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In Kashmir there are thousands of young women who were sold in their teens by their parents to older men, and now living lives governed by restrictions which many equate to imprisonment. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Umar Manzoor Shah
SRINAGAR, Oct 11 2019 (IPS)

Haseena Akhtar was only 13 when an agent told her parents that they could earn a good amount of money by letting her marry a Kashmiri man. The man was, however, three times older than Akhtar, the agent said.

Akhtar’s parents, who lived in the poverty-stricken region of West Bengal (an eastern Indian state), had two other daughters and according to tradition they would have had to bear cost of their marriages. So they let their 13-year-old daughter go with the agent.

Akhtar, who is now 20, ended up here in Kashmir — a landlocked northern region of India caught in the grip of violence and conflict over the past 30 years.

The agent took her to an old part of the city in Srinagar, the region’s capital, and she was married to a middle aged, disabled, Kashmiri man.

“That was not a marriage in any terms. That was a pure selloff. I was sold to a man who couldn’t find a bride for himself in Kashmir because his right leg was amputated after he was injured in a bomb blast some years before,” Akhtar told IPS.

Too many daughters and no boy

A year after the marriage, she gave birth to a girl.

Three more daughters later, and the strong desire by both her husband and her in-laws for a son and grandson was not fulfilled.

By the age of 18 Akhtar was mother to four daughters and relations with her husband and her in-laws had deteriorated.

“I was nothing less than a sex slave for my husband who wanted me to give birth to a boy. When that didn’t happen, I was first ridiculed, then beaten and then dragged out of the home along with my daughters,” Akhtar said.

One of the neighbours provided her with shelter and intervened to talk to her husband and his family. A volunteer organisation also came to her aid and helped her get work as a cleaner in a private firm, earning $100 a month.

When efforts to remedy things with her in-laws failed, Akhtar’s husband  paid her $550 and divorced her.

With a meagre income and four daughters to support, the road ahead for Akhtar looks filled with hurdles.

“I don’t know what I will do and where I will go. I sometimes wonder why being poor makes you vulnerable to all kinds of exploitation,” she said.

It’s so common, its socially acceptable

Akhtar’s story is not unique here.

In Kashmir there are thousands of young women like her, sold in their teens by their parents to older men, who are now living lives governed by restrictions which many equate to imprisonment. 

Infested with violence and Islamist militancy, Kashmir is becoming a safe haven for human traffickers. 

A three-decade insurgency that aims to free the region from Indian rule and the Indian efforts to quell it have claimed at least 100,000 lives, including those of civilians, militants and members of the security forces.

The border tensions and insurgency have killed an average of 1,500 people each year over the last 30 years, according to official records. Here, many former militants, torture victims and people who remain psychologically affected by the conflict didn’t marry at the traditionally marriageable ages of between 25 to 35 years. 

Now much older, these rejected grooms are turning to agents who provide them with young, non-local women whom they can marry — all for the price of just a few thousand dollars.

Aabid Simnanni, a renowned scholar and a social worker who heads an organisations that focuses on human trafficking in Kashmir, told IPS that a majority of the marriages between Kashmiri men and teenage, non-local women end badly due to the generational and cultural gaps. 

“You see the men to whom these young brides are married to are middle aged — 40 to 45 years old. How could you expect such a huge generation gap to disappear? Also, there are cultural, linguistic and many other barriers between the two sides. These things matter a lot in a successful marriage,” Simnanni said.

He said that for the past five years his organisation has been helping women get legal and financial help but that it would be a Herculean task to stop the practice. 

Police won’t investigate because the women are legally married

A senior official in the anti-trafficking cell of the Kashmir police told IPS that it has become almost impossible to catch traffickers as there is no one willing to testify to the crime.

“The victim is usually married to the man by [law] and it is difficult to ascertain the victim’s age as the documents are already forged by the agents. We act only when we receive the complaint against anyone,” said the official who did not wish to be named as he is not authorised to speak to the media about the issue. 

He says that there are no records available about the number of brides trafficked to Kashmir as the practice has societal acceptance in Kashmir. 

“The marriage is happens in a broad day light. Though it is an open secret that these girls are sold by their parents for a pretty sum, the relationship they get into is absolutely legitimate and legal in accordance the law,” the official said.

My marriage, my prison

Four years ago, Ulfat Bano, a 14-year-old from India’s Northern state of Bihar was taken to Kashmir by her distant cousin who herself was married to a Kashmiri man. 

Bano’s family was given around one thousand dollars and an assurance that she would marry into a good family. 

Here she was given to a  50- year-old torture victim.

“I was shocked when I saw him first. He was older than my father and I was forcibly married to him. I had no choice,” Bano told IPS.

According to her, her husband was tortured in the early 1990s when militancy against the Indian rule erupted in Kashmir.

His left eye was damaged and for years he could not find a local woman to marry him. His family contacted Bano’s cousin, who was married to one of their relatives, and asked her to find a bride for their son.

Now the mother of a three-year-old daughter and a two-year-old son, Bano longs for home every day. 

In the four years since her marriage, she has not been allowed to return to Bihar to see her family.

“Kashmir is nothing less than a prison for me. What good is this life for when you cannot meet your parents and share few moments of joy with them? My husband fears that if he allows me to meet my parents, I won’t return home.

“He is probably right.”

—————————————–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

• West Africa’s Fine Line Between Cultural Norms and Child Trafficking
• As Fathers Die, Kashmir’s Children Become Breadwinners
• Myanmar and China’s Bride Trafficking Problem

The post For Some in Kashmir Marriage Equates to Sexual Slavery 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 For Some in Kashmir Marriage Equates to Sexual Slavery appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Dr. Abiy Ahmed must now work tirelessly for peace

By PRESS RELEASE
OSLO, Oct 11 2019 (IPS-Partners)

“We congratulate Dr. Abiy Ahmed on the Nobel Peace Prize and his courageous efforts in bringing ambitious reforms to Ethiopia and offering the hand of peace to neighbouring Eritrea. The Norwegian Refugee Council is among the very few international groups operating in Eritrea and Ethiopia and assisting people in need in both countries. We have witnessed the dramatic improvement in relations between the two countries during Dr. Abiy Ahmed´s government after conflict and tension over the years produced displacement and suffering.

As the recipient of the Nobel prize, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed must now make resolving ethnic tensions within Ethiopia a priority and work tirelessly to bring peace to his people.

As Africa´s youngest leader, Dr. Ahmed made peace with Eritrea after almost 20 years of hostilities. He released political prisoners and journalists, unbanned opposition groups and appointed women to his cabinet, all within a year of being in office.

Today´s announcement is not only a win for Dr. Ahmed but for Ethiopia.

When I visited Ethiopia in June, I was astounded by the country´s economic and social achievements, including its ability to welcome refugees from war-torn countries like South Sudan and Somalia without complaint. Ethiopia currently hosts over 900,000 refugees and passed a historic new law that allows refugees access to services such as work permits and banking.

However, I was equally struck by meeting many of the millions of displaced Ethiopians as a result of ethnic violence. Around 2.3 million citizens are displaced inside the country, 1.7 million of them after fleeing conflict. Dr. Ahmed must continue to be brave and work to resolve ethnic tensions through peaceful means and bring to an end the misery and suffering of millions of displaced people.”

For interviews or more information, please contact:

NRC’s media hotline: info@nrc.no, +47 90562329

The post Statement by NRC Secretary General Jan Egeland following the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize winner for 2019: appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Dr. Abiy Ahmed must now work tirelessly for peace

The post Statement by NRC Secretary General Jan Egeland following the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize winner for 2019: appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Kul Chandra Gautam
KATHMANDU, Nepal, Oct 11 2019 (IPS)

The United Nations is faced with a financial crisis once again. Leaders of as many as 64 countries who paraded and pontificated at the UN General Assembly and its multiple Summit meetings in September 2019 were deadbeats, who had not paid their dues in full to the UN for this year.

Many have been in arrears for multiple years. Those include not just poor and war-torn countries in crisis but many wealthy countries such as the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Oman, and Nigeria whose ambassador presides over the UN General Assembly this year.

This is not a new phenomenon. UN has been in serious financial crisis before. And once every decade or so the crisis becomes alarming as it seems to be at present.

We are told that the UN Secretariat could face a default on staff salaries and payments for goods and services by the end of November 2019 unless more Member States pay their budget dues in full.

To address the crisis, the Secretary-General has taken various steps including reduction in official travel; postponing spending on goods and services; discontinuing events outside official meeting hours, and possibly considering postponement or even cancellation of meetings and conferences mandated by the General Assembly. Previous Secretaries-General also had to resort to such measures.

Faced with similar circumstances, many bold proposals were made to resolve the crises in the past. But the fate of such proposals always ended up in resorting to short-term, stop-gap, compromise solutions.

Kul Chandra Gautam

As his predecessors have done in the past, Secretary-General António Guterres wrote a letter to all Member States on the 7th of October 2019 to apprise them of the imminent financial crisis and appealed for their help to resolve it.

What is new in the S-G’s most recent letter to Member States is an explicit acknowledgment that “this is a recurrent problem that severely hampers the Secretariat’s ability to fulfil its obligations to the people we serve”.

He went on to say that he “looks to Member States to resolve the structural issues that underlie this annual crisis without further delay”.

It is my considered view that the time has come for the Secretary-General himself to exercise bolder leadership and make some specific proposals, and not just to “look to Member States to resolve the structural issues that underlie the crisis”.

Precisely because there are structural issues and strong vested interests, Member States by themselves are unlikely to come up with solutions that require bold, innovative and even non-conventional approaches.

Only a neutral, visionary and respected leader or a group of leaders can come up with such proposals. The onus and the opportunity for coming up with such proposals now lies squarely with Secretary-General António Guterres.

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.

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.

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.

What might be some elements of the proposal that the S-G can present? I made a humble proposal in 2017 when the Trump administration first proposed its sweeping cuts to the UN budget and aid for international development: http://kulgautam.org/2017/03/20/responding-to-us-budget-cuts-for-united-nations/.

This proposal was further dissected in an Inter Press Service article in December 2018 by several scholars and diplomats with deep knowledge and affinity with the UN : http://www.ipsnews.net/2018/12/time-end-cheque-book-diplomacy-un/

Here are two key elements that stand out for the S-G’s consideration: 1) resurrect, revise and reformulate the 1985 proposal by the late Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme who recommended capping the share of any member state to 10 percent of the organization’s assessed contributions, and 2) seriously explore some innovative financing arrangements such as the Tobin tax on currency or financial transactions, a carbon tax, taxes on the arms trade, and raising resources from the deep seas and other global commons, which are considered the common heritage of humankind.

It is worth remembering that the cap proposed by Palme was intended to reduce the UN’s excessive dependence on funding by the US and a fistful of big donors. The spirit of the Palme proposal was to protect the UN from being unduly influenced by and vulnerable to the whims of such donors.

Any shortfall caused by capping the US contribution to the UN can and ought to be made up by other members of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the large number of middle-income emerging economies, without putting undue burden on the world’s low-income countries and LDCs.

It is worth recalling that in the larger scheme of international finance, in a world economy of $88 trillion and global military budgets of $1.8 trillion per year, the UN’s regular annual budget is only $3.3 billion, and the totality of the UN system’s budget for humanitarian assistance, development cooperation, peace-keeping operations, technical assistance and other essential normative functions, amounts to less than $50 billion per year.

This is a modest amount to respond to the huge challenges that the UN is asked and expected to help tackle.

To put it in perspective, the total UN system-wide spending annually is less than the defense budget of India or France, and less than one month’s US spending on defense.
With similar investment, bilateral aid and national budgets of much bigger proportions could hardly achieve results comparable to what the UN and international financial institutions achieve.

On the idea of exploring alternative innovative funding, it is useful to recall that financing for development landscape is changing rapidly. Many UN activities already benefit from private sector financing and philanthropic foundations. Many NGOs rely increasingly in cloud-sourcing and crowd-funding as well as different modalities of public-private partnerships.

Harnessing such possibilities and expanding its sphere of partnerships must also be part of the UN’s own sustainable funding agenda as recognized in SDG-17.

We know that the US and many other states are likely to oppose such schemes as most states want to safeguard their monopoly over taxing powers and will not be keen to give such authority to the UN or anyone else.

Many governments would also be fearful of UN mobilizing funding from non-conventional sources that they cannot control.

However, I see no reason why the UN should not judiciously explore such funding options – not to replace core funding by Member States, but to complement it.

After all, the UN is supposed to be an organization of “We the Peoples”, not just “We the Governments”. Historically, it is often the people’s movements that have helped the UN to set ambitious and futuristic agenda, such as on human rights, social justice, and climate change, often defying the resistance of some powerful as well as many power-hungry governments.

To his credit, Guterres has dared to push the agenda of addressing the climate crisis, universal health coverage – including sexual and reproductive health and rights – and several other measures despite known objections by some powerful Member States, including the US.

While actual progress has been limited, and the S-G does not have the power or the resources to force changes, the bully pulpit of the world’s top and most visible diplomat needs to be harnessed for the greater good of humanity.

Dag Hammarskjold and Kofi Annan dared to take bold leadership despite great odds, and history has judged them well.

I would urge António Guterres to come up with some bold proposals for sustainable funding of the UN on the occasion of its 75th anniversary in 2020. This could be one of his lasting legacies as the Secretary-General of the SDG-era.

https://amazon.com/author/kulgautam

The post Wanted: Bold Leadership by António Guterres: On Sustainable Funding of United Nations appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Kul Chandra Gautam, a former Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF and Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, is the author of: Global Citizen from Gulmi: My Journey from the Hills of Nepal to the Halls of the United Nations.

The post Wanted: Bold Leadership by António Guterres: On Sustainable Funding of United Nations appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Isabel Ortiz is Director of the Global Social Justice Program at Joseph Stiglitz’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University, former Director at the International Labour Organization (ILO) and UNICEF, and senior official at the UN and at the Asian Development Bank.
 
Matthew Cummins is senior economist who has worked at UNDP, UNICEF and the World Bank.

By Isabel Ortiz and Matthew Cummins
WASHINGTON DC, Oct 11 2019 (IPS)

While this week Ministers of Finance and economists meet in Washington to confront global economic challenges at the IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings, the majority of the world population lives with austerity cuts and see their living standards deteriorating. World leaders must reverse this trend.

Isabel Ortiz

Since 2010, most governments in both high income and developing counties have been implementing austerity policies, cutting public expenditures. Surprisingly, this trend is expected to continue at least until 2024, according to a global study just published by the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University, global trade unions and civil society organizations. Austerity has become “the new normal.”

Based on IMF fiscal projections, the study finds that a new fiscal adjustment shock will start in 2020. By 2021, government expenditures as a share of GDP will be declining in 130 countries, nearly three-fourths of which are in the developing world. The reach of austerity is staggering: nearly 6 billion persons will be affected by 2021.

How are governments cutting their budgets and implementing austerity reforms? In practice, the most commonly considered adjustment measures in 2018-19 include: pension and social security reforms (in 86 countries); cutting or capping the public sector wage bill, including the number and salaries of teachers, health workers and civil servants delivering public services (in 80 countries); labor flexibilization reforms (in 79 countries); reducing or eliminating subsidies (in 78 countries); rationalizing and/or further targeting social assistance or safety nets (in 77 countries); increasing regressive consumption taxes, such as sales and value added taxes (in 73 countries); strengthening public-private partnerships (PPPs) (in 60 countries); privatizing public assets/services (in 59 countries); and healthcare reforms (in 33 countries).

All of these measures have negative social impacts. As a result, in many countries older persons have lower pensions; there are not sufficient teachers, medical and care staff, and the quality of public services suffers; there are less jobs, and people work under more precarious conditions; prices increase while wages are stagnant; and the low and middle classes are squeezed and under pressure.

Matthew Cummins

In perspective, the macroeconomic and fiscal choices made by governments over the last decade are alarming. The G20 alone committed US$10 trillion to support the financial sector in response to the global financial crisis, and then passed the costs of adjustment to populations, with millions of people being pushed into poverty and lower living standards.

The worldwide drive toward austerity or fiscal consolidation can be expected to aggravate the growth and employment crisis and diminish public support at a time of high development needs, soaring inequalities and social discontent.

Austerity is also being used as a trojan horse to induce “Washington Consensus” policies to cut back on public policies and the welfare state. Once budgets are contracting, governments must look at policies that minimize the public sector and expand private sector delivery, including PPPs. There are clear winners and losers from this renewed Washington Consensus, and governments must effectively assess and question these policies.

Austerity and budget cuts do not need to be “the new normal.” There are alternatives, even in the poorest countries. Governments can find additional fiscal space to fund public services and development policies through at least eight options, which range from increasing progressive tax revenues, cracking down on illicit financial flows, improving debt management and using fiscal and foreign exchange reserves, to adopting more accommodative macroeconomic frameworks, reprioritizing public expenditures and -for lower income countries- lobbying for greater aid. All these options are endorsed by the United Nations and the international financial institutions.

It is time for world leaders to abandon the myopic scope of macroeconomic and fiscal policy decisions that benefit few and, instead, look for new fiscal space and financing opportunities to foster a robust global recovery and the achievement of long-term global prosperity for all.

The post Austerity, the “New Normal” appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Isabel Ortiz is Director of the Global Social Justice Program at Joseph Stiglitz’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University, former Director at the International Labour Organization (ILO) and UNICEF, and senior official at the UN and at the Asian Development Bank.

 
Matthew Cummins is senior economist who has worked at UNDP, UNICEF and the World Bank.

The post Austerity, the “New Normal” appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Civilians at risk as violence escalates and humanitarian work is suspended.

By PRESS RELEASE
Oct 10 2019 (IPS-Partners)

Civilians in north-east Syria are at risk and humanitarian aid could be cut off following the launch of a new military operation in the area, leading aid agencies are warning.

Reports from humanitarian responders on the ground say civilians are already on the move and that some vital services have been interrupted, including medical facilities and water supplies. Agencies say that some of their staff have fled with their families, while others are on lockdown.

An estimated 450,000 people live within 5km of the Syria-Turkey border and are at risk if all sides do not exercise maximum restraint and prioritise the protection of civilians. The population includes more than 90,000 internally displaced people, who have already been forced to flee their homes at least once in Syria’s unrelenting war.

According to UN OCHA, there are at least 1,650,000 people in need of humanitarian assistance in north-east Syria. The life-saving humanitarian response will be threatened if instability forces aid agencies to suspend or relocate their programming and staff, as is already happening. With an ongoing major crisis in Idlib and huge needs across the country, the aid response in Syria is already stretched to breaking point.

The 14 aid agencies are urging parties to the conflict to fully respect International Humanitarian Law and ensure that they refrain from using explosive weapons in populated areas. They must ensure all measures are taken to protect civilians and facilitate safe, unhindered humanitarian access. People living in the area affected by this military action have the right to freedom of movement and must not be forcibly displaced from their homes.

Likewise, there must be no forcible returns of refugees living in Turkey to Syria. Anyone returned could face threats to their safety and security, continued internal displacement and reliance on humanitarian assistance that the international community is not in a position to provide. According to the Government of Turkey, an estimated 83 per cent of the three million Syrians in Turkey do not originate from the north-east.

The international community has an important role to play in helping to resolve this crisis. The UN Security Council, which is expected to discuss the situation today (10th October), must emphasize the need for restraint and reiterate importance of protecting civilians and facilitating unimpeded humanitarian operations.

The security situation in the area is already fragile, with tens of thousands of fighters and their families being held in camps and detention centres. All children must be protected and provided humanitarian assistance, and countries of origin must take immediate steps to repatriate the estimated 9,000 children from at least 40 different nationalities who are in north-east Syria.

Urgent action is needed to ensure that the humanitarian situation in north-east Syria does not worsen further, with potentially dire consequences for families and children who find themselves once again caught up in deadly violence.

Signed:
• Action Against Hunger
• Christian Aid
• CARE International
• DanChurchAid
• Diakonie Katastrophenhilfe
• Humanity & Inclusion
• International Rescue Committee
• Medecins du Monde
• Mercy Corps
• Norwegian Refugee Council
• Oxfam
• People in Need
• Un Ponte Per
• World Vision

For more information please contact Karl Schembri karl.schembri@nrc.no / +962 7902 20159 or Caroline Anning caroline_anning@wvi.org / +962 778482439

The post 14 aid agencies warn of humanitarian crisis in North-East Syria appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Civilians at risk as violence escalates and humanitarian work is suspended.

The post 14 aid agencies warn of humanitarian crisis in North-East Syria appeared first on Inter Press Service.

This week UN Security Council considered the situation in Syria. Aid groups operating in northeastern Syria have been raising the alarm about civilian casualties and an impending humanitarian crisis this week, as Turkey began a military assault on the turbulent region’s Kurdish militants. Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elias

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 10 2019 (IPS)

Aid groups operating in northeastern Syria have been raising the alarm about civilian casualties and an impending humanitarian crisis this week, as Turkey began a military assault on the turbulent region’s Kurdish militants.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Human Rights Watch (HRW) and other groups warned about everything from massive new flows of refugees to conditions for detained Islamic State (IS) fighters from a previous phase in Syria’s chaotic civil war.

Turkish forces began an offensive in Syria’s northeast on Wednesday to clear out Kurdish militias and return Syrian refugees, within days of United States President Donald Trump’s controversial decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria’s turbulent north.

MSF teams “remain ready to provide medical care after the Turkish military launched operations” and “are preparing for a potential increase of patients linked to the conflict,” the group said in a statement Wednesday.

“We have seen people being displaced from locations along the border due to the conflict and are extremely worried that the military intervention will threaten the safety and wellbeing of the Syrian people,” the group said.

Military operations against Kurdish fighters began Wednesday with air strikes rocking the Syrian border town of Ras al Ain with large explosions, as Turkey moved tanks, artillery, and howitzers in preparation for a broader assault.

United Nations spokesman Farhan Haq said aid groups would have “scale-up at a time of crisis” and urged the region’s armed forces to keep the Turkey-Syria border open so that aid trucks could bring food, medicine and other gear to those affected by fighting.

Ankara seeks to create a “safe zone” to return millions of refugees to Syrian soil and end a “terror corridor” on Turkey’s southern border. Turkey says Kurdish YPG fighters in northeast Syria are terrorists due to their links to militants waging an insurgency inside Turkey.

Turkey had been preparing to advance into Syria’s northeast since U.S. troops started pulling out of the area in a policy shift by Trump that was widely condemned in Washington as a betrayal of America’s armed Kurdish allies.

Eric Schwartz, president of Refugees International, an aid group, blasted Trump’s policy shift and rounded on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s “shockingly irresponsible” assault, which “will put lives at grave risk.”

“Trump’s decision to give Turkey the green light to launch an incursion into northeast Syria could have major humanitarian consequences,” Schwartz, a former U.S. State Department official, said in a statement.

“It could open new fronts in the conflict and newly displace hundreds of thousands of civilians across an area already in the grip of a humanitarian crisis [and] likely force international relief groups to evacuate just when they are most needed.”

Doz, a youth aid organisation, said Ankara’s stated objective of resettling some 2 million Syrian refugees from Turkey back to their homeland was tantamount to “demographic engineering and ethnic cleansing”.

In a statement, Doz urged the European Union, the U.N. and the U.S. to try to “prevent this war”, which will have “dramatic consequences such as new mass forced migration and directly affect the life of 6 million civilians.”

Fighting in the struggling northeast could “revive” prospects for IS and “cause the release” of some 12,000 hardline militants who are detained by Kurdish forces at al-Hol and other camps in Syria’s northeast, said Doz.

HRW, a New York-based campaign group, said the detained militants across some seven lockups in the northeast included 4,000 foreign fighters who should be repatriated to their countries of origin.

“Thousands of people, including children, are stuck in what amounts to shockingly overcrowded prisons on suspicion of being IS, but no one is accepting responsibility for them,” said Letta Tayler, a crisis researcher for HRW. 

 

“Any authority that effectively controls these informal prisons is legally bound to urgently improve conditions and ensure that each and every detainee is held lawfully.”

Related Articles

• South Sudan’s Authorities Allow Serious Human Rights Abuses to Flourish and go Unpunished – Report
• Afghan War Deadly for Children Despite Peace Process: UN

The post Aid Groups Warn of Humanitarian Crisis from Turkey’s Assault on Syria appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Credit: UN peacekeeping

By Izumi Nakamitsu
STOCKHOLM, Oct 10 2019 (IPS)

Throughout history, technology has transformed armed conflict. The carnage of First World War battlefields is a stark example of what happens when advances in weaponry outpace the normative frameworks around its use.

Today, we are experiencing a technological revolution that holds incredible promise for human development and welfare. From genome editing to quantum computing and artificial intelligence, emerging technologies offer us powerful new ways to achieve our shared commitments, including the Sustainable Development Goals.

Our networked society is promoting a “democratization” of technological dissemination. Ease of understanding and using technology is greater than ever before. Yet these benefits also bring with them clear risks for international peace and security.

Before I address the trends and consequences of the current technological context, I want to add my usual caveat: it is important not to be alarmist about the ramifications of technology, but at the same time not dismissive either.

With that, let me share with you some of the major trends in conflict risk as I see them and the implications they carry for international peace and security.

First, the application of technology to new means and methods of warfare is aggravating an arms-racing dynamic in both conventional and nuclear weapons. This dynamic is evident in the eye-watering amounts of money spent on weapons – some 1.8 trillion dollars last year, according to SIPRI – and the nuclear modernization campaigns that are, in effect, a qualitative nuclear arms race.

This is both exacerbated by, and in turn exacerbates, the absence of transparency and confidence in international relations. As States strive to develop newer and better weapons, it threatens to undermine stability and increase the prospects for unintended and potentially uncontrollable escalation.

This dynamic is not limited to States with advanced technological bases. The democratic characteristics of technological innovation provide for creative asymmetric responses – the digital IEDs, if you will.

The second trend I want to highlight is how technology is opening new potential domains for the conduct of hostilities.

Military operations using emerging technologies and in new domains can involve actions that are not easily classifiable or fall below traditional thresholds for an armed attack or an act of aggression.

This creates challenges for international peace and stability, as even non- permanent means of disrupting or disabling a military capability can prompt a conventional armed response.

Take, for example, what is commonly referred to as “cyber warfare”.

The frequency of malicious cyber incidents is growing, along with their severity. Such acts are contributing to diminishing trust and confidence among States and encouraging them to adopt offensive postures for the hostile use of these technologies.

The difficulty of attributing responsibility for cyber-attacks could result in unwarranted armed responses and escalation. Constraints agr the case of cyberattacks that do not cause physical damage and are not lethal.

New domains and methods of warfare will also change the impact on civilians in ways that are less kinetic but equally damaging. For example, “casualties” in a cyber conflict could include millions of people who have had their bank accounts wiped out by an offensive cyberattack.

Put differently, some of these new technologies could not only change the size and speed of destruction in conflict, but also the character and nature of destruction in war.

A third and related trend is how certain new technologies, in particular armed uncrewed aerial vehicles, are undermining civilian protections. Lower risks to armed forces and comparatively lower levels of physical violence risk lowering the threshold on the use of armed force in situations where it would not otherwise have been contemplated.

Such actions not only endanger civilians, but risk escalating conflict.

The fourth and final trend I want to draw attention to is the emerging nature of warfare enabled by networked militaries, autonomy, uncrewed vehicles, advanced sensors, and weapons that can attack at hypersonic speeds.

This form of warfare is not yet fully realized, but technological innovation, coupled with evolving military thinking, is trending the world in this direction with several significant risks.

So-called “hypersonic weapons” pose particular concerns because they could both reduce decision-making times while also adding ambiguities related to the nature of their targets and their own payloads, whether conventional or nuclear.

Increased adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) may lead to decision-making processes faster than human cognition and concern has been expressed about the potential for unpredictable and non-transparent behaviour by AI in armed conflict.

Increasing autonomy in the critical functions of weapons systems raises serious ethical and legal questions for existing frameworks and how to ensure human accountability for the use of force. The growing use of UAVs and increased autonomy could lead to perceptions of casualty-free warfare.

The possibility of third parties with malicious intent interfering in control systems to incite conflict cannot be discounted.

The potential for such advances to exacerbate political divisions and global tensions would be alarming even in the most benign of international environments.

However, we are currently mired in a geostrategic context defined by distrust, the militarization of international relations and a dearth of dialogue. Relations between the so- called “great powers” are eroding as the rules-based international order – including the disarmament and non-proliferation regime – is being challenged.

Other global issues – climate change, mass migration and social unrest – will also continue to affect the nature and conduct of armed conflict.

In this unsettling environment, where brakes on warfare are being removed, the utmost caution should be exercised in the deployment of technological innovations with disruptive ramifications.

Having said this, it is easy to list risks and challenges. It is a much harder task to elaborate solutions.

I would like to suggest today what might be some of the key elements, from the United Nations’ perspective, for our joint work ahead to elaborate possible solutions. Some of them relate to substance, others to the process and partnerships we must forge.

First, a few points related to the development of norms and their operationalization or implementation.

One of the most prominent debates in the governance of emerging technologies has been whether international frameworks can adequately contain new risks and concerns. There is divergence over whether existing law is sufficient or whether new legal instruments are required.

Some new technologies, such as armed drones, have prompted concerns about how they can tempt some to reinterpret international law.

What we need is an honest debate about how international law applies to any possible use of emerging technologies as weapons, how any such uses are constrained or prohibited by existing international law and where new approaches, including new law, is needed to mitigate foreseeable risks.

Increased transparency and accountability in the use of new technologies could help increase confidence in adherence to international law. When it comes to the weaponization of new technologies, broadened use and transparency of weapons reviews – those required under article 36 of Additional Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Conventions – would build confidence about the legality of those weapons systems.

Regardless of where States sit on this debate, protecting civilians from the effects of armed conflict must continue to be a central concern when addressing the means and methods of warfare.

This is a tenet that we cannot lose sight of as States rush to utilize technological innovations in armed conflict.

We must reinforce mechanisms for the protection of civilians, including respect for and compliance at all times with applicable international law, including international humanitarian law.

While Member States will continue to have primary responsibility in matters of international peace and security, twenty-first century norm-making cannot be just straightforward treaty negotiations between States.

Much of the technology we have been discussing today is either dual-use or even enabling. Its creators need to be brought into the fold.

The importance of developing effective multi-stakeholder platforms that can bring together experts from Member States, industry, academia and civil society should be a priority.

This is important not only to ensure that intergovernmental deliberations are adequately informed, but also that technical communities are aware of the context and possible consequences of their work.

Modern norm-making should consider a broad spectrum of responses, from self-regulation such as code of conducts, to political initiatives such as transparency and confidence-building measures, to comprehensive and multifaceted efforts in the traditional intergovernmental negotiations.

Secondly, while each of these technologies will have a disruptive individual impact, it is at their convergence where the real challenges lie.

We need to generate a better understanding of the combined effects, especially of enabling technologies such as cyber and AI that will impact everything, not least each other. What, for example, will be the impact of autonomous malware?

I am particularly worried about how the combined use of technological innovations could upend strategic stability and lower the barriers to the use of a nuclear weapon.

Concepts such as “left of launch” missile defence – the disabling of nuclear command and control structures by cyber means – could create “use it or lose it” mentalities for first strikes.

Experts have raised the possibility of AI deep fakes to spoof command and control or early warning systems, as well the prospect of so-called “data poisoning”, the deliberate alteration of the data on which AI runs to produce unintended outcomes.

Because of such risks, Cold War concepts, including classical deterrence models, should be re-evaluated for the digital age where terms such as “cyber deterrence” could have dangerous escalatory consequences. In this era, instead of deterring conflict we need to better focus on preventing it.

In the UN context, we have made good progress to address some of the challenges posed by innovations in technology.

On autonomous weapons, States considering this issue within the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons have produced three consensus reports. My office stands ready to support Member States to build on the commonalities identified in those reports, including by elaborating measures to ensure that humans remain in control of the use of force.

Five UN Group of Governmental Experts have agreed that international law applies to the use of ICTs and that the UN Charter applies in its entirety. In 2015, the GGE was able to forge 11 voluntary non-binding norms to reduce risks to international peace, security and stability. That work continues now in two forums – an Open-Ended Working Group that met earlier this month, and another GGE that will convene later this year.

To help facilitate responses to their potential risks, my office, together with the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, published a study on hypersonic weapons. The study makes the case for multilateral discussion of these weapons, the development of which cannot be seen in isolation from the current deterioration in strategic arms control. We have now convened two track 1.5 meetings to inform and explore its findings.

Member States have taken practical steps to preserve peace and security by developing and commencing the implementation of transparency and confidence-building measures in outer space activities.

Later this year, the First and Fourth Committees of the General Assembly will convene a third ad hoc meeting on possible challenges to space security and sustainability.

A GGE on the prevention of an arms race in outer space also met earlier this year. Unfortunately, it was unable to agree on a substantive report, but nevertheless had the most substantive dialogue since the item was introduced to the Conference on Disarmament in 1985.

As you can see, there have been good discussions taking place in various individual areas of new technology. It is important to start now in understanding what might be the possible combined impact of these technologies in today’s international security environment. This leads me to my third and final key issue.

The disruptive nature of technological innovations and the convergence between them has prompted calls for new thinking in disarmament, arms control and non-proliferation.

As the Secretary-General said in February this year: “We need a new vision for arms control in the complex international security environment of today.”

Any new vision would need to preserve the indispensable benefits of the existing frameworks but could address many of the issues I have already mentioned. It should encompass all kinds of nuclear weapons and their qualitative developments.

It could consider particularly destabilizing categories of weapons such as hypersonic weapons. It could take into account new developments in technology and the potential vulnerabilities these have exposed, as well as the convergences between them, and new models of governance.

It should preserve and further develop or strengthen measures for protection of civilians in any type of conflict. And it should enable the use of these technologies for our collective benefit, in conflict prevention and peace-building mechanisms, and also arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation.

The UN has the convening power to create different types of platforms and discussion mechanisms. It is uniquely situated to be an impartial convener and bring in non-government actors so that multiple stakeholders can learn from each other and develop creative, mutually beneficial solutions.

I believe that the UN system, due to its broad expertise, is also well-placed to act as a catalyst for innovative thinking. I believe the UN has to play a central role in bringing together the security and humanitarian discourses in a new vision for arms control and disarmament.

And I believe the UN should contribute creative ideas to maximize the benefits and minimize the challenges of disruptive technology.

The use of technology in warfare in ways that undermines our collective security is not a forgone conclusion. Through dialogue, transparency, negotiation and cooperation, we can build the normative framework that prevents the direst of scenarios from taking place. I look forward to working together to secure our common future.

*In an address to the fourth annual Stockholm Security Conference at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)

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Excerpt:

Izumi Nakamitsu is UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs*

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By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 10 2019 (IPS)

The UN’s smoldering cash crisis, which has threatened staff salaries and payments to vendors, has triggered strong reactions and rattled the over 6,400 staffers who work in the 39-storeyed Secretariat building in New York.

The proposed cuts in spending, which also cover about 37,500 UN staffers worldwide, excluding over 25 UN agencies, have put the focus on several issues, including a “bloated bureaucracy,” and more critically, on the time and money spent on endless overseas trips by some high ranking UN officials who are constantly “airborne”.

http://ask.un.org/faq/14626

Guy Candusso, a former First Vice-President of the UN Staff Union, told IPS, the cash crunch in the 1990’s was much worse, but Under-Secretary-General Joe Connor managed to solve it.

“Over the last 10 years, the UN has become a bloated organization, especially at the top. If the cash crunch is considered so serious now, there should be a complete hiring freeze along with the other measures announced,” said Candusso, a longstanding staffer, until his recent retirement.

Patricia Nemeth, President, United Nations Staff Union, told IPS staff at the United Nations are alarmed by the cash flow crisis facing the organisation.

“In addition to the anxiety we feel regarding next month’s salary, constant financial uncertainty limits our ability to fulfil our mandates or deliver services to the most vulnerable,” she said.

The United Nations Staff Union in New York has been working closely with the Under Secretary-General for Management Strategy, Policy and Compliance and the Controller to keep staff informed of the situation as it evolves.

Among the various mitigating measures, the Union welcomes the instruction to limit all official travel to essential activities.

“In this spirit, we expect senior officials to lead by example, as we are in this together”, said Nemeth, who is also Vice President for Conditions of Service – The Coordinating Committee of International Staff Unions and Associations CCISUA

“More importantly, on behalf of our 15,000+ constituents (NY staff and local staff in the peacekeeping missions) the Leadership of the United Nations Staff Union appeals to those countries who have not yet done so to heed the Secretary-General’s call and make the payments required to ensure that the work of the United Nations can continue, with the resources required to accomplish the mandates they themselves have given us.”

“We count on the world’s leaders to support the UN’s valuable work, improving the lives of current and future generations,” she declared.

Ian Richards, President of the 60,000-strong Coordinating Committee of International Staff Unions and Associations (CCISUA), told IPS: “Obviously staff are very worried about what is going on. We are pleased that the Secretary-General has prioritised payment of salaries and we have also been asked to advise on which meetings and events can be delayed for when there is more money available.”

If things get worse, Richards warned, this will have serious consequences.

“Staff have rent and other bills to pay and for those in dangerous duty stations, we need to be able to continue paying for their safety and security”.

He said this could also impact the UN’s ability to deliver food to the most needy and protect the rights of the most vulnerable.

Focusing on the UN’s mandates, Nemeth told IPS the world is faced with countless pressing issues, from violent conflicts to natural disasters, all set against the continued need to promote sustainable development for all.

The United Nations is the leading force in humanitarian efforts; in maintaining peace and security; and in offering hope for the most vulnerable, all of whom aspire to the most basic needs: life, liberty, dignity, peace, security and justice.

“Yet our critical work around the globe is currently hampered by delays in the payment of Member States’ contributions, compounded by overly restrictive financial rules.”

“We are grateful to the Secretary-General for his continued efforts to ensure that Member States fulfil their obligation to come forward with their assessed contributions. However, if the situation does not improve, we call on the Secretary-General and his team to calibrate their response to ensure that staff is protected, and ask him to cooperate closely with the Staff Unions to find practical solutions,” she declared.

UN Spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters the Secretariat could face a default on salaries and payments for goods and services by the end of November unless more Member States pay their budget dues in full.

The Secretary-General has therefore requested additional steps be taken immediately, including further reductions in official travel; postponing spending on goods and services; and discontinuing events scheduled outside official meeting hours at headquarters duty stations.

In addition, conferences and meetings may have to be postponed or services be adjusted. He is reviewing further options, said Dujarric.

The Secretary-General has already written to Member States about “the worst cash crisis facing the United Nations in nearly a decade”.

Stressing the Charter obligation of Member States, the Secretary-General thanked the Member States who have paid their regular budget assessments, which is now 129, and urged those who have not paid to do so urgently and in full.

By the end of September, Member States had paid only 70% of the total assessment for the regular budget, compared with 78% at the same time last year. The Secretariat had put in place multiple measures since the beginning of the year to align expenditures with cash inflows.

The 64 states that have yet to pay regular budget dues in full for 2019 are: Afghanistan, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Bangladesh, Belize, Benin, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Central African Republic, Comoros, Congo, Costa Rica, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Ecuador, Eritrea, Gambia, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea-Bissau, Honduras, Iran (Islamic Republic of), Israel, Kiribati, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Mexico, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Oman, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Philippines, Republic of Korea, Romania, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Sao Tome and Principe, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Seychelles, Somalia, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Tajikistan, Togo, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, United States of America, Uruguay, Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of) and Yemen.

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@ips.org

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Osamu Kusumoto is Secretary General and Executive Director of Asian Population and Development Association (APDA)

By Osamu Kusumoto
TOKYO, Japan, Oct 9 2019 (IPS)

Currently, the topic of abortion as human rights leaves the world bustling. When the state of Alabama1 in the United States enacted a very strict ban on abortion, it shocked the world. This prompted so-called conservative movements, led by female business owners, to make a full-scale advertisement in the New York Times claiming abortion is a human right2 ; hence the global debate between pro-life and pro-choice.

Osamu Kusumoto

This discussion is a remnant of the debate at the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in 1994. Twenty Five years into the ICPD and the struggle between opposing views persists, causing the continued disruption in the　accessibility of women to reproductive health. This is especially true in developing countries.

The purpose of this paper is to show that pro-life and pro-choice are actually following the same logical development despite failing to arrive at the same conclusion.

Current Status of ICPD and Reproductive Rights

As its name suggests, ICPD is a conference that places population issues in the context of sustainable development, which served as the basis of the current Agenda 2030. However, the population problem has been treated as a value and not a scientific issue. Following this paradigm, possible solutions are unattainable.

Efforts are being made to include abortion in the ICPD Programme of Action (PoA), particularly in paragraphs 5.5., 7.3. and 7.36, which defines Reproductive Rights. The principles behind such effort are that:

A) Reproductive rights embrace certain human rights that are already recognized in national laws, international human rights documents and other consensus documents.

B) These rights rest on the recognition of the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so.

The concept of the reproductive right is not included in the human rights defined by the UN CESCR.

Pro-choice advocates aim to expand the definition of reproductive rights in the ICPD PoA and position the right to abortion in 7.3, which refers to the number of and spacing of children. As such, the right to abortion is not an infringement to self-determination, which is central to the concept of human rights.

Pro-life advocates, on the other hand, regard abortion as infringing on the right to existence of another life, which is a gift from God.

However, it must be recognized that unplanned and unwanted pregnancies also happen. One case in point is the Yazidi girl who got pregnant as a result of sexual assault by members of ISIS. She was alienated from her community causing further victimization of the child. This is just one case and many more are happening in different parts of the world. Such abuse put women and girls in difficult position. How can this kind of problem be addressed?

The basis of human rights is respecting the dignity of human life as part of society regardless of one’s race, religion, or culture. Therefore, this contradicts the concept that abortion is a human right. Obviously, no matter how extensive the discussion on this problem could go, no logical solution can be reached. Ergo, it is meaningless to engage in an argument that will always end up in a stalemate.

Possible solution

Reproductive Rights as defined in the ICPD PoA intends to prevent pregnancy in situations where self-determination is not possible – these cases must be devoid of theological debates. Serious discussions and negotiations had been made during the formulation of the ICPD PoA and it can be assumed that a reasonable conclusion was drawn because it was adopted and ratified by many countries.

The debates on abortion may be addressed through a democratic decision-making mechanism. Unless the conditions for achieving reproductive rights are there, such as the meaningful empowerment of women, access to education, improved socioeconomic status, advancement in the field of health – especially in family planning – and full dissemination of reproductive health services, women cannot be held accountable.

Abortion is not a matter that should be recognized as a right yet, but it is an issue that should be treated with the utmost care. Appropriate medical measures must be put in place for situations where the conditions for reproductive rights cannot be met, resulting in an unwanted pregnancy. Otherwise, prolife means denying the life and dignity to human beings who are victims of circumstances.

The suggestion is to separate the issue of abortion from reproductive rights. This way, it will be possible to present a more realistic, reasonable and relevant solution that could be more commonly acceptable.

1 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/alabama-senate-abortion-bill-passes_n_5cd9fba1e4b073aa0b3266d9?guccounter=1
2 https://forbesjapan.com/articles/detail/27402?utm_source=owned&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=mailmagazine_0522_1461&utm_content=art1

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Excerpt:

Osamu Kusumoto is Secretary General and Executive Director of Asian Population and Development Association (APDA)

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By Stella Paul
INCHEON, South Korea, Oct 9 2019 (IPS)

“The window of opportunity to avoid catastrophic climate change is fast shrinking,” executive director of the Green Climate Fund (GCF), Yannick Glemarec, tells IPS.

He was speaking at the GCF Private Investment for Climate (GPIC) Conference, which took place in Incheon, South Korea, from Oct. 7 to 9. The conference has been an important platform to encourage greater dialogue among investors on the barriers they face, share past and current investment experiences and exchange innovative ideas while assuring them of all assistance and support by GCF.

“When I started my career 30 years ago though we had 80 years before we would cross the 2 ° Celsius threshold. Today we face the real risk of crossing it within 20 to 30 years or 40 years,” Glemarec says.

Executive director of the Green Climate Fund (GCF), Yannick Glemarec speaks to IPS from the GCF Private Investment for Climate (GPIC) Conference, which took place in Incheon, South Korea, from Oct. 7 to 9 about the need for scaling up private investment for climate projects. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

“In addition what we have found over the past fews years is that 2 ° Celsius might be already far too much for a number of countries for a number of communities for a number of ecosystems. We thought, for example, that we would not see major threats to ecosystems before an increase of temperature to 3, 4, 5, 6° Celsius. Today we believe that coral reefs could be wiped out by the time we reach 2 ° Celsius,” he says.

In this interview with IPS, Glemarec candidly shares his views on the urgency of more actions in both climate mitigation and adaptation and also the urgent requirement of more finances to make these actions possible.

He also shares some details about how GCF is working to mobilise these finances, especially from private investors as public money is not enough to meet the massive needs. Finally, he shares some examples of positive leadership by GCF in developing countries where private investment helped set up and run energy projects with great success.

Related Articles

• Global Climate Change Investment Heavily Tilted Towards Mitigation and Low on Adaptation

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Excerpt:

In this Voices from the Global South podcast executive director of the Green Climate Fund (GCF), Yannick Glemarec speaks to IPS from the GCF Private Investment for Climate (GPIC) Conference, which took place in Incheon, South Korea, from Oct. 7 to 9 about the need for scaling up private investment for climate projects.

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Credit: United Nations

By Ben Phillips
MEXICO CITY, Oct 9 2019 (IPS)

Last month 195 world leaders once again met in New York for big speeches and grand events. But on inequality, when all is said and done, more has been said than done.

Four years after governments across the world committed to fight inequality as part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, far too little has been seen in the way of government action. That’s not the verdict of critical NGOs – that’s the official assessment of UN Secretary-General António Guterres himself.

As Guterres told countries, adding only the thinnest diplomatic coating, “the shift in development pathways to generate the transformation required to meet the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 is not yet advancing at the speed or scale required.”

Indeed, he noted, “the global landscape for Sustainable Development Goal implementation has generally deteriorated since 2015”. It is in this context that the UN has called for a “decade of delivery” following five years in which we the people have been able to feast on words whilst fasting on action.

For years, grassroots organisations have been sounding the alarm about the damage being caused by widening inequality. More recently, the formal debate on inequality shifted and the accepted mainstream normative position has become that inequality is dangerous and needs to be reduced.

The UN has also stepped up in providing coordination and advice. But governments have not shifted in recognition of the new consensus. Cynicism about whether anything will be done has taken root amongst even the most hopeful observers.

And the big headlines from this year’s UN General Assembly did very little to counter that cynicism, dominated as they were by the world’s loudest leaders, who seem to make up for an absence of substance with a surfeit of bombast.

Quietly, on the sidelines, however, another group met to plan not a communique on the stage but a series of actions at home. It was not a huge group of countries, just a dozen, but it included countries from every region of the world and every income level.

They met not because they think they have the answers, but because they are keen to learn from each other and to act. From Indonesia to Sierra Leone to Sweden to Mexico, they and others gathered in the first heads of state and government meeting of the Grand Challenge on Inequality, a new multi-stakeholder initiative to support vanguard governments, committed to tackling inequality, in finding the path by walking it.

Then, even more crucially, these same leaders mandated senior leaders and officials – the doers – to gather just after the New York meetings in Mexico City, and then in a few months in Jakarta, and onwards, to plan the implementation of a series of practical country-specific policies to narrow the gap between the runaway few and the many pushed behind.

You haven’t heard about this meeting because the leaders don’t believe that they have yet earned the right to declare themselves the leaders. Saint Francis of Assisi said “Preach the Gospel, and if you must, use words.”

In a similar spirit, the country leaders in the Grand Challenge on Inequality recognized, in the New York and in Mexico City meetings, that the power of their commitment to tackling inequality will be shown not in what they say but in what they do.

They recognized that there is no single policy that on its own can beat inequality, and so a series of complementary policies year on year is needed. They recognized that tackling inequality means taking on vested interests: that it means progressive tax and universal public services, it means protected workers and regulated corporations, it means designing policy from the bottom-up not the top-down, and it means tackling the wealth and power of the very wealthy.

As part of that, they opened themselves up to forthright challenge from grassroots social movements and trade unions, and shared what they as leaders were finding most challenging and the lessons they had learnt from their mistakes. It was, I’ll confess, something of a shock to hear leaders start off not with justifications but with self-criticism.

It was a world away from the (in)famous “Big Men Who Strode New York”. In a world saturated by the fake, to witness sincerity was disorientating.

It is early days for the pioneer governments Grand Challenge on Inequality, but, as a witness and as someone who has spent years bluntly challenging governments for their failures, here’s why it matters: social transformation doesn’t happen when people recognize that ther society is unfair – it happens when people also recognize that it can be fairer.

And that depends on people witnessing change, somewhere. Cynicism and despair are ultimately tools of the status quo. There is nothing more dangerous to those who would keep things as they are than the threat of a good example.

And, quietly, this group of countries, of leaders who do not call themselves leaders, are starting to build that good example. Oxfam have started to call this group of governments the “axis of hope”. Perhaps these governments could be more prosaically named the “axis of action”.

Grassroots organising will remain essential to help foster leaders’ determination, and to push back against the pressures that will continue to be exerted by economic elites. There is no certainty that change is coming. But there is no longer certainty that it isn’t. And the sound that accompanies this change is not the bang of fireworks. It is a quiet whirring of hard work.

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Excerpt:

Ben Phillips is an author and activist on inequality.

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Amaranth cultivation in Jumla district in Nepal. Credit: LI-BIRD

By Sonia Awale
KATHMANDU, Oct 9 2019 (IPS)

The nutritious grain that mountain peoples of the Americas and high Asia cultivated were displaced by wheat and rice, but they are staging a comeback thanks to growing public consciousness about health.

Food items like pickled potato, roasted corn, tomato in curry and chilli paste are as Nepali as you can get. But few here know that these staples of our food heritage have their roots in the Andes, and were actually brought to Europe and Asia only in the last 500 years.

Just like the Andes, the Himalaya has its own superfoods like chino (Proso millet) and kaguno (Foxtail millet) which have similar nutritional value to quinoa, but very few know of their existence

Now, there is growing demand for other lost crops of the Incas like amaranth and quinoa among urban Nepalis. These grains are high in protein, low in carbohydrates, gluten-free and rich in micronutrients and minerals.

In fact, amaranth and quinoa are healthier alternatives to rice, particularly for diabetes and hypertension patients. Another South American fruit, the gooseberry, is much sought after for its fibrous and antioxidant properties.

“We might cater to a limited market, but there is a growing demand for superfoods. In fact more and more of our customers prefer to eat quinoa instead of rice,” said Roseeta Raymajhi of Fresh Shelf and Beverage in Baluwatar that has been supplying quinoa for two years.

The Incas grew a variety of crops and vegetables, exotic fruits, beans and tubers. But with the Spanish conquests, native crops were replaced with European foods and many were lost. However with better understanding of their nutritional value, some of the lost crops of the Inca are being rediscovered.

Amaranth is now also cultivated in Nepal’s Jumla and Humla districts, where the arid mountains have a similar soil and climate to the Andes. Iron-rich amaranth leaves (latta ko sag) are eaten as a vegetable, and larger-scale amaranth cultivation in Doti and Achham districts cater to a rising demand in India.

“Many mountain crops like amaranth had been neglected but these are climate smart superfoods and that is where the future is,” explained Rita Gurung of LI-BIRD, the Pokhara-based agro-biodiversity research organisation.

She says the crops need commercial-scale production and an campaign to promote their nutritional value by recipe generation so that Nepalis will make them a regular part of their diet.

Just like the Andes, the Himalaya has its own superfoods like chino (Proso millet) and kaguno (Foxtail millet) which have similar nutritional value to quinoa, but very few know of their existence.

“We have so many highly nutritional foods, but we have abandoned them for processed and packaged foodstuff and vitamin capsules,” laments public health expert Aruna Uprety.

It has been over four years since Saurav Dhakal started Green Growth, an online shopping portal for organic produce in Kathmandu. He has seen gradual increase in demand for locally grown organic and nutrient rich produce, but says farmers have to be first convinced that there is a market for them.

“There are traditional recipes to all of our indigenous foods that we have to relearn and propagate,” Dhakal says.

This Dasain, let us replace rice with kodo (millet), phapar (buckwheat), jau (barley), til (sesame), aalas (flax seed) so that when we eat, drink and make merry, we also become healthier.

This story was originally published by The Nepali Times

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By Stéphane Dujarric
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 9 2019 (IPS)

The Secretary-General wrote to Member States about the worst cash crisis facing the United Nations in nearly a decade. The Organization runs the risk of depleting its liquidity reserves by the end of the month and defaulting on payments to staff and vendors.

Stressing the Charter obligation of Member States, the Secretary-General thanked the Member States who have paid their regular budget assessments, which is now 129, and urged those who have not paid to do so urgently and in full.

This is the only way to avoid a default that could risk disrupting operations globally. The Secretary-General further asked governments to address the underlying reasons for the crisis and agree on measures to put the United Nations on a sound financial footing.

By the end of September, Member States had paid only 70% of the total assessment for the regular budget, compared with 78% at the same time last year. The Secretariat had put in place multiple measures since the beginning of the year to align expenditures with cash inflows.

These included adjusting hiring and other non-post expenses based on expected cash availability. Had it not contained expenditures globally from the beginning of the year, the cash shortfall in October could have reached $600 million and the Organisation would not have had the liquidity to support the opening of the General Assembly debate and the high-level meetings last month.

To date, we have averted major disruptions to operations.

These measures are no longer enough. The Secretariat could face a default on salaries and payments for goods and services by the end of November unless more Member States pay their budget dues in full.

The Secretary-General has therefore requested additional steps be taken immediately, including further reductions in official travel; postponing spending on goods and services; and discontinuing events scheduled outside official meeting hours at headquarters duty stations.

In addition, conferences and meetings may have to be postponed or services be adjusted. He is reviewing further options.

The Secretary-General noted that this is a recurrent problem that severely hampers the Secretariat’s ability to fulfil its obligations to the people we serve.

We are now driven to prioritize our work on the basis of the availability of cash, thus undermining the implementation of mandates decided by inter-governmental bodies.

The Secretary-General therefore looks to Member States to resolve the structural issues that underlie this annual crisis without further delay.

The Secretary-General has also kept the staff informed of these developments.

Footnote:

As of Tuesday 8 October 2019, 129 Member States have paid their regular budget dues in full. For a list of those countries, see http://www.un.org/en/ga/contributions/honourroll.shtml.

At this time, Member States have paid US$1.99 billion towards the 2019 regular budget assessment. The outstanding amount for 2019 for regular budget is US$1.386 billion.

The 64 states that have yet to pay regular budget dues in full for 2019 are: Afghanistan, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Bangladesh, Belize, Benin, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Central African Republic, Comoros, Congo, Costa Rica, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Ecuador, Eritrea, Gambia, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea-Bissau, Honduras, Iran (Islamic Republic of), Israel, Kiribati, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Mexico, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Oman, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Philippines, Republic of Korea, Romania, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Sao Tome and Principe, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Seychelles, Somalia, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Tajikistan, Togo, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, United States of America, Uruguay, Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of) and Yemen.

Meanwhile in a letter dated 7 October addressed to all UN staffers, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says: I am writing to update you again on the troubling financial situation facing the United Nations. As you know, I have been working closely with Member States and managers over the past few months to solve the liquidity crisis facing our regular budget.

The ultimate responsibility for our financial health lies with Member States. Most of them have fulfilled their Charter obligations and have paid in full and some even on time. We are regularly engaging those who have not yet paid in full and will continue doing so.

With your help, we have been containing expenditures globally from the beginning of this year to align it with our liquidity. Without these measures, we would not have been able to meet payrolls and fulfil our obligations towards vendors this month.

To date, Member States have paid only 70 per cent of the total amount needed for our regular budget operations in 2019. This translates into a cash shortage of $230 million at the end of September. We run the risk of depleting our backup liquidity reserves by the end of the month.

I want to assure you that we are in this together. I have made every effort to protect staff from this crisis and I will continue to do so. I wrote to Member States on 4 October 2019 to explain that we are at a critical juncture for regular budget operations and that I must now take additional stop-gap measures to ensure the salaries and entitlements of staff will be paid as usual.

The Department of Management Strategy, Policy and Compliance will meet with senior managers tomorrow to explain these measures.

I have asked the Department of Management Strategy, Policy and Compliance to continue to work with the various departments and offices to further contain non-post expenditure wherever possible.

Managers will be asked to explore avenues to further limit expenses during the last quarter, including postponing conferences and meetings or seeking ways to reduce related expenses by adjusting services.

I am also directing them to limit all official travel to the most essential activities and to further reduce all other non-post expenses. This includes postponing purchases of goods and services, implementing energy saving and other measures to reduce utility bills and temporarily curtailing expenses on managing facilities.

Everything is being done with the major objective: To protect staff from the impact of our liquidity problems. I ask you to engage with your managers if you have any concerns. Please also share with them your ideas for curtailing expenditures in your areas of work. Together, we will manage in these difficult times.

I will continue to work with Member States to solve this problem to enable the United Nations to carry out its vital work.

Thank you for your cooperation and your service during these challenging times.

The post UN Faces its Worst Cash Crisis in Nearly a Decade appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Stéphane Dujarric is Spokesman for the Secretary-General

The post UN Faces its Worst Cash Crisis in Nearly a Decade appeared first on Inter Press Service.

A child receives treatment in the northeastern district of Mymensingh, Bangladesh. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By External Source
GENEVA, Oct 8 2019 (IPS)

A staggering 2.2 billion people already suffer from eye conditions and visual impairment today, but the global need for eye care is set to increase “dramatically”, with lack of exercise a key factor, the UN health agency said on Tuesday, unveiling its first ever report on vision across the world.

While welcoming recent successes in eliminating common conditions such as trachoma in eight countries, the World Health Organization (WHO) highlighted evidence indicating that eye problems are increasingly linked to lifestyle choices, including screen time.

Youngsters are among those at risk, WHO’s Dr Alarcos Cieza told journalists in Geneva:

“It is unacceptable that 65 million people are blind or have impaired sight when their vision could have been corrected overnight with a cataract operation, or that over 800 million struggle in everyday activities because they lack access to a pair of glasses”

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General

“In children, one of the factors that may influence the increased number of children with myopia, is that children do not spend enough time outdoors. It is a trend that is already observed in some countries like in China”, he said. “But of course, it is a trend that we can predict in other countries if they are an everyday habit, especially with child populations.”

 

Eye ‘never relaxes’ indoors

The problem with staying inside, is that the lens in your eye rarely relaxes, WHO’s Dr Stuart Keel explained.

“When you’re indoors, the lens inside your eyes is in a complete flex state, or it’s flexed but when you’re outside, it’s nice and relaxed.”

Pointing to recent scientific data from China investigating the “clear link” between time spent outdoors and the delayed onset of later-stage short-sightedness, Dr Keel cautioned that studies on “near-task” activities such as watching video on a tablet computer, were “not as conclusive at this stage”.

According to the WHO’s World Report On Vision, the burden of impairment tends to be greater in low and middle-income countries.

Women also suffer disproportionately, along with migrants, indigenous peoples, and those with disabilities and rural communities.

“Eye conditions and vision impairment are widespread, and far too often they still go untreated,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. “It is unacceptable that 65 million people are blind or have impaired sight when their vision could have been corrected overnight with a cataract operation, or that over 800 million struggle in everyday activities because they lack access to a pair of glasses.”

Population growth and ageing – along with lifestyle changes and urbanization –  will also “dramatically increase” the number of people with eye conditions, vision impairment and blindness in the coming decades, WHO’s report shows.

One of the study’s main findings is that prevention is key, since at least one billion people are living with sight problems that could have been avoided with timely treatment.

Addressing this backlog of vision impairment or blindness owing to short and far-sightedness, and cataracts, will require $14.3 billion, the agency notes.

It points out that prevention is particularly important in low-income regions including western and eastern sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where blindness rates are on average eight times higher than in high-income nations.

The combination of a growing and ageing population will also “significantly” increase the total number of people with eye conditions, but this too could be turned around with preventative measures.

Typical conditions that could be treated if diagnosed early, include diabetic eye disease, along with cataracts and glaucoma.

“Vision impairment should not be seen as part of the ageing process,” Dr Cieza insisted, “because if you receive the appropriate care, for example, in the case of glaucoma, you can prevent the vision impairment associated with glaucoma, or if you receive cataract surgery, you can avoid the visual impairment associated with cataracts.”

 

High-quality eye care for all

Another key thrust of WHO’s report is that high-quality eye care should be accessible to everyone, regardless of their income and location.

To do this, treatment should be included in countries’ national health plans as an essential part of the overall aim of achieving effective universal health coverage, it says.

For the most part, eye conditions that can cause vision impairment and blindness –cataracts, trachoma and refractive error – are the main focus of national prevention strategies.

Nevertheless, other eye conditions that do not typically cause vision impairment – including dry eye and conjunctivitis – should not be overlooked, WHO says, noting that they “are frequently among the leading reasons for presentation to eye health care services all countries”.

This story was originally published by UN News

 

The post One Billion People Have Preventable Eye Conditions, Increasingly Linked to Lifestyle Choices, According to WHO appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Wan Manan Muda and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Oct 8 2019 (IPS)

Two decades into the 21st century, all too many people still associate being ‘overweight’ with prosperity, health and wellbeing, mainly because being thin has long been associated with being emaciated due to hunger, undernourishment and malnutrition.

Overweight and obesity can easily be assessed by anthropometric measures, including the body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference. But BMI thresholds for overweight and obesity may differ by ethnic group or country.

Wan Manan Muda

The standard World Health Organization (WHO) BMI cut-off for overweight is 25, while the threshold for obesity is 30, understood as an abnormally high percentage of fat, which can be either generalized or localized.

Obesity pandemic
In 2014, McKinsey Global Institute estimated 2.1 billion overweight people, including the obese, then almost 30% of the world’s population. The related economic burden was estimated to be over US$2 trillion, a close third to civil conflicts and smoking.

By 2016, an estimated 1.97 billion adults and over 338 million children and adolescents worldwide were categorized as overweight or obese, following the rapid increase in overweight, including obesity, in recent decades.

An estimated 6% of children under 5 years of age were overweight in 2016, up from 5.3% in 2005. Similarly, the prevalence of overweight and obesity among adults rose by 27% between 1980 and 2013.

The situation in many middle-income developing countries is especially dire as higher incomes and more food consumption have reduced hunger while worsening other forms of malnutrition, including ‘hidden hunger’ or micronutrient deficiencies. The resulting health condition of much of the population generally imposes heavy costs for themselves, their families and their nations, while reducing their incomes.

Role of the brain
Obesity is typically due to nutrient imbalances where food ingested is stored as fat, instead of being utilized for energy and metabolism. Epidemiological evidence suggests ‘high fat’ and carbohydrate diets contribute to obesity, and the relationship between dietary fat and the degree of obesity.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Although there is now a near consensus that unhealthy diets worsen obesity and health, less is known about neurological changes to the brain due to such diets. Recent research finds that high-fat diets — specifically those with considerable fats and carbohydrates — contribute to irregularities in parts of the brain regulating body weight.

A recent study found that high-fat diets stimulate inflammation in the brains of mice, triggering physical changes in such cells, and encouraging the mice to eat more and become obese. As this happens before the body displays signs of obesity and body weight changes, it implies that high-fat diets induce the brain to want to eat more.

Thus, it is possible that high-fat diets may not just affect humans physically, but also alter food intake neurologically. Hence, it is detrimental when food rich in fat and carbohydrates is easily available, encouraging even more eating.

Health threats
Many factors contribute to obesity, including lifestyle, diet, individual genetics and gut bacteria. Besides high fat and carbohydrate diets, immune system activity can also contribute to obesity, although details remain unclear.

The presence of large numbers of fat cells changes micro-biomes inside the body, causing the body to respond negatively. Worryingly, obesity has been closely linked to various chronic diseases including cardiovascular disease, diabetes and other metabolic disorders.

Recent research also clarifies how they affect various diseases of the brain, including Alzheimer’s, a neurological disorder associated with changes in brain cells more prevalent among the obese.

Such evidence continues to grow. Therefore, high fat diets have not only contributed to the developing world’s overweight and obesity pandemic, but may also have caused damage to brains and brain functioning.

Prevention better than cure
Changing diets, food consumption and human behaviour have all contributed to the nutrition transition and obesity pandemic.

While the developing world makes slow progress in overcoming hunger, or dietary energy undernourishment, much more needs to be done to educate the public about problems of malnutrition besides macronutrient deficiencies.

Micronutrient deficiencies, or ‘hidden hunger’, as well as diet-related non-communicable diseases also need to be addressed.

Already, those associated with overweight and obesity have been growing rapidly to pandemic proportions in recent decades, mainly due to dietary and other behavioural changes.

The authors recently co-authored Addressing Malnutrition in Malaysia available at: www.krinstitute.org

The post Beware High-Fat Diets appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Circle of Women Ambassadors

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 8 2019 (IPS)

New York’s diplomatic community has continued to be enriched by a record number of women Permanent Representatives (PRUNs)—50 in all, as of October 2 – compared with about 15 to 20 back in the 1980s and early 1990s.

But the history-making number is still short of gender parity, falling far behind the 140 men who are PRUNs in the 193-member General Assembly, the highest policy-making body at the United Nations.

The remaining three women are designated Charge d’Affaires ad interim or acting heads of their respective diplomatic missions – and don’t hold the rank of PRUN.

https://protocol.un.org/dgacm/pls/site.nsf/files/HoM/$FILE/HeadsofMissions.pdf

The 50 PRUNs, who are also designated as Ambassadors, are members of an exclusive association called the “Circle of Women Ambassadors”— even as the circle has steadily kept widening.

The only other glass-shattering UN event took place in September 2014 when six of the 15 members of the UN Security Council– long monopolized by men– were women.

“It’s a little strange that it’s taken us this long,” Ambassador Sylvie Lucas of Luxembourg, was quoted as saying, more than five years ago.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told delegates last week that “no country in the world is on track to attain gender equality by 2030, and women continue to be hampered by discriminatory laws, unequal access to opportunities and protections, high levels of violence, and damaging norms and attitudes.”

So, gender parity among men and women ambassadors may be a long way off.

Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury, former Permanent Representative of Bangladesh, and a one-time UN Under-Secretary-General told IPS: “To me any progress which manifests equality and representation of women’s recognized engagement is welcome.”

The fact that, at the moment, the number of women Permanent Representatives to the UN at its headquarters has reached the highest point ever is a development worthy of our attention, he said.

“However, we have a long way to go even to reach the numerical equality among 193 Member States”, said Ambassador Chowdhury, the initiator of UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 as President of the Security Council in March 2000: a resolution that underlined the important role of women in the prevention and resolution of conflicts, and on peace negotiations and peace-building.

“In this context, I recall the Call to Action by civil society (which I proudly co-signed) for the world leaders on 25 September 2013 as they converged in New York for the General Assembly’s high level meetings urging them to take action for equality of women’s participation at all decision-making levels in four areas”, he added.

• 1. Appointment of a woman as the next UN Secretary-General. [reality: none out of 9 Secretaries-General in 74 years of UN history]

 

• 2. Nomination of Women as future Presidents of the General Assembly by the Regional Groups. [reality: only 4 out of 74 Presidents]

 

• 3. Election of More Women as Heads of Various UN Governing Bodies, [reality: overwhelmingly underrepresented by women]

 

4. Appointment by Member-states of More Women as Ambassadors to the UN in New York and Geneva. [reality: overwhelmingly underrepresented by women]

On all four points, the UN community needs to do much more to call it history-making, said Ambassador Chowdhury.

Kshenuka Senewiratne, Sri Lanka’s trailblazing ambassador– her country’s first female permanent representative (PRUN) in over 63 years– told IPS that gender empowerment has continued to advance in her home country, even as women outnumber men in many walks of life, and particularly in higher education.

She said this is also reflected in the Sri Lankan foreign service where women have dominated over men in open competitive exams.

“And it is possible the same trends continue in many developing nations— even as the UN tries to advance its 2030 Development Agenda where gender empowerment remains one of the priorities.”

But still, “I have yet to hear my colleagues here say that it was a concerted gesture of gender balance that they got posted to New York,” she declared.

Barbara Crossette, a former UN Bureau Chief for the New York Times, told IPS: “My initial thought is that this phenomenon of more powerful women in diplomacy is not unlike women rising on their own in politics and not just by inheriting leadership as widows, daughters or other kin of men, such as Indira Gandhi, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Benazir Bhutto, Chandrika Kumaratunga or Cristina Fernández de Kirchner”.

She pointed out there are now more Angela Merkels, Michelle Bachelets or Elizabeth Warrens, to name only a few.

“Women are also rising in international agencies and civil society organizations, gaining expertise in global affairs, geopolitics and armed conflict, often in uniform and wearing a peacekeeper’s beret”, said Crossette, the senior consulting editor and writer for PassBlue and the United Nations correspondent for The Nation.

Asked whether more female diplomats will aid the cause of greater gender equality, she said: “ I would say, not necessarily, unless the Secretariat and missions in the field come down harder on denigrators and abusers of women. And, as Louise Frechette (a former UN deputy Secretary-General) told me in an interview, only if member states chose the most competent, outstanding women when making nominations to fill appointments in the UN system. They should be the models”, she declared.

Reinforcing his arguments further, Ambassador Chowdhury said the political significance of this increase in the number of the women Ambassadors would be that their joint actions would draw more attention, bearing, of course, in mind that all Ambassadors to the UN act generally on the basis of instructions from their respective capitals.

“But, I believe, their coalition can join hands to focus on issues particularly those directly related to women’s empowerment and equality, like Goal 5 of SDG.”

They can also ask for greater engagement of Secretary-General’s leadership in the implementation of UNSCR 1325 on women and peace and security which has made the realization of women’s equal participation at all decision-making levels obligatory on all members of the United Nations and whose 20th anniversary is coming up in October 2020, he noted.

Realizing gender parity at the senior posts of the UN, both at headquarters and at field levels, could be another area for joint effort.

“Women Ambassadors could strategize to turn this newly gained numerical enhancement into an effective coalition to attain global objectives of women’s equality and empowerment,” he argued.

Apart from this increase in the number of women Ambassadors, another encouraging development had been that three consecutive women Ambassadors have been elected as President of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in 2017 –from the Czech Republic, 2018, from St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and 2019 from Norway.

This has improved somewhat ECOSOC’s dismal record of women Presidents, he said.

Since its beginning in 1946 and all the way upto 2003, ECOSOC’s practice of electing only men was challenged by Ambassador Marjatta Rassi of Finland as its first woman President, followed by second woman in 2009 before the successive three women Presidents – a total of 5 out of 74, said Ambassador Chowdhury.

“Given the unacceptably poor women’s representation as General Assembly and ECOSOC Presidents, women Ambassadors can continue their relentless efforts to improve gender parity in high offices,” he declared.

Meanwhile, addressing a working luncheon of the Circle of Women Ambassadors last April, the former President of the General Assembly Maria Fernanda Espinosa Garces said: “At the UN too – where we should be leading by example – only a quarter of Permanent Representatives are women. Only one of the General Assembly’s main committees is chaired by a woman. I hope that we, in this Circle, can encourage our colleagues to nominate more women to leadership positions in the General Assembly, and across the UN.”

In his annual report on “The Work of the Organization” released last week, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres claimed the world body continues to make significant progress towards gender parity.

For the first time in the history of the United Nations, “we have achieved gender parity in the Senior Management Group and among Resident Coordinators, and are almost at parity among the senior leadership ranks across the Organization, well ahead of my target date of 2021.”

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@ips.org

The post UN Women Ambassadors Rise to New Heights But Fall Short of Gender Parity appeared first on Inter Press Service.

A farmer tends to vegetables in a greenhouse in Antigua, where a climate-smart agricultural initiative seeks to improve farm productivity. Participants at the Green Climate Fund (GCF) Private Investment for Climate (GPIC) Conference heard that will climate change funding has increased, most of it is being spent on mutation and not adaptation projects like this. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Stella Paul
INCHEON, South Korea, Oct 8 2019 (IPS)

Good news: the graph depicting climate investments has been steadily increasing. Climbing from the 2012 figure of $360 billion in climate investments across the world to close to $600 billion currently.

But despite the upward trend, its not even halfway to the $3trillion needed each year till 2030 to meet the development goals for capping global warming to 1.5 ° Celcius.

This was the broad picture that emerged on the first of the three-day Green Climate Fund (GCF) Private Investment for Climate (GPIC) Conference, which began on Monday, Oct. 7, in Incheon, South Korea. Attended by 600 people, including private investors, government officials and international finance experts from a diverse sector, this is the 2nd edition of the conference.

Addressing the conference at the opening ceremony, executive director of the GCF Yannick Glemarec said that the world needed to dramatically scale up adaptation and mitigation efforts and both of these had enormous investment opportunities. The conference, he reminded the attendees, was designed to act as an ideas marketplace to explore how to redirect the huge amount of funds held by large banks and other institutional investors into driving climate action in developing countries.

“Opportunities for private sector investment in energy in developing countries alone are estimated  more than $23 trillion from now to 2030. Today, the private sector manages more than $210 trillion in assets but invests only a very limited amount in climate finance due to severe market barriers,” Glemarec said.

At the conference, he hoped, the participants would be able to “reflect on these barriers and provide some actionable solutions”.

 

Barbara Buchner, Executive Director of the widely renowned Climate Finance programme at the Climate Policy Initiative, says global investment is heavily tilted towards mitigation and is low on adaptation. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Mitigation- Adaptation gap

Most of the current private investments are in climate mitigation sectors, such as e-transport and renewable energy. Adaptation projects around the world, including agriculture and land, still fail to attract private investments, they noticed.

“Globally, private investment is heavily tilted towards mitigation and is low on adaptation,” says Barbara Buchner, Executive Director of the widely renowned Climate Finance programme at the Climate Policy Initiative — a global policy think tank that works to improve energy and land use policies around the world.

• According to Buchner, CPI has been tracking private investment in climate change since 2011 and right from the beginning, private investors have shown their preference for projects that cap carbon emissions such as renewable energy and transport projects, instead of forests or agriculture.
• In 2016, the total climate finance in climate adaptation projects globally was $22 billion, while in mitigation projects it was $436 billion. Though investment has increased since then –the mitigation investments are now around $600 billion, Buchner reveals.

The reasons, she says, are many: lack of awareness and knowledge of climate risks, domestic policy and regulations that hinder mitigation, denied market access, social attitudes, multi-layer complexities of investing in adaptation projects on agriculture, water and land and a general lack of understanding in how such projects can result in profits.

“Mitigation projects, on the other hand, are more investment ready as the technology is already available and therefore one can just go and invest. The impact of the investments also are more direct and visible,” she said.

 

Yannick Glemarec (left), executive director of the Green Climate Fund (GCF), and Andrew Holness (right), prime minister of Jamaica, talk at the 2nd Private Investment for Climate Conference. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Leadership matters

While risks and a lack of attraction and understanding were more common barriers for private investment, a lot was also dependent on political leadership, said some experts.

For example, Africa needs infrastructure funding worth $130-170 billion a year, but government and public funding will alone will not be enough to meet this goal.

So, the region needs to attract private investment. However, at present, there are few business opportunities for the private investment, said Koffi Klaousse, project development director at Africa 50 – an infrastructure fund.

“We have numerous projects, but very few of them offered an actual investment and business opportunity for the private sector,” Klausse said, before emphasising that political leadership at the country level could change the scenario by making it more possible for private investors to play a significant role.

Earlier on the day, an example of positive leadership was also shared by Andrew Holness – prime minister of Jamaica – a country that has attracted nearly $1 billion worth of private investment. The only head of the state at the conference, Holness described how his government has been trying to interpret the climate threats as a great opportunity for private investment

“For us, climate change is a disaster. But if we embrace the challenge, it could also mean an opportunity,” said Holness.

“If weather is going to be more severe, then we must build more resilient and climate smart infrastructure and mobile more public and private resources to support the effort,” he said before asserting to attendees that Jamaica would continue to be “fiscally responsible” and  continue to reduce its debt burden to make itself more investment friendly.

In past decade alone, the country had been able to reduce its debt burden to 60 percent from over a 100 percent. And it is on track to meeting the goal of 50 percent of energy being produced by renewable sources.

The conference, which ends on Oct. 9, will continue discussions on a number of issues, including exploring how to shift the trillions of dollars held by institutional investors, how to tap climate bonds to fund climate-focused action, and expanding the role of financial innovation to boost climate investments in infrastructure, energy and land use.

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Over a million Rohingya refugees are without a state as Myanmar refuses to recognise them as citizens. Pictured here is the refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar along Bangladesh border with Myanmar. Credit: ASM Suza Uddin/IPS

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 8 2019 (IPS)

Movie star Cate Blanchett and businessman Richard Branson spoke up this week for the millions of people around the world who cannot get passports and other papers because they lack an official nationality.

The United Nations says the problem — known as “statelessness” — is getting worse, as a worldwide trend towards nationalism means governments are increasingly loath to help people viewed as unwelcome outsiders.

From the mostly-Muslim Rohingya people across Myanmar and Bangladesh to the masses of stateless folks in Côte d’Ivoire, Thailand, Latvia, Syria and Kuwait, Blanchett, Branson and others urged governments to tackle the problem.

“Statelessness has a devastating impact on millions of people around the world,” Blanchett, an Australian double Oscar-winner, told journalists on Monday during a week of intergovernmental talks in Geneva.

“They experience marginalisation and exclusion from cradle to grave … It’s total invisibility.”

By one count from 2017, some 70 countries reported on 3.9 million stateless individuals, but the U.N. agency for refugees, UNHCR, says the real figure globally is likely three times higher with some 12 million people impacted.

The world’s biggest stateless population are the Rohingya, hundreds of thousands of whom have sought safety in Bangladesh after fleeing violence in Myanmar, which does not recognise them as citizens.

“No one should have to suffer the indignity and exclusion that comes with being stateless,” Branson, a British billionaire wrote on Monday.

“Fortunately, over a hundred states have come together in Geneva this week to commit to do more to put an end to statelessness once and for all.”

 

It’s difficult to imagine how any country can maximise its potential by ignoring significant populations of stateless people. My take on statelessness and how to solve it https://t.co/R5gRApf5pa #IBelong @Refugees pic.twitter.com/SoGgG1rJtb

— Richard Branson (@richardbranson) 7 October 2019

 

The U.N. calls statelessness a “man-made problem” stemming from a “bewildering array of causes” — often legal directives and the re-drawing of national borders. Some 600,000 people remain stateless after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

Stateless people are often denied certificates at birth and remain excluded for the rest of their lives, the U.N., says. They lack the papers for travel, marriage, work, schooling, healthcare, and opening bank accounts.

“Statelessness can deny people and communities their identity and sense of self, contributing to the breakdown of family and social relationships and creating legal problems for generations,” said U.N. deputy secretary-general Amina Mohammed. 

“And stateless people are voiceless people. Prevented from voting or participating in public life, they are without representation anywhere.”

U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said the decade-long “#IBelong” campaign was making gains towards ending statelessness by 2024, with more than 220,000 stateless people acquiring a nationality since 2014.

“This is an area in which – for relatively little investment – wide-reaching impact is within our reach,” said Grandi.

In July, Kyrgyzstan became the first country to officially end statelessness. The U.N. says Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan could also meet the 2024 deadline; while Thailand is boosting efforts on its 479,000 ethnic hill tribespeople and other stateless individuals.

Madagascar and Sierra Leone have rewritten their laws so that mothers can confer citizenship to their children, as fathers have long been able to do. Still, 25 nations do not readily grant mothers this right – one of the leading causes of statelessness globally. 

But Grandi also highlighted the Rohingya, and the Indian state of Assam, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has vowed to disenfranchise millions of Muslim immigrants amid a polarising election campaign.

“The progress is far from assured: damaging forms of nationalism, and the manipulation of anti-refugee and migrant sentiment – these are powerful currents internationally that risk putting progress into reverse,” said Grandi.

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By Rothna Begum
GENEVA, Oct 7 2019 (IPS)

After more than a decade of women’s rights activism, Iran’s Guardian Council has finally approved an amendment that would grant Iranian citizenship to the children of Iranian women married to foreign men.

The Guardian Council was the last body needed to approve this long overdue reform to Iran’s discriminatory citizenship law.

Previously, Iran’s civil code granted children and spouses of Iranian men citizenship automatically, while children born in Iran to Iranian women and foreign fathers must live in Iran at least until they are 19 before they can apply.

It is unclear how many children in Iran have Iranian mothers and foreign fathers. However, the issue has come to prominence in recent years because of tens of thousands of registered and unregistered marriages between Iranian women and Afghan men whose children are unable to obtain citizenship on an equal basis.

Rothna Begum

Research in other countries has shown that such discrimination can harm children’s access to education, health care, housing, and employment when they become adults.

The latest attempt to reform the law was inspired by Maryam Mirzakhani, a world-renowned Iranian mathematician and Fields Medal recipient who passed away from cancer in 2017. Because her husband is not Iranian, her daughter cannot obtain Iranian nationality.

In May, Iran’s Parliament finally adopted the proposed reform, but it went back and forth from the Guardian Council, a body of 12 Islamic jurists, to determine whether it is in accordance with Iran’s Constitution and Sharia (Islamic law). They approved the amendment last week.

While this is a long-awaited victory for Iranian women, the newly-amended law does not equalize access to citizenship completely. Iranian women must apply for nationality for their children, while children of Iranian men are granted nationality automatically.

Children who turn 18 can apply for nationality themselves. A security check is required in both cases.

Most concerning is that that the amended law requires the Intelligence Ministry or the Intelligence Organization of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to certify that there is no “security problem” before approving citizenship in these specific applications.

This vaguely defined provision can be used to arbitrarily disqualify applicants if they or their parents are seen as critical of the government, particularly in eastern and western border areas where cross-border marriages are more common and where authorities keep a tight grip over peaceful activism.

In a matter of weeks, Iran’s newly-amended law will finally see children of Iranian women able to apply for the same benefits that children of Iranian men have.

But Iran should remove the remaining obstacles to ensure that children of Iranian citizens, whether men or women, are granted citizenship on an equal basis. They are all, after all, Iranian children.

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Excerpt:

Rothna Begum is Senior Researcher, Women's Rights Division at Human Rights Watch

The post Reforms Will Grant Nationality to Children of Iranian Women appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Veena S. Kulkarni, Associate Professor, Department of Criminology, Sociology and Geography, Arkansas State University, USA; and Raghav Gaiha, (Hon.) Professorial Research Fellow, Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, England.

By Veena S. Kulkarni and Raghav Gaiha
NEW DELHI, India and JONESBORO, US, Oct 7 2019 (IPS)

China’s almost meteoric transition from a being a low income to a middle income country within a span of four decades is often perceived as a miracle analogous to the post Second World War Japanese economic development experience. China’s GDP rose from $200 current United States dollars (US$ henceforth) in 1978 to $9,470 current US$ in 2018 (World Development Indicators, The World Bank). Unsurprisingly, China’s rapid and near sustainable growth has attracted widespread interest among academics and policy makers alike.

Veena S. Kulkarni

China embarked on a set of systematic reforms of its centrally planned economy in the year 1978, which ignited this spark of economic growth. In nearly three decades after the reforms, China increased its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) eightfold with an average growth in GDP and GDP per capita of 9.5% and 8.1% percent (measured in constant US$), respectively (Hofman and Wu 2009). These figures appear more exceptional when seen relative to China’s performance: a) in the pre-reform period and b) by its contemporaries at that time. While China with an average GDP per capita rate of 2.1% was out ranked by several countries during a two-decade period before the reforms, its GDP per capita was the highest across a list of 105 countries for the years 1978-2005 (Hofman and Wu 2009). The extraordinary growth in income levels seem to have been replicated with respect to other economic indicators such as poverty rates and wealth per adult. The poverty head count ratio declined by more than one fifth in less than a decade from 17.2% in 2010 to 3.1% in 2017 (World Development Indicators, The World Bank). Additionally, there is a notable increase in the wealth per adult from US$4,292 in 2008 to US$47,810 in 2018 (Global Wealth Data Book 2018, Credit Suisse Research Institute). Further, convergence between the timings of the economic reforms with that of the demographic transition led to low dependency ratios (low share of non-working relative to working age population) creating a ‘perfect storm’ for bolstering economic growth. The more recent trends of the economy growing between 6-7% do admittedly indicate a downward trajectory but the prospects in absolute terms remain high.

However, this more seldom than not favorable scenario is projected to have an expected and significant impact on the age composition and epidemiological profile of China. All the standard health indicators show that China has completed what demographers would call mortality/epidemiological transition. Mortality/epidemiological transition is characterized by two interrelated components: a) a greater concentration of deaths at older ages, and b) a dominance of deaths by degenerative illnesses as compared to communicable diseases. Life expectancy at birth in China between 1990 and 2017 rose by nearly a decade for women (from 70.7 years to 79.9 years) and over third quarter of a decade for men (from 66.9 years to 74.5 years) (Global Burden of Disease). Such dramatic rises in life expectancy obviously translates into increasing share of the elderly total population. The percentage of population 65 years or older has more than doubled from 4.43% in 1950 to 9.33% in 2015 and is projected to increase to 11.97% in 2020. An examination of the trend indicates the rate of growth of the elderly unlike the period between 1950 and 1970 has not only been consistently on the rise, it has done so noticeably after 1990. The projected percentage of elderly population at 11.97% in 2020 is more than twice that in 1990 (5.63%) (World Population Prospects 2019, United Nations Population Division). The projection for year 2040 considering the age of 60 as the benchmark predict more than one in four persons to be elderly (World Health Organization).

On the second component of the epidemiological transition, Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) affect for more than 80% of the 10.3 million premature deaths and 77% of Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs), the statistic that is not that distant from other OECD countries. A review of the ranking of the top ten most causes of major deaths for the years 2007 and 2017 reflects the realization of the second part of the mortality/epidemiological transition. Except for the road injuries, the ten major causes of deaths fall in the category of degenerative illnesses. Further, both in 2007 and in 2017, the first four causes, stroke, ischemic heart disease, COPD and lung cancer are nearly unequivocally related to lifestyle factors. Stroke and ischemic heart diseases that are highly correlated with hypertension rose by 27% and 54% between 2007 and 2017. Additionally, there was 95.7% spike in percentage of most deaths caused by hypertensive heart disease between 2007 and 2017. Hypertensive heart disease moved from a rank of 11 to a rank of eight. In a similar vein, the ranking of the impact of diseases with respect to the number of years of life lost (YLLs) or causing premature deaths shows stroke and ischemic heart disease as topping the list both in 2007 and in 2017. Further, between 2007 and 2017 the increase in that ‘deadly’ impacts were 21.8% (stroke) and 43.9% (ischemic heart diseases). The corresponding rise for hypertensive heart disease was 79.8%. Yet another disconcerting evidence on the growing detrimental effect of hypertension can be gleaned from the climbing in the ranking of diseases causing disability. Stroke moved from being the thirteenth highest in 2007 to being fifth highest in 2017. The combined effects of causing most deaths and disability owing to stroke and ischemic heart disease is respectively more than 25% and 40%. Also, relative to ten countries in the comparison group delineated by the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Project, based on GBD’s regional classification, trade partnerships and sociodemographic indicators, YLLs and DALYs due to stroke and ischemic heart diseases is the highest in China.

Raghav Gaiha

The above patterns and trends clearly evince a transition to a lifestyle that is more prone to incidence of cardiovascular diseases, a change that has been empirically observed to accompany usually interrelated reasons such as rising levels of income, urbanization, globalization and consumption of processed food as substitute to home made and fresh food. The latter appears to be a prominent contributor to China’s epidemiological profile tilting toward cardiovascular illnesses such as stroke, ischemic heart disease and hypertensive heart disease. Dietary risk has been found to be the most significant factor in explaining most of the deaths and disability in 2007 and in 2017. Additionally, there was a 29.6% increase in the risk caused by dietary patterns between 2007 and 2017 (Global Burden of Disease).

One of the integral ingredients for making food edible and/or enhance taste is salt. However, salt is the primary source of sodium and increased intake causes hypertension and consequently heightens the probabilities of stroke, heart attack and other related cardiovascular ailments. The average salt consumption for a healthy Chinese is 10.5 grams as opposed to the recommended 6 grams as per the Chinese Dietary Guidelines (World Health Organization). This higher than optimal quantity of salt utilization has been attributed in addition to putting salt in home cooked food and at the table (such as soy sauce, fish sauce and table salt), increasing eating of packaged food combined with lower consumption of fresh fruits, vegetables, dietary fiber like whole grains. The diet part is in particular significant given the high dietary risk. The Food Sustainability Index, a weighted average of indicators in the health and nutrition category, has been created by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Barilla Centre for Food and Nutrition (BCFN). China ranks 21 among the 38 countries for which the Nutritional Challenge Index has been created also by The Economist.

The enormity of role of salt in determining people’s healthy diet and consequently healthy years of life acquire prominence when coupled with the facts that China’s population is aging quite rapidly and elderly are more susceptible to hypertension and other cardiovascular diseases. Moreover, reduction of salt is considered as one of the most cost effective strategies to improve health outcomes and reduce number of deaths. World Health Organization estimates 2.5 million deaths globally could be prevented if salt consumption is reduced to the recommended level.

Expectedly, World Health Organization in collaboration with the local organizations and with the Chinese government has initiated public service campaigns to increase knowledge, awareness and support to homes, schools, work places and the food industry to reduce amount of salt. The State Council as part of the Healthy China 2030 Initiative has set a goal of reducing the salt intake by 20%. Also, at the forefront of recognizing the urgency of reforming the food industry to align with ensuring a sustainable production of healthy food is the Barilla Foundation as evidenced by its unveiling of the report, ‘Fixing the Business of Food, the Food Industry and the SDG Challenges’ on September 24, 2019.

In addition to the advocacy and the activism aspects, an area that demands a careful assessment is governmental expenditure on health care. The slowing of economic growth coupled with the shifting demographics toward the elderly enhances the urgency of planning for the future. It is estimated that government expenditures on health would increase three times to about 10% of the GDP by 2060 (The World Bank and World Health Organization 2019). This is all the more critical considering illnesses such as hypertension that are usually a consequence of high salt consumption. As hypertension does not cause symptoms at the early stages, it can easily go undiagnosed. In China it is estimated that only 13.8% of the 270 million people who have hypertension have the disease managed (World Health Organization). Thus, it is pivotal to focus on both preventative and curative measures with respect to the occurrence of illnesses caused by unhealthy dietary lifestyle that include high salt consumption. Not doing so implies high cost to the society with respect to loss of productive years through death and/or disability. Based on China’s compliance with the mission of World Health Organization and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that are founded on the ambition of ‘leaving no one behind’, it appears that China is committed to the goal of reducing the salt intake within the next decade as part of the larger initiative of providing a healthy productive life to all of its citizens.

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The post ‘Salty’ Concern: Tackling High Salt Consumption in China appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Veena S. Kulkarni, Associate Professor, Department of Criminology, Sociology and Geography, Arkansas State University, USA; and Raghav Gaiha, (Hon.) Professorial Research Fellow, Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, England.

The post ‘Salty’ Concern: Tackling High Salt Consumption in China appeared first on Inter Press Service.