country remains the continent ’s largest producer, with 750,000 tonnes produced in the 2018 to 2019 agriculture season. Environmentalists believe Mali’s average rainfall has dropped by 30 percent since 1998 with droughts becoming longer and more frequent.

… and conflict for resources

Paul Melly, Chatham House Africa consultant, tells IPS that desertification reduces the scope for agriculture and pastoralism to remain viable.

“And of course, that may lead a few disenchanted members of the population, particularly young men, to be attracted by alternative livelihood options, including the money that can be offered by trafficking gangs or terrorist groups,” he says.

Ousmane echoes Melly’s sentiments, saying: “The temptation is too much when you live in desertification-hit areas because you don’t get enough food to hit and water to drink.

“That’s where the bad guys start showing up on your door[step] to tell you that if you join them, you will get plenty food, water and pocket money. The solution is to run away, as far as you can to avoid falling into that trap.”

Consequently, Ousmane and Abdoulaye sold the few remaining animals the family had so they could leave the country.

In Burkina Faso they hoped to find work in farming. 

However, they were not always welcomed.

“We could feel the resentment from locals, so I told my brother we should leave before it gets ugly because there were already some tensions between local communities over what appeared to be land resources,” he says.

Chatham House’s Melly confirms this: “There is no doubt that the overall context, of increasing pressure on fragile and sometimes degrading natural resources, is a contributory factor to the overall pressures in the region and, thus, potentially, to tension.”

 Like elsewhere on the continent, severe environmental degradation appears to be among the root causes of inter-ethnic conflicts.

Using the Darfur region as a case study, the Worldwatch Institute says: “To a considerable extent, the conflict is the result of a slow-onset disaster—creeping desertification and severe droughts that have led to food insecurity and sporadic famine, as well as growing competition for land and water.”

What is being done?

Projects such as the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification’s Land Degradation Neutrality project aimed at preventing and/or reversing land degradation are some of the interventions to stop the growing desert. 

• Another large that aims to wrestle back the land swallowed by The Sahara is the Great Green Wall (GGW), an eight-billion-dollar project launched by the African Union (AU) with the blessing of the UNCCD, and the backing of organisations such as the World Bank, the European Union and FAO.
• Since its launch in 2007, major progress has been made in restoring the fertility of Sahelian lands.
• Nearly 120 communities in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have been involved in a green belt project that resulted in the restoration more than 2,500 hectares of degraded and drylands, according to the UNCCD.
• More than two million seeds and seedings have also been planted from 50 native species of trees.

Everyone, including terrorists are equal in the face of the expanding Sahara

But there remain gaps and many in Mali still remain affected. 

Community leader Hassan Badarou spent several years teaching Islam in rural Mali and Niger. He tells IPS Mali has a very complex situation.

“It is not easy to live in these areas. People there face double threats. It is double stress to flee from both armed conflict and desertification. And such people need to be welcomed and assisted, and not be seen as a threat to locals livelihoods.

“That is why we used to preach tolerance and solidarity wherever we went, to avoid a situation whereby local communities would feel that their meagre resources are under threat from newcomers. There should be a dialogue, an honest and frank dialogue when communities take on each other over land and water resources,” he advises.

Against the expanding Sahara, all are equal. Fadimata, an internally displaced person from northern Mali, tells IPS that climate change is affecting everyone in the Sahel, including terrorists.

“I saw with my own eyes how a group of heavily-armed young men came to a village, looking for food.

“They said they wanted to do no harm, but wanted something to eat. Of course we were very scared, but the villagers ended up putting something together for these poor young men. They sat down and ate, and drank plenty of water and left afterwards. I think it is better that way than to kill villagers and steal their food, livestock and water.”

Related Articles

• Mali Heading Closer to Civil War
• Armed Groups in Northern Mali Raping Women

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A 25 year-old tuberculosis patient is treated at her home in Funafuti, the main island of Tuvalu in the South Pacific. Credit: UNDP Tuvalu/Aurélia Rusek.

By External Source
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 17 2019 (IPS)

A staggering 1.5 million people died from tuberculosis (TB) last year, the UN health agency said on Thursday, in an appeal for far greater funding and political support to eradicate the curable and preventable disease.

Caused by the bacteria Mycobacterium tuberculosis, TB commonly causes persistent coughing, fatigue and weight loss. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) and its latest Global TB Report, around 10 million people developed TB in 2018 and three million sufferers “are not getting the care they need”.

Countries where people suffer most are China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, and South Africa.

Although the 2018 TB toll was marginally better than in 2017, the burden remains stubbornly high among poor and marginalized populations, particularly those with HIV

Highlighting some good news, WHO also pointed out that Brazil, China, the Russian Federation and Zimbabwe – all of which have high TB burdens – achieved treatment coverage levels of more than 80 per cent, in 2018.

Nonetheless, although the 2018 TB toll was marginally better than in 2017, the burden remains stubbornly high among poor and marginalized populations, particularly those with HIV.

One of the reasons for this is the cost of TB care, with data showing that up to four-fifths of TB patients in so-called “high-burden” countries spend more than 20 per cent of their household income on treatment.

Drug resistance remains another obstacle, WHO maintained, with 2018 seeing an estimated half a million new cases of drug-resistant TB. Only one in three of these people was enrolled in treatment, it added, while also recommending that multidrug resistant TB should now be tackled with fully oral regimens “that are safer and more effective”.

 

Stronger systems and better access to care are key: Tedros

Insisting that the world must accelerate progress if it is to reach the Sustainable Development Goal of ending TB by 2030, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that in practice, this required “strong health systems and better access to services. That means a renewed investment in primary health care and a commitment to universal health coverage.”

Following last month’s commitment by Heads of State at the UN in New York to make healthcare available to all and address communicable diseases like TB, HIV and malaria, WHO highlighted the value of “comprehensive” national campaigns that could diagnose and treat several ailments at a time.

The UN agency cited “better integrated” HIV and TB programmes that have led to two-thirds of people diagnosed with TB now knowing their HIV status, for which they are now taking treatment.

WHO also welcomed the fact that seven million people were diagnosed and treated for TB last year – up from 6.4 million in 2017.

This was “proof that we can reach global targets if we join forces together, as we have done through the ‘Find.Treat.All.EndTB’ joint initiative of WHO, Stop TB Partnership and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria”, the WHO Director-General said.

 

‘Breaking the trajectory’ of TB epidemic

Echoing that message, Dr Tereza Kasaeva, Director of WHO’s Global TB Programme confirmed that WHO is working closely with countries, partners and civil society on innovations “to break the trajectory of the TB epidemic”.

According to WHO, there is massive and chronic underfunding for TB research estimated at $1.2 billion a year. On top of this, the shortfall for TB prevention and care is estimated at $3.3 billion in 2019.

This is despite the fact that about one-quarter of the world’s population has latent TB, meaning that people have been infected by TB bacteria but are not yet ill with the disease, so they cannot transmit it.

Priority needs include a new vaccine or effective preventive drug treatment, rapid diagnostic tests and safer, simpler, shorter drug regimens. The World Health Assembly-approved Global TB Strategy aims for a 90 per cent reduction in TB deaths and an 80 per cent reduction in the TB incidence rate by 2030 compared with 2015 levels.

The strategy established milestones for 2020 of a 35 per cent reduction in TB deaths and a 20 per cent reduction in the TB incidence rate compared with 2015.

 

This story was originally published by UN News

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By African Development Bank
ABIDJAN, Côte d’Ivoire, Oct 17 2019 (IPS-Partners)

In just a few weeks, the second edition of the annual Africa Investment Forum will kick off in Johannesburg, South Africa, with development finance institutions determined to tackle the continent’s infrastructure investment challenges and advance Africa’s economic transformation agenda.

Africa Investment Forum 2018 broke the mold for regional investments and offered lessons about what can be done when multilateral development and finance institutions decide to pull their resources together to deliver as one.

“When we laid out our vision to tilt the flow of capital into Africa by convening the first transaction-based investment forum, many thought it would all amount to building castles in the air. One year down the road, the verdict is undisputed. Africa’s investment opportunities are proving to be seriously attractive,” said Akinwumi Adesina, President of the African Development Bank, convener of the Forum.

The inaugural forum powerfully demonstrated the Bank’s convening power and ability to rally key development institutions, global and regional investors around the common objective of fast-tracking Africa’s economic transformation.

The collective resolve to tackle head-on Africa’s annual infrastructure investment gap, estimated at between US$130 billion and US$170 billion, was on full display during the opening ceremony.

“The inaugural Africa Investment Forum witnessed an extraordinary level of engagement. The conversation moved from talking about investment to advancing deals towards financial closure. 2019 will validate and redefine the perception of investor confidence regarding the African Continent,” said David Makhura, Premier of Gauteng province in South Africa.

Heads of key partner institutions include Patrick Dlamini, CEO, Development Bank of Southern Africa, Professor Benedict Oramah, President, the Africa Export-Import Bank, Dr. Bandar M. H. Hajjar, President, Islamic Development Bank; Admassu Tadesse, President, Trade and Development Bank. The Forum’s founding partners also include Alain Ebobisse, CEO, Africa 50; Mallam Samaila Zubairu, CEO, Africa Finance Corporation.

For Alain Ebobisse, CEO of Africa50, the continent is brimming with opportunities that are waiting to be seized. “The Africa Investment Forum not only brings together investors and stakeholders to initiate deals but can help close transactions that would otherwise take months or years. In infrastructure, this makes a significant difference since the financial and opportunity costs of project delays are high.”

Africa’s development challenges need a swift, bold, and robust response. Of the world’s 20 countries with the least access to electricity, 13 are in Africa. Investment in the region of $43-55 billion per year is needed until 2030-2040 to meet demand and provide universal access to power.

“The audacity showed in South Africa last year, and the results in terms of investment and deals closed will live long in the investor community’s memory,” Adesina tells global investors on the hunt for yields and opportunities.

“We will be reaching for new heights. Already, a robust pipeline of deals valued at billions of US dollars, in energy, cross-border infrastructure, agriculture will be tabled for discussed in the boardroom sessions,” he said.

Last year’s Forum attracted 1,943 participants representing 87 countries and brought together 400 investors from 52 countries. The innovative investment marketplace, brings together heads of state, project sponsors, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and other institutional investors.. Policymakers, private equity firms, and other key senior government officials will also be present.

Africa Investment Forum 2019 will run from 11-13 November in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Contact: Nafissatou Diouf, Manager, Communication and External Relations Department, African Development Bank, email: n.diouf@afdb.org

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In rural Sri Lanka women are tasked with fetching and carrying water for the entire household, sometimes walking miles with pots and bottles balanced on their heads. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Jemimah Njuki
NAIROBI, Oct 17 2019 (IPS)

Climate change has a disproportionate impact on women and girls. This is clear when it comes to water, for instance. The Global Commission on Adaptation Report launched at the United Nations General Assembly last week states that the number of people who may lack sufficient water, at least one month per year, will soar from 3.6 billion today to more than 5 billion by 2050.

In many developing countries, gender roles and expectations have made women and girls bear the brunt of looking for water. Currently, women in sub-Saharan Africa spend an average of about 200 million hours per day collecting water, and a whopping 40 billion hours per year. As the impacts of climate change worsen, the burden on women and girls who are still responsible for over 70% of the burden of collecting water in Africa.

Currently, women in sub-Saharan Africa spend an average of about 200 million hours per day collecting water, and a whopping 40 billion hours per year. As the impacts of climate change worsen, the burden on women and girls who are still responsible for over 70% of the burden of collecting water in Africa
While most analysis of climate change recognise the impact on and role of women, many reports and programs fail to recommend practical ways to support women and to address the gender barriers that they face in responding to climate change.

And even more fail to put real resources to address gender inequalities. Now, the implementation of this new Global Commission on Adaptation report is a huge opportunity for improvement and ensuring that gender equality is at the centre of all future climate adaptation investments.

There are three ways in which this report can put women, and gender equality at the core of the three revolutions that the report proposes: revolution in financing, revolution in planning and revolution in knowledge.

First, for the revolution in financing, the Global Commission on Adaptation report recommends a 1.8 trillion USD fund needed to help the world adapt but none of this is directed to specific women lead initiations.  That should be rectified. Governments and donors should make specific investments to women led, and women inclusive funds to enable women adapt to climate change.

Women are already making efforts to pool their own funds together to support each other. For example, in Uganda,  the Women’s Empowerment for Resilience and Adaptation Against Climate Change,  a community of 1,642 women-led associations, representing more than 250,000 women, have pooled together their individual savings to generate a fund of close to USD 3 Million.

Women involved in this initiative borrow from this pool of savings to invest in innovative, scalable and replicable activities that catalyze action towards a low-carbon and highly resilient future.

Over 200,000 women have access to clean water, 250,000 earn income from income generating activities including bee keeping, over 1800 use solar energy while 34,000 energy-saving stoves have been constructed in thousands of households, reducing deforestation by 8%. Investments that help replicate such successes across the globe will economically empower women while conserving the environment and reducing the impacts of climate change.

Second, for the revolution in planning, government and other implementing agencies must make gender equality central to the planning process for climate change adaptation across the key systems that are the focus of the report- food, natural environment, water, infrastructure, cities, and natural disaster management.

This will require gender analysis for all proposed interventions in the different sectors, gender budgeting to ensure resources are allocated to gender responsive and gender specific actions, and monitoring and evaluation systems that measure impacts of interventions on different groups and on gender equality.

Studies by Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN show that a gender analysis of many climate-smart agriculture practices shows that they require relatively high investments in time and/or labour (e.g. building stone bunds and terraces) which can increase women’s labour burden.

A gender analysis can therefore inform the design and implementation of climate adaptation innovations. On gender budgeting, studies show that in countries like Nepal and Bangladesh, gender budget statements for climate change have led to more targeted investments on gender and climate change.

And third, on the knowledge revolution, a coalition of global organizations working on gender and climate should develop global guidelines on integrating gender concerns in climate adaptation and build capacity and accountability mechanisms to implement and monitor their application across countries by governments, private sector, global organizations and community-based organizations working on climate adaptation.

Organizations such as the World Health Organization, the International Labour Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization have been developing global guidelines on health, on labour standards and on agriculture. Such guidelines have been shown to have positive impacts.

An evaluation of the FAO voluntary guidelines on the responsible governance of tenure of land, fisheries and forests enacted in 2012 found that five out of six countries evaluated had included principles of responsible governance of tenure in policies, laws or activities, as a result of the guidelines.

It’s time to move beyond the analysis of women’s vulnerabilities to climate change and their roles in climate adaptation. Governments and donors must put their money where their mouths are – real investments on gender equality in the climate adaptation agenda.

 

The post Governments, Donors and Investors Must Put Their Money Where Their Mouths are on Gender and Climate Change appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Dr Jemimah Njuki works on issues of gender equality in the rural economy including on agriculture and climate resilience. She is an Aspen New Voices Fellow.

The post Governments, Donors and Investors Must Put Their Money Where Their Mouths are on Gender and Climate Change appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The International Organisation for Migration says that in Bangladesh victims of human trafficking are either abducted or lured with promises of a better life. Credit: Rafiqul Islam Sarker/IPS

By Rafiqul Islam
DHAKA, Oct 17 2019 (IPS)

After his father passed away two years ago, the burden of caring for a six-member family rested on the shoulders of the now 19-year-old Farhad Hossain. He had no clue how he would support his family and pay for the education of his four younger siblings. 

Capitalising on Hossain’s plight, a neighbour offered him a “promising job” abroad in Iraq.

Hossain, a resident from Kishoreganj district, Bangladesh, believed that going abroad was the only way for him to earn enough money to advance in life. So, he sold a piece of land and gave Taka 300,000 ($ 3,750) to the neighbour. 

“Few days later, I, along with some 14 Bangladeshis, were flown to Iraq. And when we reached Baghdad airport, two Bangladeshis received us and took us to a den in the desert,” Hossain told IPS over phone from Iraq.

The next day, he said, a gang of human traffickers, including Bangladeshis and Iraqi nationals, detained them in a house and started beating them, seeking a ransom. “We were forced to call to our family members via phone informing to give them the ransom money otherwise they would kill us,” Hossain said.

“But, my family’s [financial] circumstances was not so good [and they couldn’t afford] to pay the money the traffickers demanded. They did not give us food and even water regularly. They beat us three times in a day. I suffered such torture for six months. And when my mother sent the traffickers another amount of Taka 200,000 ($ 2,500), they released me. But many remained detained there,” he said.

Upon release Hossain was able to find work at a petrol station near Baghdad. He earns Taka 25,000 or $315 a month now and sends some of this home to his family.

Zahid, who works as a bellhop in Dhaka, has a similar story of trafficking. Last year, one of his relatives convinced him to go to Malaysia, where he was promised a job and told that he didn’t have to pay large sums to migrate. So Zahid, a resident of Dhaka’s Gopalganj district, paid the relative Taka 50,000 (about $ 625) so he could leave the country via irregular means.

Zahid and about 100 people, mostly youth, embarked from Cox’s Bazar, the location of the Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh. They were to travel a treacherous journey by boat to Indonesia and then on to Malaysia.

After a few days, they reached the shores of Indonesia. Zahid told IPS that instead of travelling onwards to Malaysia, they were kidnapped and taken to a jungle where the traffickers demanded a ransom, threatening to kill them if their families did not pay up. They were frequently beaten by traffickers, Zahid said.

More than a month passed before local law enforcement agencies rescued them and deported them to Bangladesh.

“The damage has already done. My husband returned home. That is why we are not interested to talk about the issue any more,” Zahid’s wife told IPS, wishing not to be identified as they both still remain fearful.

• In 2018, about 8.9 million Bangladeshis migrated internally and around 730,000 left the country through regular channels to work abroad — 12 million Bangladeshis are currently employed abroad.
• But unknown numbers migrate each year through irregular channels, risking exploitation and abuse at the hands of smugglers and traffickers, according to the U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report 2019.
• However, official data shows that over a five-year period from 2013 to 2018 over 8,000 people from Bangladesh, including women and children, were victims of human trafficking — a crime that places migrant workers at risk to physical and mental abuse, harassment, forced labour, forced and illegal marriages, sexual exploitation, illegal trade and in some cases, death.

“Due to unemployment problems and economic inequality existing in the country, a trafficked person doesn’t take much time to calculate their future financial gains and swallow the offer of the traffickers. The victims are either abducted or lured with promises of a better life by providing a lucrative job or marriage offers and false proposals to visit holy places. It is critical for all stakeholders to join hands and work together to combat human trafficking,” Sharon Dimanche, Deputy Chief of Mission for the International Organisation for Migration, Bangladesh, said in a recent statement.

• According to the U.S. Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report 2019, Bangladesh is on the Tier 2 Watch List for the third consecutive year.
• A Tier 2 ranking means that the country has not met standards of the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000 but has made significant efforts to do so.
• To be on the Tier 2 Watch List means is the ranking is similar to Tier 2 but the number of human trafficking victims is significantly high or significantly increasing in that country.

Human trafficking is illegal in Bangladesh.

The 2012 Prevention and Suppression of Human Trafficking Act criminalises sex and labour trafficking, prescribing penalties of five years to life imprisonment and a fine of not less than Taka 50,000 ($ 610).

But Shariful Islam Hasan, head of BRAC Migration Programme, told IPS, “The accused do not get punishment in most of the trafficking cases.”

The figures confirm this. Only around 4,446 trafficking cases have been filed under the Act since 2012. Out of an approximate 4,758 arrests there have been only 29 convictions, according to the Human Trafficking Cell of the Bangladesh Police.

“Trafficking is a transnational crime. The existing laws are good enough to prevent trafficking. But we need to implement the laws strictly to bring the traffickers under custody. And, raising awareness is the key issue where we should give intensive emphasis,” Dr Nakib Muhammad Nasrullah, a professor of Law, University of Dhaka, told a recent function observing the World Day Against Trafficking in Persons 2019.

However, officials say that the Bangladesh government has taken various initiatives to counter-trafficking like formulating policies, strengthening task forces, and the formulation of various committees such as:

• GO-NGO National Coordination Committee to Combat Human Trafficking,
• Committee to Monitor the National Plan of Action for Combatting Human Trafficking 2018-2022,
• the Rescue, Recovery, Repatriation and Integration (RRRI) Task Force, and
• Vigilance Task Force and Counter-Trafficking Committees (CTC) at district, sub-district and union levels.

Recently, United Nations agencies in Bangladesh established a national migration network to ensure coordinated U.N. country-wide support to the Bangladesh government in implementing the Global Compact on Migration and other relevant policies. 

“People desperately want to go abroad seeking jobs. That is why sometimes they go abroad through illegal channels and become victims of human trafficking. But, the law enforcing agencies here are working sincerely to prevent trafficking incidents,” Alamgir Hossain, additional superintendent of police and spokesman of the Armed Police Battalion, told IPS over phone

—————————————–The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN ) is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7 which ‘takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms’.

The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths, gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalisation of indifference, such us exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking” and so forth.

Related Articles

• For Some in Kashmir Marriage Equates to Sexual Slavery
• Human Trafficking – It Came Disguised as the Opportunity of a Lifetime
• Why Prosecuting Human Traffickers in Nigeria is Nothing More than a Mirage

The post Beaten and Tortured for a Ransom, Lured by the Promise of a Livelihood appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

This is part of a series of features from across the globe on human trafficking. IPS coverage is supported by the Riana Group.

The post Beaten and Tortured for a Ransom, Lured by the Promise of a Livelihood appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 17 2019 (IPS)

When the six much-ballyhooed high-level UN meetings concluded late September, there were mixed feelings about the final outcomes.

And civil society organizations (CSOs), who were mostly disappointed with the results, are now gearing themselves for two upcoming key climate summit meetings: COP25 in Santiago, Chile in December and COP26 in Glasgow, UK in late 2020, along with the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Women’s Conference scheduled to take place in September 2020 in New York.

But perhaps the most politically-significant event in 2020 will be the 75th anniversary of the United Nations which will take place amidst continued threats against multilateral institutions, rising right-wing nationalism, growing authoritarianism and widespread disinformation.

The anniversary will also take place in the shadow of one of the worst financial crises facing the world body – as Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that “the situation remains dire. And without immediate action, I can no longer guarantee the smooth functioning of the Organization.”

“I urge you to help put the United Nations on a solid financial footing,” he pleaded last month before the 134 members of the Group of 77 developing countries, plus China.

Sesheeni Joud Selvaratnam, Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030 lead at ActionAid, told IPS the United Nations is marking its 75th anniversary next year against a backdrop of rising global hunger, the climate crisis and an unravelling of progress towards social justice and equality.

“It’s not too late to get the Sustainable Development Goals back on track, but the 2020 global summits must see political will and leadership that translates into real action on the ground.

“States turning up and making commitments at the High-Level Political Forum and UN General Assembly isn’t enough. Governments must be held accountable to their citizens on implementing and delivering on their promises by 2030, and ensuring the most vulnerable are not left behind,” said Selvaratnam.

Jens Martens, executive director of Global Policy Forum (New York/Bonn), told IPS the summits have put the UN back at the centre of the global debates on future justice.

At least, many Heads of State and Government have recognized the climate emergency and the importance of sustainable development by participating in the summits.

“They have launched countless new initiatives to implement the SDGs. This is of course better than the destructive policies of Trump, Brazil’s Bolsonaro & Co,” he noted.

But, being present at the summits, making nice speeches, dating Greta Thunberg, and expressing understanding for the concerns of young people is not enough, he added.

“As long as governments do not change fundamentally the framework conditions of sustainable development, this will remain symbolic policy and sometimes pure actionism.”

The summits were once again summits of announced actions. But the world does not need more hypocritical promises and announcements, he pointed out.

“It needs political decisions that make fiscal policies fairer, bring global economic and monetary policy into line with SDGs and human rights, and rapidly accelerate the exit from the fossil fuel economy”, said Martens, who has coordinated the international Civil Society Reflection Group on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

In an oped piece for IPS last week, Kul Gautam, a former UN Assistant Secretary-General said: Everybody says UN needs reforms. But the kind of reforms that are proposed by Member States are often timid and inadequate, and in the case of those proposed by some, e.g. the Trump administration, they are actually harmful and contrary to the multilateral ethos of the United Nations.

Such proposals are unlikely to command broad-based support, he warned.

It is time for the Secretary-General himself to take the initiative and commission a high-level panel to propose a more predictable and sustainable funding of the UN, said Gautam.

The 75th anniversary of the UN in 2020 is a perfect occasion for the S-G to present a bold proposal for a more sustainable funding mechanism for the UN in keeping with the ambitious Sustainable Development Agenda for 2030 that the UN has championed so boldly, he declared.

Teresa Anderson, climate policy coordinator at ActionAid, told IPS 2019 has seen an unprecedented uprising of ordinary citizens around the world, inspired by young people, taking to the streets to demand action on the climate crisis.

“They have exposed the failure of the richest polluting countries at the UN climate action summit to respond with the ambition needed to address the scale of the climate emergency.

“Ahead of the climate summit in Santiago this December, we’re demanding meaningful financial support to address the injustice of climate change. Important proposals to support countries dealing with climate-induced ‘loss and damage’ are on the table”, she added.

It’s critical that the world does not turn its back on the vulnerable countries left to pick up the pieces after climate disasters, Anderson declared.

The September summits covered several issues on the UN agenda, including Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Climate Action, Universal Health Care, Financing for Development (FfD), Nuclear Disarmament and Small Island Developing States (SIDS).

Still, what is particularly annoying, Martens told IPS, is that the UN provided an exposed stage at the summits for billionaire Bill Gates and numerous representatives of transnational corporations.

The last few decades have shown that the market-based solutions these corporate actors have propagated have not solved the global crises, but rather aggravated them, he noted.

Martens said the more than 300 representatives of civil society organizations (CSOs) which met parallel to the SDG Summit at the People’s Assembly have rightly stated in their declaration: “We are saddened by the persisting lack of political will and leadership to even begin to address these issues. This is not good enough. This is failure.”

Jesse Griffiths, Head of Programme, Development Strategy and Finance Overseas Development Institute, told IPS “I did a blog for our website on the Dialogue – available here.”

“My main concern would be that while it was important that the level of attention to the issue was raised – this was a high-level event with heads of state involved – the event itself had been structured so that no concrete outcomes could be made.

This has been a problem of the FfD process itself – the FfD Forums that are held every year could in theory agree what needs to be done to put us on track to finance the SDGs, “but in practice they merely take stock of where we are, and have so far produced no real concrete outcomes”, he added.

“I fear this state of paralysis will continue until we have another high-level summit to follow up from Addis Ababa in 2015,” said Griffiths.

According to Guterres, the summit did produce several positive initiatives. “Let me be specific about just a few”, he told at the conclusion of the meeting.

He said 77 countries – many in the industrialized world – had committed to net zero carbon emissions by 2050. And they were joined by 10 regions and more than 100 cities – including several of the world’s largest.

He also pointed out that 70 countries announced they will boost their National Determined Contributions by 2020, while well over 100 leaders in the private sector committed to accelerating their move into the green economy.

More than 2,000 cities committed to putting climate risk at the centre of decision-making, creating 1,000 bankable, climate-smart urban projects.

UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric provided the final figures: a total of 195 speakers participated, including the Holy See, the State of Palestine and the European Union. Uzbekistan was the only country that did not speak.

Among the speakers — 82 Heads of State and 43 [Heads of Government].

There were 16 women speakers, which was 8.2 per cent only of all the speakers, and that is slightly lower than last year, when there were 19 women speakers or about 9.8 per cent.

To put matters into perspective, on the first day of the General Debate, he said, there were two female Heads of State and one Head of Government, compared to 29 male Heads of State and five male Heads of Government.

The longest speech at the General Debate was 50 minutes [from Pakistan] and the shortest speech from the President of Rwanda, Mr. [Paul] Kagame.

“We also had the Climate Action Summit and six other major meetings at the UN during the time of the General Debate.”

In addition, from 23 through 30 September, 1,674 bilateral meetings were held at the UN. And, as of 30 September, 566 other meetings, including those of regional groups [and] UN system entities, were held during the high level debate.

And, for our part, said Dujarric, “we issued 137 readouts from the Secretary General’s bilateral meetings.”

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@ips.org

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Ghanian smallholder farmer Regina Dabiali says they are increasingly losing out on harvests as their grains are becoming affected by aflatoxins. Courtesy: Albert Oppong-Ansah/IPS

By Albert Oppong-Ansah
BONO EAST REGION, Ghana , Oct 16 2019 (IPS)

Adwoa Frimpomaah, a smallholder farmer from Dandwa, a farming community in Nkoranza, in Ghana’s Bono East Region, and her two children have been consuming insect-infested and discoloured grains produced from their three-acre farm.

“Just look, I harvested this maize a week ago and after de-husking, majority of the cobs are either rotten, mouldy, or discoloured. I spent all my resources on this farm so I will sell the good grains, and wash the darkened grains, take out the rotten ones and eat it because we have no food,” she tells IPS.

Part of the yield from the April to July farming season, the grains that Frimpomaah and her family consumed are discoloured and mouldy because of the humidity and high temperatures here.

Dr. Rose Omari, Senior Research Scientist at the Science, Technology and Policy Research Institute, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research described these discoloured and mouldy grains as potentially being contaminated by harmful aflatoxins, which are both toxic and carcinogenic.

Researchers say that Ghana, like many West African countries, has high levels of aflatoxins in a majority of its staples, such as maize, peanuts, millet, and sorghum.

“Consumption of both maize and groundnut results in high human aflatoxin exposure in Ghana. However, most Ghanaians have little to no knowledge of either what aflatoxins are or the health risks posed by these toxins,” a 2018 report titled ‘Prevalence of Aflatoxin Contamination in Maize and Groundnut in Ghana’ states.  

“Aflatoxins are one of the most potent and dangerous groups of mycotoxins worldwide. Over four billion people in developing countries are repeatedly exposed to aflatoxins, contributing to greater than 40 percent of the disease burden in these countries,” an explanation on the characteristics of aflatoxins states. 

Smallholder farmers take a hit

This is in addition to economic losses.

“The trade sector has been affected as well. Commodities from Ghana (peanut butter, spices, and edible seeds) exceeding tolerance thresholds have been rejected in European borders. As a consequence, Ghana faces a threat of an export ban of aflatoxin-susceptible commodities if necessary actions to reduce aflatoxin levels in trade commodities are not taken,” the 2018 report titled ‘Prevalence of Aflatoxin Contamination in Maize and Groundnut in Ghana’ states. 

Other small holder farmers are also feeling the impact.

“Yesterday an aggregator came here to convince us to sell a 100-kilogram sack of maize for GHC 90 ($16). We do not get the right market because of high levels of aflatoxins that affects the quality of our grains,” smallholder farmer Regina Dabiali, 30, tells IPS.

“It is demotivating for us to work hard throughout the season and not receive our deserved wage. We are not progressing in life.”

People unwittingly exposed to the toxins

Gladys Serwaa Adusah, the leader of the farming cooperative, Middle Zone Women Farmers, says that aflatoxin contamination is not only robbing people of income, but also is “deadly and scary”.

“I know that some traders in their quest to maximise profit prepare and sell unwholesome corn dough by mixing aflatoxins contaminated grains with the good ones. It is used to prepare a variety of dishes, including porridge, kenkey and banku, (local dishes) which many people eat unknowingly,” she says.

Omari tells IPS that studies conducted show that the continuous intake of food that contains high levels of aflatoxins, is detrimental to the health of both adults and children. In adults, she says, studies validate that the accumulation of low levels of aflatoxins over time damages the human liver, resulting in liver cancer. It also causes acute health conditions including, vomiting, abdominal pains, coma, and death when highly contaminated products are consumed.

Omari says, “It is a fact that in sub-Saharan Africa children are exposed to aflatoxins very early in life, including in utero through maternal food intake, during breastfeeding, through weaning and post-weaning periods through foods prepared from aflatoxin-contaminated peanuts and maize.”

“This leads to malabsorption, micronutrient deficiencies, impaired immune function, and vulnerability to gut infections, which all lead to impaired growth and malnutrition.”

Omari says, according to the latest Ghana Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey, stunting in Ghana is highest among children under the age of five in the Northern Region and lowest in the Greater Accra region.

Referencing a study she conducted in 2018, together with other researches, Omari reveals that over 64 percent of weanimix (food made of maize, peanuts and beans) samples tested for high levels of aflatoxins, above 10 parts per billion (ppb) codex standards for process foods.

“The prevalence levels in this country are very high. These products ideally should not be on the market because safety-wise it is not wholesome. Most especially it is food for children who are the most vulnerable, ” she says.

However, according to the Food Sustainability Index, a global study on nutrition, sustainable agriculture and food waste developed in collaboration between the Barilla Centre for Food and Nutrition Foundation and the Economist Intelligence Unit, Ghana has a malnourishment prevalence score of 74.2 out of 100, where 100 equals the highest sustainability and greatest progress towards meeting environmental, societal and economic Key Performance Indicators.

Though quality Assurance Manager at Nestlé Ghana, Raphael Kuwornu, tells IPS that the issue of high levels of aflatoxin is of great concern to the company, “because we produce food for both adults and especially infants”.

“As a result we are working with a roadmap, which would see a continuous reduction in aflatoxin from 0.5ppb to 0.2ppb by 2020 for companies that supply us with maize grains,” he says.

Temperatures soar and so does prevelance of aflatoxins

Conditions favourable for the development, growth and dispersion of these fungi is between temperatures of 18 to 42° Celsius.

Deputy Director and Head of Research and Applied Meteorology at the Ghana Meteorological Agency, Francesca Martey, tells IPS that data gathered indicates a warming climate in Ghana.

Since 1960, she states, Ghana’s whole mean annual temperature rose by 1° Celsius and projections shows a further increase. “This is anticipated to have a major impact on the crop production system. The situation is not mild it is a serious issue,” she stresses.

Dr. Emmanuel Tachie-Obeng, a Principal Programme Officer at the Ghana Environmental Protection Agency, confirms to IPS that the rising temperature will fuel the production and spread of aflatoxins.

Tachie-Obeng says aflatoxins levels in maize may increase rapidly if not checked in areas such as Northern Volta, Central and Bono regions.

A solution that is not yet available to all

Last year, scientists at the International Institute of Tropical Agricultural (IITA) in collaboration with the United States Department of Agriculture – Agricultural Research Service and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology developed and tested a bio-pesticide called Aflasafe that controls fungi that produces aflatoxins in the soil. 

Aflasafe is made from four non-aflatoxin producing  types of fungi native to Ghana, preventing crop infection, contamination, and reducing aflatoxins by between 80 and 100 percent.

Dr. Daniel Agbetiameh, Aflasafe Technical Advisor at IITA, tells IPS that the all-natural product is applied before crops are harvested and it displaces the aflatoxin-producing moulds by first occupying and then “colonising” the space these poison producers would otherwise occupy.

“With four kilos of Aflasafe, we can protect an entire acre of maize, groundnuts or sorghum. The result is increased farmer income, and better consumer health,” Agbetiameh notes.

He adds that aflatoxin management is a pipeline of events that starts from the farmer to the consumer so each actor needs to play their role in reducing levels of aflatoxins.

Frimpomaah, Adusah and Dabiali want the government to consider including Aflasafe on the list of inputs offered to farmers under its flagship programme Planting for Food and Jobs.

Until then, Dabiali says that smallholder farmers like herself, are “sweating for nothing”.

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The post Ghana’s Grains and Groundnuts Face Increasing Contamination Amid Increasing Temperatures appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Shayda Naficy is a Senior Program Director at Corporate Accountability. Her areas of expertise include international human rights, global democracy movements, and water privatization and water management*.
 
Ebuata Philip Jakpor, a journalist and passionate advocate for environmental justice, is currently Programme Manager with the Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria.

By Shayda Naficy and Ebuata Pholip Jakpor
GENEVA / LAGOS, Oct 16 2019 (IPS)

In Geneva this week, a treaty process is underway that promises to usher in a new era for human rights around the globe.

The process—the intergovernmental working group on the binding treaty on transnational corporations and human rights—could mean that for the first time, human rights would be prioritized above corporate profits.

But the future of the agreement and human rights writ large will depend on whether governments can agree on a strong text this week.

Communities and governments have long struggled to hold abusive corporations and industries accountable.

These corporations which are sometimes wealthier than the countries in which they operate, have employed a series of tactics to escape accountability including hiding behind their supply chain, questioning jurisdiction, and in some cases even disputing the legal authority of individuals, communities, and governments have to hold them accountable in the first place.

This week’s meeting is the treaty’s fifth round of negotiations. Since its inception, the process has been met with opposition from many governments where major transnational corporations are based, including the United States and the European Union.

Corporate abuse and human rights violations have become all too familiar an occurrence, especially in communities of color, and especially in the Global South. Chevron’s massive pollution of the Amazon region in Ecuador was staggering.

But to add insult to injury, the U.S. transnational corporation subsequently refused to pay the $9.5B judgment found against it by the Ecuadorian judicial system.

The 1995 summary execution of the Nigerian Ogoni Nine and the role Shell played in these crimes also remains shameful. Equally disturbing is the assassination of Berta Cáceres and four other Honduran activists fighting the construction of a dam financed by international financial institutions who for years claimed no culpability for the dam project’s human rights abuses.

But if this treaty can tip the scales on these and other abuses around the world, all eyes must be on this week’s process to expose corporate interference and the efforts of governments operating in bad faith.

Here are four things to pay close attention to:

1. Attempts to water down the treaty: After multiple attempts at holding global corporations accountable over the past few decades, governments have finally reached the phase of negotiating the text of the treaty. This is groundbreaking.

But as with any negotiation, the devil will be in the details. We must guard against any amendments to the draft text that would weaken its potential to hold transnational corporations accountable.

2. Broadening the scope may sow confusion: The latest draft has expanded the scope to include national-level businesses in addition to transnational corporations. Such a change could result in heightened political tensions among governments, and risks diluting the focus on regulating transnational corporations—which is the stated purpose of the 2014 Human Rights Council Resolution 26/9 that is the basis of this negotiation.

3. Negotiating in bad faith: The European Union has time and again tried to shut the process down and has stood in opposition of the treaty despite its own parliament’s support for it. They will likely be joined in their opposition by industry trade groups such as the International Organisation of Employers and the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), the ICC also being a well-known obstructionist in other U.N. Fora like the UNFCCC. Business organizations like the ICC represent some of the most abusive corporations in the world—including Dow, Chevron, and Shell—which have been implicated in serious human rights violations.

4. A growing and unrelenting movement: Civil Society will also be mobilizing broadly to make sure we have a robust process and a strong binding treaty. Watch for the efforts and interventions in particular of the Global Campaign to Reclaim Peoples Sovereignty, Dismantle Corporate Power and Stop Impunity (Global Campaign) and the Treaty Alliance. The Global Campaign’s seven key proposals for a strong treaty are vital to ensure the text delivers what the world needs.

If successful, this week in Geneva will be a pivotal moment in upholding the primacy of human rights over corporate profits. It would be a lasting victory for the global movement to stop corporate abuse and would help foster a world in which all people can live up to their full potential and in harmony with earth’s vital natural systems.

Footnote:

The United Nations (UN) Inter-governmental Working Group (IGWG) discussing a treaty on “transnational corporations and other business enterprises with respect to human rights,”(1) enters its fifth round of negotiations this week from 15-19 October at the UN Human Rights Council.

During this session, UN member states will negotiate the second draft of this ground-breaking treaty that aims to hold transnational corporations to account for their human rights violations.

Interest in this process continues to grows as evidenced in the significant presence of UN member states delegates, civil society and elected officials worldwide.

321 members of regional and national parliaments, as well as municipal authorities, have endorsed the Call of People’s Representatives Worldwide for the UN Binding Treaty.

The post Holding Transnational Corporations Accountable for Human Rights Abuses appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Shayda Naficy is a Senior Program Director at Corporate Accountability. Her areas of expertise include international human rights, global democracy movements, and water privatization and water management*.

 

Ebuata Philip Jakpor, a journalist and passionate advocate for environmental justice, is currently Programme Manager with the Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria.

The post Holding Transnational Corporations Accountable for Human Rights Abuses appeared first on Inter Press Service.