Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

By Genevieve Donnellon-May
AUSTRALIA, Feb 7 2022 (IPS)

Safeguarding food security has long been a critical priority for the Chinese central government. President Xi’s latest comments and meetings demonstrate continued concerns at the top about China’s food security. Ahead of the 20th National Congress this year and the release of the No 1 policy document, there are already several hints regarding what the Chinese central authorities could prioritise in terms of food security for this year and beyond. Other factors, including the potential influences of gene-edited plants, commercialisation of genetically modified (GM) crops, and of a Russia-Ukraine conflict should also be considered.

Genevieve Donnellon-May

At a Politburo Standing Committee meeting in December 2021, President Xi emphasised that the country’s challenges and risks should be addressed with the country’s strategic needs in mind. He also reiterated the need to stabilise the agricultural sector and safeguard the nation’s food security, calling for more robust measures to guarantee stable agricultural production and supply. “The food of the Chinese people must be made by and remain in the hands of the Chinese,” he was quoted as saying by state broadcaster CCTV.

Similarly, the recent Central Rural Work Conference, which usually sets out agricultural and rural development plans and tasks related to “the three rurals” (“三农”) (agriculture, rural areas, and farmers), also emphasised the importance of safeguarding food security and achieving self-sufficiency.

Potential themes in 2022 concerning food security

1. Safeguarding food security
Safeguarding food security will likely remain a key objective as it is needed to ensure social stability and has also been publicly linked to China’s national security by President Xi. Food security is one of the six guarantees (六保) made in April 2020 in response to COVID-19 and changes to the global food supply chains. Recent public comments from China’s top leaders show that importance has not waned and that there is a more significant push to safeguard food security, which will continue in 2022 and beyond. For instance, the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Tang Renjian, called seeds “the ‘computer chips’ of agriculture” and cultivated land, the “‘lifeblood’ of food production.”.

2. Grain security and increased agricultural production
Grain security has long been a top priority for the central authorities in China. Indeed, “food security” (粮食安全) translates as “grain security” in Chinese. With grain self-sufficiency as the main overarching goal of China’s food security strategy, China has undertaken enormous political and fiscal efforts alongside spatio-temporal changes in China’s grain production patterns to strengthen its grain production. And these efforts have, to some extent, paid off. For instance, between 2003 and 2013, China’s domestic grain production rose from 430 million metric tons to over 600 million metric tons.

To encourage domestic production of grains, the Chinese central authorities have put forward various policies and plans. For instance, in January 2021, the National People’s Congress began drafting a new grain security law. Following this, grain security was also listed in the Chinese central government’s 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) draft with China aiming to meet an annual grain production target of more than 650 million metric tons. Additionally, under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs’ current Five-Year Agricultural Plan (2021-2025) on crop farming, China will stabilise its annual grain output and beat a target of 700 million metric tons by 2025.

Two key areas of grain security in China are soybeans and corn:

A) Soybeans
Soybeans are used in animal food, human food, and industrial products. Meanwhile, soybean oil is the primary edible oil in China, accounting for about 40% of the total oil consumption in the country. Although China is the world’s fourth-biggest soybean grower, the country is also the world’s largest soybean importer. Statistics from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs show that over 80% of domestic consumption relies on imports, reaching more than 100 million metric tons in 2021. The imported soybeans are GM and are mainly processed to produce cooking oil and the meal used in animal feed. Locally produced soybeans are non-GM and are primarily used for direct human consumption.

However, China’s reliance on foreign soybeans was viewed as a concern during the Trump-era trade war. China is likely to reduce its reliance on soybean imports by increasing domestic production to encourage self-sufficiency. In December 2021, Premier Li said that significant efforts must be undertaken to stabilise grain acreage and increase the production of soybeans and other oil crops. Following this, last month the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs announced China’s new 14th Five-Year Plan on crop farming. As part of this plan, by the end of 2025 China wants to have produced approximately 23 million tonnes of soybeans, up 40% from current output levels.

B) Corn
Although China is the world’s largest grower of corn by area, its total production falls short of its needs. In 2021, the country had to import more than 28 million tons of corn in 2021, up 152% from an annual record of 11.3 million tonnes in 2020. Most corn imports came from the US, Argentina, Brazil, and Ukraine.

Nonetheless, Beijing may continue to diversify its import sources of corn and encourage domestic production, where possible, to ensure a stable supply. Having launched the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, China’s interest in diversifying corn imports has grown. Before the launch of the BRI, the United States of America (US) was China’s biggest supplier of corn and accounted for almost all Chinese imports of corn. Nonetheless, this had changed by 2019 when Ukraine became China’s biggest supplier of corn, making up over 80% of corn imports in China for that year.

The implications of a Ukraine-Russia conflict
An external factor to consider is the current tensions between Ukraine and Russia. Much of Ukraine’s most fertile agricultural land is in its eastern regions, which are also vulnerable to a potential Russian attack. In the case of a Russian incursion or land grab, the flow of goods from Ukraine would likely be impacted, including Ukraine’s agricultural exports. As a major grain exporter (e.g. corn, wheat, and rye), Ukraine plays a crucial role in feeding populations worldwide. The implications of a Russian attack may well extend into the countries and regions that depend on Ukraine for food, exacerbating social and political instability as well as leading to food insecurity.

Genetically modified crops – game-changers?
Although China was the first country to grow GM crops commercially, commercialisation has not gone ahead, partly due to significant public opposition to GM food. However, recent moves from the Chinese government suggest that China will, at some stage, approve new regulations to allow the planting of GM seeds to boost the domestic production of these crops.

Announcements from China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs suggest that China is preparing to allow greater use of GM technology in agriculture and also support domestic biotech companies. Recently, the ministry published draft rules outlying registration requirements for herbicides used on GM crops, announced plans to approve the safety of more GM corn varieties produced by domestic companies, and announced plans to approve the safety of more GM corn varieties produced by domestic companies.

Gene-edited plants – another gamechanger?
China is also interested in gene-edited plants. In January this year, the Ministry of Agricultural and Rural Affairs China published trial rules for the approval of gene-edited plants, paving the way for faster improvements to crops. Taking into account some of the many pressures China and other countries face, including water quality and quantity issues and climate change impacts alongside urbanisation and shifting demographics, China may also encourage the development of “climate-smart” seeds to help increase domestic production.

At present, the full socio-economic and environmental implications of China’s push to strengthen domestic production, of soybeans and corn, remain unclear. Questions may be asked about China’s climate change commitments, green agenda, and food security. How much water and energy are needed for Chinese farmers to meet these targets? With President Xi having promised that the country will reach peak carbon emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060, how could this impact China’s ambitions of increased domestic soybean and corn productions, while simultaneously trying to satisfy China’s food demand and ensuring that the country’s agricultural systems are environmentally efficient?

Genevieve Donnellon-May is a research assistant with the Institute of Water Policy (IWP) at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests include China, Africa, transboundary governance, and the food-energy-water nexus. Genevieve’s work has been published by The Diplomat and the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum.

 

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Young farmers and brothers Prosper and Prince Chikwara are using precision farming techniques at their horticulture farm, outside Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. . Credit: Busani Bafana/ IPS

By External Source
Feb 7 2022 (IPS)

As an agricultural and environmental scientist, I’ve worked for decades exploring the practical challenges that smallholder farmers encounter in East Africa. These include controlling weeds that can choke their crops and looking for new ways to deal with pests or diseases that threaten their harvests.

I focus on smallholder agriculture because most of the food in the region is generated by farms that are only a few acres or hectares in size. And, while African economies are diversifying, most Africans still depend on crops and livestock production for income.

Across the region there is a strong link between fighting hunger, poverty and improving productivity and incomes on smallholder farms. But we must be careful to avoid pursuing solutions that damage the broader ecosystem

Across the region there is a strong link between fighting hunger, poverty and improving productivity and incomes on smallholder farms. But we must be careful to avoid pursuing solutions that damage the broader ecosystem.

In my research, I have explored how farmer innovations and local knowledge can contribute to maintaining crop varieties, livestock, pollinators, soil micro-organisms and other variables essential for a sustainable agriculture system. What scientists call agriculture biodiversity or agrobiodiversity.

My work puts me firmly on the side of people who today advocate for an approach to food production that’s called “agroecology” or “environmental conservation.” This means a focus on farming methods that protect natural resources and vulnerable ecosystems while respecting local knowledge and customs.

At the same time, however, in certain contexts I do support approaches that are viewed as “wrong” to many contemporary advocates of agroecology. These include the use of certified, commercial seeds for improved crop varieties, fertilisers, and genetically modified crops.

Opposition by agroecologists is rooted in a mix of concerns. With certified seeds, there is wariness about the cost to farmers and the impact on the common practice of saving seeds from one season to the next. For fertilisers, the focus is on run-off caused by their excessive use in places like North America and Europe. Opposition to genetically modified crops involves unease with using genes from unrelated species to improve crops. In addition to this is the potentially higher price of modified varieties.

While this may seem contradictory to some, I know that agroecology and advanced farming practices can co-exist in Africa. Indeed, to ensure African farmers and food markets can thrive while protecting local ecosystems – especially as climate change presents a host of new food-related challenges —- they must co-exist.

In my view, supporters of agroecology who strongly oppose new inventions are sincere in their beliefs that they are advocating for the interests of Africa’s farmers and the preservation of vulnerable ecosystems. Unfortunately, if successful, such hardline positions will narrow the options available in ways that will be harmful to both.

 

Weighing up the options

The three issues that appear to be most contentious for certain advocates of agroecology: fertilisers, commercially produce improved seeds and genetically modified crops.

Let’s start with synthetic fertilisers. The main concerns with fertilisers are related to their misguided and excessive application. In some places, this has contributed to the degradation of freshwater and saltwater ecosystems. However, rather than an absolute ban on using them, I prefer strategies that consider their safe and, modest use.

There are many situations on African farms today where modest amounts of synthetic fertilisers – applied in combination with other sustainable soil management strategies, such as crop rotation and intercropping – will do more to restore degraded landscapes than cow or sheep manure alone.

For the farmers I’ve worked with, the manure from their livestock may be enough to fertilise the small garden outside their kitchen, but it won’t be nearly enough to fertilise entire farms. Particularly if they hope to grow enough food to sell.

 

Seed debates

Some agroecology advocates also firmly oppose commercial seeds in favour of those saved by farmers from season to season. There are concerns about the cost of new seeds to farmers and also that crop diversity will narrow as varieties, that farmers have planted for generations, will be lost.

Again, I look for evidence of outcomes, as do most farmers I encounter. Overall, the farmers I’ve worked with in Africa are radically practical and carefully evaluate their options. They will purchase a commercial seed if they see clear evidence that it is worth the investment. For instance, that it provides superior yields, or other qualities, while retaining the flavour and texture they and their customers prefer. If not, they will use seeds saved from previous years.

Expanding their options with commercial seeds can empower farmers. It helps them make choices that can help to improve both household income and sustainably boost production to meet consumer demands. These outcomes align with agroecological principles.

 

A successful women’s farming project in Ethiopia is a model for training other urban farmer groups all over Africa on how to adapt to climate change. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

 

Genetically modified crops

When it comes to genetically modified crops, I focus on the traits they contain and the agroecological conditions where they are to be used. Again, context is critical. There are clearly contexts where genetically modified seeds —- once thoroughly tested to prove they are safe —- can be compatible with agroecology.

For example, varieties of maize, cotton and cowpea are now being developed for, and increasingly cultivated by, African farmers. The genetically modified traits are used to help address pests and other stresses, including drought. These crops undergo extensive trials and national regulatory reviews to assess their safety and consider their release to farmers for use.

New varieties of genetically modified maize and cowpea that can fight off destructive crop pests are especially attractive. They contain traits acquired from a safe, naturally occurring soil bacteria called Bacillus thuringiensis or Bt. It has also been used for decades as an organic crop protection spray. Incorporating Bt traits directly into the crop itself reduces the need to treat fields with expensive and, in some instances, potentially toxic pesticides that may result in huge problems for people and the environment from inappropriate use. In this context, the genetically modified seeds —- if affordable – could be the optimal choice from an agroecological perspective.

Bt cowpea was recently approved in Nigeria and Bt maize is being evaluated as an option for fighting destruction caused by the recent arrival of fall armyworm pests on the continent. Bt cotton is already grown in several countries in Africa where it offers higher yields and reduces the need for pesticides.

However, farmers in Burkina Faso are no longer growing Bt cotton due to concerns about the quality of the fibres produced by the variety available to them, though not its pest-fighting properties. These quality concerns point to the need to support local breeding efforts, as Nigeria is now doing with its Bt cotton varieties, as opposed to rejecting the technology itself.

 

No perfect solution

The difficult issues around Bt cotton production in Burkina Faso are evidence that there are no perfect solutions.

But we know the results of a lack of choices – where African farmers plant only the seeds from varieties they have been cultivating for decades and have limited options for maintain soil health and dealing with crop pests. It has contributed to a situation where crop yields have stagnated, lands are degraded of basic nutrients, consumers’ demands must be met with costly food imports. Those who depend on agriculture suffer high rates of poverty and hunger.

We also know from the experience of farmers in other countries about the pitfalls of an over-reliance on a small range of commercially produced crop varieties and unchecked use of fertilisers and pesticides.

But we will not overcome these challenges by narrowing the options for addressing them. Instead, we should be open to a wider range of practices and innovations.

For me that means embracing the core focus of agroecology – supporting environmentally sustainable food production that benefits local farmers, consumers and ecosystems – while avoiding the wholesale rejection of certain technologies that, in the right context, can be instrumental to achieving this critical goal.

Ratemo Michieka, Professor , University of Nairobi

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

By Nidhi Kaicker and Radhika Aggarwal
NEW DELHI, Feb 7 2022 (IPS)

The year 2021 began with several new vaccines showing efficacy in randomized trials, but despite 26 authorised Covid-19 vaccines globally, and at least another 200 in development (The Lancet, 2021), the first few weeks of year 2022 brought a sense of uncertainty.

Nidhi Kaicker

Nearly 2 years after the first Covid-19 case was registered in India, the country ranked third globally in terms of total deaths due to coronavirus, and second in terms of total number of cases. More than six and a half million cases and fifteen thousand deaths were added to India’s tally in January 2022 alone. The increased detection of the Omicron variant in the initial weeks of the year raised concerns whether we will see another deadly wave worse than the second.

Despite the availability of drugs in hospitals and pharmacies, presence of trained, mostly vaccinated health workers, enhanced bed capacity, three approved vaccinations, markedly reduced test prices and easier treatment affordability, the second wave saw a much faster spread of the disease.

The failure to follow Covid-19 safety protocols amidst the events such as election rallies, farmers’ agitations and religious gatherings has had severe consequences in the form of spiralling cases, reduced supplies of essential treatments, and increased deaths particularly in the young.

No state or union territory has been spared by the pandemic, especially in the second wave, but the spread of infections has been disproportionate, and the policy response and outcomes have been varied. This asymmetric impact of Covid-19 across states, both in terms of spread and mortality has its explanation in not just medical factors such as availability and accessibility of health care resources, but several socio-demographic and economic factors. These determinants of the state wise variation have important implications for socioeconomic planning and policies, particularly because state governments have been using measures such as closures and containments, and during the second wave, were seen as ‘laboratories’ for the control of Covid-19.

Our analysis focuses on identifying determinants of the spatial heterogeneity of the pandemic, in terms of number of cases and deaths per million population for a 15 month period starting mid-March 2020 until the end of June 2021. Our findings suggest that the pandemic has had a greater intensity in regions with higher per-capita incomes and urbanization rates. That the richer regions show a higher number of cases compared to the poorer regions could partly be attributed to better rate of testing, but also because the richer regions are more likely to attract more frequent travels due to business, and migrants and thus initially expected to be the hubs of the coronavirus infection with a more rapid diffusion to other regions.

Radhika Aggarwal

While higher incomes would enable easier access to health care facilities, and the ability to work remotely, higher incomes are also associated with greater mobility, and consumption of income elastic items such as dining out, entertaining and socialization – items that generate higher infection risk. Urban areas are more susceptible to the spread of Covid-19, primarily because of greater density, congestion, and may be home to urban slums with inadequate hygiene and sanitation.

Our finding results also suggest a greater intensity of the pandemic in states with higher disease burden due to non-communicable diseases, higher proportion of population in the age group 60 years and above, and lower proportion of population belonging to disadvantaged socioeconomic groups. Thus, interplay between affluence and urbanization, environmental risks and co-morbidities, and the associated higher fatality rates seem highly likely.

A comparison of the state-wise incidence of the pandemic during the first and the second wave reveals the importance of decentralization of essential health services as a one-size-fits-all approach in flawed. States and districts should have the autonomy to respond to the changing local situations, and there is an important role of technology in streamlining the management of resources (including funds) within and across regions.

An active management information system, with accurate data on demographic distribution of cases, deaths, hospitalisations, vaccinations, along with statistical modelling to predict the spatial spread of infection can enable regions to proactively prepare for the likely caseloads in the future.

There is continuing uncertainty about how the Covid-19 epidemic will unfold in the near future. There are reasons why we should be wary. Firstly, vaccination does not eliminate the risk of infection. Besides, the chances of vaccination reducing transmission to others are undermined by the finding that the new variants start spreading even in the absence of symptoms. Moreover, vaccine-induced immunity wanes with time and new variants. For instance, a growing body of ongoing researchsuggests that the vaccines used in most of the world offer almost no defense against the Omicron variant.

The necessity of booster doses, except in the immune compromised, is not fully understood but it’s likely that they will prolong protection. Another concern with vaccinations is hesitancy around getting inoculated.

In short, the current regime of vaccination offers neither “herd immunity” nor long-term protection. So the outcome of the endless battle remains shrouded in uncertainty.

Nidhi Kaicker is an Assistant Professor of Management at Ambedkar University Delhi. Radhika Aggarwal is an Assistant Professor of Management at SMVD University, Jammu.

 

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More than 120 lawmakers from over 40 countries lend their support to civil society campaign for a more democratic and inclusive UN. -- It is time for a more inclusive and democratic UN Parliamentarians from around the globe call for more participation. Credit: We The Peoples

By Frank Habineza, Susanne Menge, Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad and Angela Brown Burke
KIGALI/ BERLIN/ KUALA LUMPUR/ KINGSTON, Feb 7 2022 (IPS)

The global challenges we face are too complex for governance as usual. It is high time to strengthen the United Nations’ (UN) democratic and participatory character.

The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed deep fissures and inequalities across the world, both between and within countries. At the same time, so much more has to be done to address existential issues such as climate change, poverty, hunger, violence and exclusion. This can be accomplished via governance that puts power in the hands of the people and ensures that no one is left without access to public goods, regardless of their background.

As the premier global body, the UN has a key role to play. Over the past 75 years, the UN has done incredibly valuable work to keep the peace and advance the wellbeing of millions around the globe. However, change is urgently needed for the UN to better meet the challenges we face. No institution should shy away from processes of renewal and reform if it wishes to remain relevant.

This is why we were happy to see that the UN Secretary-General’s recent report “Our Common Agenda” highlights the need for greater participation and inclusion of people, civil society, parliamentarians and other stakeholders in the work of the UN. However, ad hoc consultations and existing mechanisms are nowhere near sufficient to satisfy this need. We need sustainable and permanent democratic infrastructure also on the global level.

In a joint statement with over 120 colleagues, parliamentarians from more than 40 countries on six continents, and in support of a global coalition of over 200 civil society organizations we are proposing three specific measures: a UN World Citizens’ Initiative which enables people to put forward proposals on key issues of global concern; a UN Parliamentary Assembly which includes elected representatives; and a high-level UN Civil Society Envoy to enable greater participation of civil society representatives.

Credit: We The Peoples

We strongly believe that the spirit and proposals embodied in these instruments will provide a way forward for the UN to emerge stronger and to allow it to continue to fulfill its invaluable work in the world.

Allowing citizens to help shape the agenda of multilateral institutions through a UN World Citizens Initiative will make our institutions more inclusive of global diversity. This will allow people all over the globe to help set the priorities for global governance.

Giving people more of a say over who represents them at the UN through a UN Parliamentary Assembly, will ensure more accountability and transparency even on the global level.

The involvement of civil society representatives would help to strengthen cooperation in partnership against power-political interests and increase social and ecological competence in our world. At the moment, it is primarily more privileged voices of civil society that find access to the discussions in New York and Geneva.

Approaching civil societies globally through a high-level UN Civil Society Envoy would engage people on the ground, take them seriously, and recognize their diversity. Against the background of shrinking spaces of civil society worldwide, the stronger involvement of civil society in the United Nations would be a strong signal to the committed people on the ground.

Our planet and the 7.8 billion people who live upon it face grave challenges. We urgently require less talk and more decisive action. The 2023 UN “Summit of the Future” proposed by the UN Secretary-General presents a unique chance to reshape global governance and to rethink the UN as the truly inclusive and democratic forum it always had the potential to be.

It is of the utmost importance that the lead up to the Summit is an inclusive and transparent process that allows all stakeholders to deliberate on these and other relevant proposals. Only by working together and allowing all affected at the table, humanity has a chance to meet the challenges of the century ahead.

Frank Habineza is Member of Parliament, Republic of Rwanda; Susanne Menge is Member of the Bundestag, Federal Republic of Germany; Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad is Member of Parliament of Malaysia and Dr. Angela Brown Burke is Member of Parliament, Jamaica.

In the We The Peoples statement, published on 26 January 2022, over 120 sitting parliamentarians from more than 40 countries and six continents called on the United Nations and its member governments to strengthen the world organization’s “democratic and participatory character.”

“We The Peoples” campaign is supported by an alliance of 200 civil society organizations, led by Democracy Without Borders, Democracy International, and CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation.

https://www.wethepeoples.org/mpstatement/

 

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Without proper planning, organization and health and safety support the impact of teleworking on the physical and mental health and social wellbeing of workers can be significant, warns new report. Credit: Martin/ILO

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Feb 4 2022 (IPS)

Now it comes to teleworking, the double-edged, relatively recent phenomenon imposed by COVID-19 lockdowns. On the one hand, it improves work-life balance, opportunities for flexible working hours and physical activity, reduced traffic and commuting time, and a decrease in air pollution. So far so good, but…

… But, on the other hand, teleworking has also heavy negative impacts: it can lead to isolation, burnout, depression, domestic violence, musculoskeletal and other injuries, eye strain, an increase in smoking and alcohol consumption, prolonged sitting and screen time and unhealthy weight gain.

A new technical brief on healthy and safe teleworking, jointly released on 2 February 2022, by the World Health Organization (WHO), and the International Labour Organization (ILO) adds on this regard the changes needed to accommodate the shift towards different forms of remote work arrangements brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and the digital transformation of work.

Among the benefits, the report says, teleworking can also lead to higher productivity and lower operational costs for many companies.

However, the report warns that without proper planning, organisation and health and safety support the impact of teleworking on the physical and mental health and social wellbeing of workers can be significant.

"In the nearly two years since the start of the pandemic, it’s become very clear that teleworking can easily bring health benefits and it can also have a dire impact"

Dr Maria Neira, Director, Department of Environment, Climate Change and Health, WHO

The WHO/ILO joint report outlines the roles that governments, employers, workers and workplace health services should play in promoting and protecting health and safety while teleworking.

“The pandemic has led to a surge of teleworking, effectively changing the nature of work practically overnight for many workers”, said Dr Maria Neira, Director, Department of Environment, Climate Change and Health, WHO.

 

Pros and cons

In the nearly two years since the start of the pandemic, it’s become very clear that teleworking can easily bring health benefits and it can also have a dire impact, she said.

“Which way the pendulum swings depends entirely on whether governments, employers and workers work together and whether there are agile and inventive occupational health services to put in place policies and practices that benefit both workers and the work.”

For her part, Vera Paquete-Perdigão, Director of the ILO’s Governance and Tripartism Department, said that teleworking and particularly hybrid working are here to stay and are likely to increase after the pandemic, as both companies and individuals have experienced its feasibility and benefits.

 

What to do?

“As we move away from this ‘holding pattern’ to settle into a new normal, we have the opportunity to embed new supportive policies, practices and norms to ensure that millions of teleworkers have healthy, happy, productive and decent work.”

Measures that should be put in place by employers include ensuring that workers receive adequate equipment to complete the tasks of the job; providing relevant information, guidelines and training to reduce the psychosocial and mental health impact of teleworking; training managers in effective risk management, distance leadership and workplace health promotion; and establishing the “right to disconnect” and sufficient rest days.

According to the joint report, occupational health services should be enabled to provide “ergonomic, mental health and psychosocial support to teleworkers using digital telehealth technologies, the report says and offers practical recommendations for the organisation of telework to meet the needs of both workers and organisations.”

These include discussing and developing individual teleworking work plans and clarifying priorities; being clear about timelines and expected results; agreeing on a common system to signal availability for work; and ensuring that managers and colleagues respect the system, explains the WHO/ILO study.

“Enterprises with teleworkers should develop special programmes for teleworking, combining measures for the management of work and performance with information and communication technologies and adequate equipment, and occupational health services for general health, ergonomic and psychosocial support.”

 

Key findings

Already in September 2021, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released the following key findings regarding teleworking:

• In Australia, France and the United Kingdom, 47% of employees teleworked during lockdowns in 2020. In Japan, which did not institute a nationwide lockdown, the teleworking rate increased from 10% to 28% between December 2019 and May 2020.
• Highly digitalised industries, including information and communication services, professional, scientific and technical services as well as financial services, achieved the highest rates of teleworking during the pandemic – over 50% of employees, on average.
• Teleworking rates during the pandemic were higher among workers in large firms than in small ones, reflecting lower digital uptake among small firms and their specialisation in activities less amenable to remote working.
• Workers with a higher level of qualifications were more likely to telework during the pandemic. In the United States, for instance, teleworking rates for individuals holding a Master’s degree or a PhD were fifteen times higher than for the least qualified employees.
• In most countries for which data are available, teleworking rates during the pandemic were much higher for women than for men, although the gap was narrower in Denmark, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
• Perceived productivity at home appears strongly associated with the desire to work at home. However, while most businesses and individuals now expect a greater use of teleworking than before the pandemic, relatively few employees are likely to telework full time in the future.

In view of all the above, teleworking is a two-faced coin and, anyway, should be accompanied by the needed measures aiming at protecting the remote working environment, which is here to stay.

 

Medical staff pose in a new maternal care ward at the Melamchi Municipality Hospital, Nepal, in November 2021. Credit: Marty Logan/IPS

By Marty Logan
KATHMANDU, Feb 4 2022 (IPS)

As the omicron wave of Covid-19 rose ominously in Nepal recently, to entice more people to get tested the government reduced the cost of PCR tests from 1,000 rupees ($8.37) to 800 rupees ($6.70) in government facilities and about double that in private ones.

“People with limited incomes can’t afford to get the test, and imagine if four members of a family have symptoms, the PCR tests alone will make a hole in their income,” Dr Baburam Marasini, former director at the Government of Nepal Epidemiology and Disease Control Division, told the Kathmandu Post.

Income per capita in Nepal in 2020 was $1,190, according to the World Bank.

“High quality health care was not universally accessible in Nepal, but was generally enjoyed by only a relatively small and elite portion of the population, and generally, access to health care in the country is unequal and the health system faces perennial shortages of resources, essential drugs and necessary medical infrastructure”

Noting that free treatment of conditions like tuberculosis, malnutrition and malaria had saved many lives in the country, Marasini argued that “the government should make PCR tests free across the country for those who have symptoms.”

While the government has not taken that step, in recent years it has provided free treatment for a growing number of chronic conditions to members of groups in need, such as the elderly, young children and the poorest in society. Yet equality in health care remains a paper promise.

In a briefing paper on the right to health in Nepal during Covid-19, the International Commission of Journalists argued that the government must “ensure that health services, facilities and goods are available to all without discrimination” and “ensure access to at very least the ‘minimum essential level’ of health services, facilities, and goods.”

Originally released in November 2020 and updated in September 2021, the ICJ paper notes that a plan was made to distribute COVID-19 vaccines to members of vulnerable groups first, but “According to various media reports, for example, some of the vaccines allocated for older persons were instead used to inoculate political party leaders, local level representatives, army personnel, their family and friends, administrators, businessmen’s families and their relatives.”

Article 35 of the Constitution of Nepal guarantees “the right to health care,” and its third provision states: “Each person shall have equal access to health care. ” The constitution’s Directive Principles, Policies and Obligations of the State also require that Nepal “keep on enhancing investment necessary in the public health sector by the State in order to make the citizens healthy” and “ensure easy, convenient and equal access of all to quality health services.”

Yet as ICJ points out, research done prior to Covid-19 found that “high quality health care was not universally accessible in Nepal, but was generally enjoyed by only a relatively small and elite portion of the population, and generally, access to health care in the country is unequal and the health system faces perennial shortages of resources, essential drugs and necessary medical infrastructure.”

Senior cardiologist Dr Prakash Raj Regmi says he sees the impact of inequality in health care daily. “In the process of investigation, in the process of treatment, even middle-class people face some difficulty.”

In an online interview the doctor notes that most of his patients are burdened by multiple non-communicable diseases (NCDs), such as cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and kidney and heart issues, whose diagnosis requires extensive testing. Afterwards, these patients often need multiple treatments. “Patients need to undergo several investigations: laboratory tests, x-rays, ultrasound, echo-cardiography. People may need coronary angiography or a CT scan or MRI—all these investigations are expensive.”

While the quality of available drugs is improving, they are also getting more expensive, so some patients discontinue their use prematurely, says Dr Regmi. “For example, a patient is given a follow-up time of three months, but they come only after six months. in that time they have stopped using two out of four drugs, so they develop complications.”

While he can provide financial support, both at his private clinic and at the non-profit community clinic where he also serves, Dr Regmi isn’t sure how many other doctors do the same. “I call myself a social worker… in my private clinic also, people who come for treatment, if they can’t afford their tests and treatment I find some way out; I support those patients.” Some tests can be done for free and for others he says he can direct patients to government labs; samples of medication can be provided at no charge and cheaper versions of drugs prescribed.

Despite the need for these informal mechanisms, Dr Regmi says that fewer patients require financial support today than in previous years, and that those who can afford it usually opt to visit less crowded private facilities.

Various developments have helped improve services in the government system: a new national health insurance scheme, devolution of some health care responsibilities to provinces and municipalities following Nepal’s transition to federalism in 2017, and free treatment of some chronic illnesses for the poorest of the poor, children and the elderly.

“A huge amount of money is being invested in this… This is very good for patients who cannot afford treatment: most of the patients are poor and these NCDs require lifelong treatment.” But the doctor says one thing is missing: “The government should focus on prevention in parallel with providing treatment, but it is not investing in prevention,” he argues.

Inequality is also obvious in maternal health services. For example, Sindhupalchowk is a mostly rural district three hours’ drive from the capital Kathmandu. Despite it having 79 health facilities, families who can afford to do so travel to the capital to have their children delivered or to larger facilities in neighbouring districts. In fact, in 2020 more than 70 percent of pregnant women left Sindhupalchowk to have their babies outside the district.

About one-half of Nepal’s hospitals, including centres for specialised care, such as the national maternity centre, are located in the Kathmandu Valley.

A recent report analysing data from 2001 to 2016 found a growing “remarkable improvement” in maternal health progress nationally, in all wealth groups. But drilling down into the statistics revealed that the poorest of Nepal’s seven provinces “have made minimal to zero progress.”

“Special investment to address barriers to access and utilization in provinces that are lagging to make progress in reducing inequality is urgent. Further studies are needed to understand the strategies required to address the gaps in these provinces and bring about fair improvement,” added the study.

Protesters take to the streets in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum. Credit: UN Sudan/Ayman Suliman

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 4 2022 (IPS)

A rash of military coups in Africa has resurrected a long dormant question: should leaders who take power through armed insurrections be barred from addressing the United Nations—an institution which swears by, and promotes, multi-party democracy?

The most recent surge, which the United Nations describes as “an epidemic of coups”, include military takeovers in Chad, Guinea, Mali, Sudan, and Burkina Faso (and not excluding Myanmar, which marked the first anniversary of a military government in the Southeast Asian country on February 1).

After a failed coup in Guinea-Bissau last week, President Umaro Sissoco Embalo told reporters “it was a failed attack against democracy. It wasn’t just a coup, it was an attempt to kill the president, the prime minister and the entire cabinet.”

In 2004, when the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the predecessor to the present African Union (AU), barred coup leaders from participating in African summits, then Secretary-General Kofi Annan singled out that landmark decision as a future model to punish military dictators worldwide.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a UN diplomat told IPS: “Perhaps it is time for African leaders to pursue such a proposal to censure military leaders. But that decision has to be ultimately taken by the General Assembly, the highest policy-making body in the Organization.”

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told reporters February 1: “It is clear that coups are totally unacceptable. We are seeing a terrible multiplication of coups, and our strong appeal is for soldiers to go back to the barracks and for the constitutional order to be fully in place in the democratic context of today’s Guinea-Bissau.”

At an earlier press briefing on January 25, Guterres said: “I am deeply concerned with the recent coup d’état in Burkina Faso. The role of the military must be to defend their countries and their peoples, not to attack their governments and to fight for power.

“We have, unfortunately in the region, terrorist groups, we have threats to international peace and security. My appeal is for the armies of these countries to assume their professional role of armies, to protect their countries and re-establish democratic institutions.”

Asked about the celebrations in the streets following a military coup, at least in one African country, Guterres said: “There are always celebrations for these kinds of situations. It’s easy to orchestrate them, but the values of democracy do not depend on the public opinion at one moment or another. Democratic societies are a value that must be preserved. Military coups are unacceptable in the 21st century.”

The New York Times reported February 1 the African Union had suspended Mali, Guinea and Sudan, but not Chad –“a double standard that analysts warned could have dire consequences for Africa”.

Djibril Diallo, President & CEO African Renaissance and Diaspora Network Inc (ARDN) told IPS there is reason to be concerned about the resurgence of military takeovers in Africa.

Contrary to perceptions, he pointed out, military coups tend to lead to more state repression not less, more political instability and halt or reversal of economic gains.

“Geopolitical divisions among the international community have not helped to address the effects of military takeovers. Regional and subregional organizations are still to find an effective way of pressuring coup leaders to hand over power to a democratically government in a timely manner,” he added.

“Any solutions to the effects of military takeovers should start with addressing prevailing chronic poverty conditions and youth unemployment, as well as endemic corruption.”

Hence the importance to push forward with the rollout of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), said Diallo, who was a former Spokesperson for the President of the UN General Assembly, 2004-2005; and Special Advisor to the Executive Director and Deputy Director of Public Affairs at UNICEF in 1986.

Prof Daniel D. Bradlow, SARCHI Professor of International Development Law and African Economic Relations, Center for Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria told IPS these coups are a troubling development.

“However, they are a symptom of the breakdown in security and governance arrangements in each country and the region, in many cases, caused by pressure from outside forces and the difficult economic situations in the country”.

He pointed out that sanctioning the military governments without also addressing the underlying governance problems and their causes is unlikely to produce sustainable improvements in the affected countries

A newly-released book* on the United Nations recounts Annan as the only Secretary-General (1997-2006) who challenged the General Assembly, urging member states to deny the UN podium to political leaders who come to power by undemocratic means or via military coups.

As one senior UN official put it: “Were military leaders seeking legitimacy by addressing the General Assembly?”

When the OAU, in 2004, barred coup leaders from participating in African summits, Annan went one step further and said he was hopeful that one day the UN General Assembly would follow in the footsteps of the OAU, and bar leaders of military governments from addressing the General Assembly.

Annan’s proposal was a historic first. But it never came to pass in an institution where member states, not the Secretary-General, rule the Organization. However, any such move could also come back to haunt member states if, one day, they find themselves representing a country headed by a military leader.

The outspoken Annan, a national of Ghana, also said that “billions of dollars of public funds continue to be stashed away by some African leaders — even while roads are crumbling, health systems are failing, school children have neither books nor desks nor teachers, and phones do not work.”

He also lashed out at African leaders who overthrow democratic regimes to grab power by military means.

Needless to say, the UN does not make any distinctions between “benevolent dictators” and “ruthless dictators.” But as an international institution preaching multiparty democracy and free elections, it still condones military leaders by offering them a platform to speak — while wining and dining them during the annual General Assembly sessions.

Although Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), once addressed the UN, some of the world’s most controversial authoritarian leaders, including Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Syria’s Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar al-Assad, and North Korea’s Kim il Sung and his grandson Kim Jong-un, never made it to the UN.

When former Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, accused of war crimes, was refused a US visa to attend the high-level segment of the General Assembly sessions back in September 2013, a Sudanese delegate told the UN’s Legal Committee that “the democratically-elected president of Sudan had been deprived of the opportunity to participate in the General Assembly because the host country, the United States, had denied him a visa, in violation of the U.N.-U.S. Headquarters Agreement.”

Meanwhile, some of the military leaders who addressed the UN in a bygone era included Fidel Castro of Cuba, Col Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya, Amadou Toure of Mali (who assumed power following a coup in 1991 but later served as a democratically elected President), and Jerry Rawlings of Ghana (who seized power in 1979, executed former political leaders but later served as a civilian president voted into power in democratic elections).

In October 2020, the New York Times reported that at least 10 African civilian leaders refused to step down from power and instead changed their constitutions to serve a third or fourth term -– or serve for life.

These leaders included Presidents of Guinea (running for a third term), Cote d’Ivoire, Uganda, Benin, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Ghana and Seychelles, among others. The only country where the incumbent was stepping down was Niger.

Condemning all military coups, the Times quoted Umaro Sissoco Embalo, the president of Guinea-Bissau, as saying: “Third terms also count as coups”

*This article contains extracts from a recently-released book on the United Nations titled “No Comment – and Don’t Quote Me on That”.

The link follows: https://www.rodericgrigson.com/no-comment-by-thalif-deen/

 

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In 2012, the United Nations General Assembly designated 6 February as the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation, with the aim of amplifying and directing the efforts on the elimination of this practice. Credit: UNFPA

By Natalia Kanem and Catherine Russell
NEW YORK, Feb 4 2022 (IPS)

“Multiple overlapping crises are putting millions of girls at increased risk of female genital mutilation. “Countries already grappling with rising poverty, inequality and conflict are seeing the COVID-19 pandemic further threaten years of progress to end the practice, creating a crisis within a crisis for the world’s most vulnerable and marginalized girls.

“Even before COVID-19, 68 million girls were estimated to be at risk of female genital mutilation between 2015 and 2030. As the pandemic continues to shutter schools and disrupt programmes that help protect girls from this harmful practice, an additional 2 million additional cases of female genital mutilation may occur over the next decade.

“Rapid population growth in some countries is expected to further increase the number of girls at risk, adding urgency to the global effort to eliminate the practice by 2030 as set out in the Sustainable Development Goals.

“Female genital mutilation harms girls’ bodies, lives and futures. It is also a violation of their human rights. Only united, concerted and well-funded action can end the practice everywhere.

“As the global community adopts programmes to reach girls and women impacted by the pandemic, there is an urgent need to accelerate investment to end female genital mutilation. Some $2.4 billion are needed to eliminate this practice in 31 high-priority countries. Specifically:

• Investment in the empowerment of girls and women, and in adequate services and response for those affected and at risk of female genital mutilation
• Investment in building partnerships and mobilizing allies – including men and boys, women’s groups, community leaders and even former practitioners of female genital mutilation – to help eliminate the practice.
• Investment in developing and enforcing national-level laws and strengthening institutions.

“So far, progress has been clear and measurable. Today, girls are one third less likely to be subjected to female genital mutilation than 30 years ago, and in the last two decades, the proportion of girls and women in high-prevalence countries who oppose the practice has doubled.

“Those gains now face an unprecedented challenge. Global efforts must keep the momentum moving forward and build on years of progress to end this harmful practice completely.”

Dr. Natalia Kanem is UNFPA Executive Director and Catherine Russell is UNICEF Executive Director.

 

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By SWAN
PARIS, Feb 3 2022 (IPS)

The Rastafari movement, which began in Jamaica during the 1930s, has become internationally known for its contribution to culture and the arts, as well as for its focus on peace and “ital” living. Major icons include reggae musicians Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer and Burning Spear, with the movement overall projecting a very male image.

But women have contributed significantly to the development of Rastafari, as Jamaican-born historian Daive Dunkley has shown through his research. Rastafari women were particularly active in the resistance against colonial rule in the first half of the 1900s, and they created educational institutions for young people and helped to expand the arts sphere in the Caribbean, among other work.

Dr Daive Dunkley (courtesy of the University of Missouri).

These contributions are highlighted in Dunkley’s latest book, Women and Resistance in the Early Rastafari Movement, an essential addition to the history of Rastafari – which scholars generally see as both a religious and social movement. US-based Dunkley, an associate professor in the University of Missouri’s Department of Black Studies and director of Peace Studies, spoke to SWAN about his research, in an interview conducted by email and videoconference.

SWAN: What inspired your research on women’s role in the early Rastafari movement?

Daive Dunkley: There is a story here. My inspiration for writing about women’s role in the early Rastafari developed from research I had been doing since 2009 on Leonard Howell, one of the four known founders of the movement. I quickly realized that women were a significant force in the group that became known as the Howellites and were critical to all their considerable initiatives. These included developing the first self-sufficient Rastafari community, known as Pinnacle.

Hundreds of women joined the estimated 700 people of the Pinnacle community in 1940, located in the hills of St. Catherine, Jamaica. I realized too that the women had been part of establishing the Ethiopian Salvation Society (ESS) in 1937 and were members of its governing board. They were secretaries and decisionmakers, including Tenet Bent, who married Howell. Bent was one of its leaders and financial backers. She also had connections in middle-class Jamaica that proved critical to the development of the ESS as a benevolent Rastafari organization.

Women have contributed significantly to the development of Rastafari, as Jamaican-born historian Daive Dunkley has shown through his research. Rastafari women were particularly active in the resistance against colonial rule in the first half of the 1900s, and they created educational institutions for young people and helped to expand the arts sphere in the Caribbean, among other work

Interestingly the ESS created a constitution written chiefly by women who called it a “Christian charity.” And some of its first outreach programs were also clearly determined by women, such as providing relief in the form of food and clothing to survivors of natural disasters in several parts of Jamaica in the late 1930s. In 2014, I decided to focus my research on the activities of the early women, who came predominantly from the peasantry. The colonial government and newspapers largely ignored the activism and leadership of these women in the development of the Rastafari movement.

SWAN: Were you surprised by the information you discovered?

D.D.:  I was not surprised by my information about women’s political, economic, and cultural activism within the early Rastafari movement. My earlier research on the antislavery activities of enslaved people included research on women. Despite slavery, these women remained active in the resistance – undermining, escaping, or abolishing slavery altogether. I found out that women’s role in the early Rastafari encountered silencing by the colonial system. We helped maintain this silencing in later writing about the early movement. What I read in terms of secondary scholarship was largely androcentric. I learned the names of the four known founders and some other prominent men. They engaged the colonial system unapologetically as Rastafari leaders. I read nothing similar about women, which I found pretty strange.

Moreover, when women were portrayed, including by British author Sheila Kitzinger in the 1960s, it was essentially to reflect on how marginal they were in the movement. By the way, for me, the early Rastafari movement dates from the 1930s to the end of the 1960s. Women in the 1960s were members of the early action, and many joined from the 1930s through the 1950s. In other words, early women were members of Rastafari during and after the colonial system. This system was far more devastating in its attitudes towards Rastafari than the early postcolonial government of Jamaica that took over with the island’s political independence in 1962.

Rastafari obtained a male-dominated image from the mid to late 1950s with devastating consequences for all the movement’s women. The colonial system successfully imposed a veil of silence on women, resulting in our ignorance of these women. More research using interviews with and about women and closer reading of the colonial archives, including the newspapers, helped me uncover some of the hidden histories of the women in the early movement. I was inspired to continue searching for these stories because I knew that Black women were never silent in the previous history of the Caribbean or before the genesis of Rastafari in 1932.

SWAN: What was the most striking aspect of this story?

D.D.:  This question is a difficult one to answer because all these stories involving women were fascinating or striking. But if I were to venture an answer to the question, I would say that the story about the women who petitioned the government for fairness and justice in 1934 stands tall among the most striking. I’ve written elsewhere about this story in a blog for the book published by LSU Press. I said that the women who petitioned the government for justice and fairness showed their awareness of the power of petitions in the history of the Black freedom struggle in Jamaica and the Caribbean.

These women organized themselves to defy the colonial police, justices of the peace, and resident magistrate. These entities had dedicated themselves to silencing Rastafari women and men. The women submitted their petitions to the central government. They did so in a coordinated fashion to ensure that the colonial officials did not ignore the pleas.

You will have to read the book to get a fuller sense of what happened due to these petitions. I will say that engaging with the government showed an effort not to escape from the society but rather to transform colonial Jamaica into a just and fair society. The women wanted the island’s Black people to see themselves improving. They wanted Jamaica to reflect their aspirations. The activities aimed at accomplishing this wish were among the most significant contributions of early Rastafari women. They were not escapists. They were radical transformationalists if we want a fancy term.

SWAN: How important is this particular segment of history to Jamaica and the world, given the international contributions of the Rastafari movement?

D.D.: Rastafari’s early history is critical to understanding both the history of Jamaica and the African diaspora at the time. People like to think of the internationalization of the Rastafari movement as starting from the 1960s and growing from there. However, my research on early Rastafari women has confirmed that this is not true. Rastafari was formulated with an international perspective and established ongoing connections with the global Black freedom struggle from its very beginning. The women also helped establish relations with Ethiopia on a political level that included fundraising, organizing, and participating in protests against fascist Italy’s aggression and subsequent occupation of Ethiopia in 1936-1941.

In addition, women protected the Rastafari’s historic theocratic interpretations of the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie I and Empress Menen Asfaw in 1930. The coronation event was critical to inspiring the genesis of the Rastafari movement. Women such as the previously mentioned Tenet Bent maintained the correspondence with the International African Service Bureau (IASB) through one of its founders, George Padmore, the Trinidadian Marxist based in London. The women knew that the organization evolved out of the International African Friends of Abyssinia formed in London in 1935 to organize resistance against Italy’s attempts to colonize Ethiopia.

In 1937, Padmore created the IASB with help from other Pan-Africanists from the Caribbean and worldwide, including CLR James, Amy Ashwood Garvey, ITA Wallace-Johnson, TR Makonnen, Jomo Kenyatta, and Chris Braithwaite, the Barbadian labor leader. The early Rastafari women preserved the history of Rastafari’s attempts to engage with the global Garvey movement from 1933, though disappointed by Garvey’s unwillingness to meet with Rastafari founder Leonard Howell.

Women, however, helped preserve the movement’s links to Garvey’s Back nationalist ideology to maintain the Pan-African political consciousness of the African diaspora. Women also read and discussed the literature of Pan-Africanist women writers such as Amy Bailey. The newspapers of Sylvia Pankhurst, the British socialist and suffragist, also kept the early Rastafari women abreast of developmental initiatives in Ethiopia.

Undoubtedly, the 1960s onwards brought further development of this international focus, especially with the development of Reggae and primarily through the touring by Bob Marley and the Wailers in the 1970s. However, much of the success of Reggae was due to its Rastafari consciousness developed in the 1930s. This consciousness centered on the African origins of humans and empowered Reggae with a message of morality, peace, and justice that appealed to people worldwide.

SWAN: From a gender standpoint, how significant would you say the research is for Jamaica, the Caribbean?

D.D.:  The early history of Rastafari women revealed some crucial developments in the story of gender and its dynamics in the modern history of the African diaspora. The early women challenged gender disparity inside and outside the movement from the 1930s’ inception of Rastafari. Many of these women had been part of empowered women congregations in the traditional churches, namely the Baptist church.

Still, they felt that Rastafari focused more on their African ancestry and therefore was more relevant to their social uplift. Among the gender discussions initiated by women was equality between the emperor and empress of Ethiopia, whereas men saw the emperor as the returned Messiah. The women proposed that the empress and emperor were equal and constituted the messianic message of the coronation event in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1930.

Women also ensured that they participated in preaching the Rastafari doctrine on the streets of Jamaica from the early 1930s. They defended men arrested and tried for their involvement in Rastafari. Many women also ended up imprisoned for their defense of the movement and its use of cannabis. Women were present during the court proceedings as witnesses and supporters. Their willingness to engage the justice system revealed to colonial officials that the male focus in suppressing Rastafari would continue to fail unless they paid attention to women.

The women carried on the Pinnacle community in the 1930s through 1950s when the police arrested the men. As my book discusses, women were at the center of initiating the most significant Rastafari organization of the late 1950s, the African Reform Church of God in Christ. One of its two founders was Edna E. Fisher. She was prosecuted for treason-felony and did not attempt during the trial to hide the fact that she was the owner of the land on which they built their organization. Fisher considered herself the brigadier of the movement. However, scholars have named the events and the trial after her partner and future husband, Claudius Henry. Still, Fisher was instrumental in the leadership and creating the organization’s cultural and political objectives.

SWAN: Why did the Rastafari movement become so male-oriented in later decades?

D.D.:  My research has shown that Rastafari became male-oriented mainly in the 1950s. This change was primarily a response to the attempts of the colonial regime to suppress the movement. Its male leaders and many male followers decided they needed “male supremacy” to fight “white supremacy.” Scholarship on the Black freedom struggle in the United States has also disclosed this decision. Despite this reorientation towards male centrism, women continued to play pivotal roles inside and outside leadership positions.

Initially, it made sense for many women to capitalize on the image of male power to protect the movement because of the targeting of male members by the government.

However, state officials eventually recognized that targeting men could not end Rastafari. They needed to take a gender-equitable approach to suppress the movement. That recognition would lead to the detention of many women by the police on charges of disorderly conduct, showing animosity towards state officials, such as police and judges.

Of course, many women also faced cannabis charges. The male orientation of the movement continued into the independence period of Jamaica primarily due to the men seeking to consolidate power. Many cultural and philosophical attitudes developed around this male-centered identity that started in the 1950s. The male focus continues within the movement despite women challenging these attitudes using notions of gender equality inherited from earlier women.

SWAN: How did the book come about?

D.D.: I started to write chapters for the book in 2014 and revised them over the next seven years. One of the strategies I used was to return to some of the women and men I interviewed to ensure that the information was consistent with what they had told me previously. I also expanded the archival research to include Great Britain and the United States materials. Regarding research materials for the book’s writing, the most important sources were the Jamaica Archives, the British Archives, the Smithsonian, and the newspapers, particularly Jamaica’s Daily Gleaner.

SWAN: What do you hope readers will take away from it overall?

D.D.: One of the things I hope will happen with this book is that it stimulates further research into women’s role in founding the Rastafari movement. That part of the history needs analysis that I think will expand our understanding of how Rastafari came about and give a complete picture of the critical figures in founding this movement. I believe women were vital to both the genesis and initial development of Rastafari, who had been articulating its consciousness before the 1930 coronation of the empress and emperor of Ethiopia.

It is clear from my research that women read the same materials men read and gradually developed their ideas about Rastafari consciousness independently of men. I also hope the book will inspire people to see poor Black women as agents of historical, social changes in the history of the African diaspora. These women had meaningful conversations regarding materializing social change for the greater good. I’m hoping readers see these women as intellectual catalysts and activists who helped shape the evolution of the modern African diaspora. These women were critical to the decolonization process, for example. – AM / SWAN

Women and Resistance in the Early Rastafari Movement is published by Louisiana State University Press.

Parents at Alheri leprosy colony outside Nigeria's Federal Capital Territory, Abuja have appealed for an end to discrimination, which they say impacts their children. Credit: Oluwatobi Enitan/IPS

By Oluwatobi Enitan
Abuja, Nigeria, Feb 3 2022 (IPS)

Seidu Ishaiku lives in the hope that his children will succeed. He and his family live with about 300 other residents in the Alheri leprosy colony outside Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory Abuja.

“They (our children) are obviously our future and hope,” Ishaiku says. “We don’t want our children to constitute a nuisance to society. We want them to succeed and become great people in future.”

He was speaking to IPS a few days before World Leprosy Day commemorated this year on January 30.

A homestead at Alheri leprosy colony outside Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory, Abuja.
Credit: Oluwatobi Enitan/IPS

The colony is in poor shape. The houses are dilapidated, there are few basic sanitation facilities, no sewage system, and the water tank at the clinic is empty. However, the borehole near their homes does guarantee a steady supply of water.

Most of the community are forced to stay in the facility long after they are cured – and survive on subsistence farming and petty trading while their children collect firewood and hawk to make ends meet for the family.

The clinic at Alheri leprosy colony outside Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory, Abuja
Credit: Oluwatobi Enitan/IPS

According to the residents, the facility has been open for 16 years, and even when cured of leprosy, the families continue to live there.

Terver Anyor, the head of Business Development for The Leprosy Mission Nigeria, said stigma, myths and misconceptions around the disease mean that people affected by the disease end up living in appalling conditions outside the mainstream society. The residents recognise The Leprosy Mission Nigeria as one of the NGOs that regularly assists them.

“Many people think that because one has a disability, maybe the fingers or the feet disease are off, then they suppose that that person has leprosy, even though that person is cured,” Anyor says. He explained The Leprosy Mission Nigeria, along with other organisations, would, over this period, be involved in awareness campaigns to sensitise people on the reality of the disease.

The awareness campaign included outreach on radio, media briefings and marches to public places in Abuja. The campaign, funded by the Sasakawa Health Foundation, will help disseminate facts about the disease.

“We aim to work towards the zero-transmission of leprosy … And we are also working towards achieving zero discrimination and zero disabilities due to leprosy,” Anyor says.

“Because of discrimination, people who are affected by leprosy don’t get jobs, and also don’t get to access social services like every other person.”

Two women sit under the trees at the Alheri leprosy colony outside Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. Credit: Oluwatobi Enitan/IPS

The children benefit from free education, but the headteacher of Alheri primary school, Aliyu Bashiru Kwali, says their parent’s conditions impact the children. He says many children go onto the streets to hawk as soon as school closes – some return at 10 pm, but others stay out the whole night. They return, he says, “with sleepy eyes”, and this means they cannot concentrate.

“The students having hawk on the streets to make ends meet for their parents is not helping matters, and we cannot stop them, because if they don’t hawk, they will not eat, their parents are incapacitated, so the huge responsibility falls on them at a young age,” Kwali says.

For many residents, their reality is complex and their anger palpable.

Ali Isah, the residents’ leader, says the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated their poor living conditions.

“We have got no intervention from Government, and we are confined here and dare not go out to beg, or else we would be maltreated by security operatives,” he says of the impact of Covid protocols. He said they once had to endure a charade where government officials brought three trailers of rice, dignitaries, and media, but when they left, the community only received three bags.

“As the head of the persons affected by leprosy, my family and I got less than a quarter of a bag of rice, which was barely enough to sustain us for three days. We struggled to survive during the lockdown with no hope in sight,” Isah says. “Our rights to freedom of religion and association have been denied us. We cannot pray in public because security operatives will deal with us. We have been ostracised.”

Lilibeth Evarestus knows first-hand about the plight of people affected by Hansen’s disease, as leprosy is also known. She is a lawyer who was once had the disease.

She now runs the Purple Hope Initiative – a non-profit for women and children affected by the disease in Lagos.

“As a person that has experienced Hansen’s disease, I faced a lot of discrimination and stigmatisation based on people’s wrong information about the disease,” she told IPS.

“I then decided to go into advocacy to create awareness and disseminate the right information about the disease. Thank goodness as a lawyer and human rights activist, I have been using my office to fight for our rights.”

Purple Hope is all about “restoring hope,” she says.

This echoes the sentiments of the WHO Goodwill Ambassador for Leprosy Elimination, Yohei Sasakawa, who says of his life’s work with people affected by leprosy: “I would like to create a society where everyone feels fully engaged, able to express their opinions, and appreciated. The coming era must be one of diversity, and for that, we need social inclusion. There is such ability and potential in the world, and to have everyone participate in society will create a truly wonderful future.”

 

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Sri Lankan Buddhist monks at the UN General Assembly session commemorating Vesak. Credit: Sri Lanka’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations

By Neville de Silva
LONDON, Feb 3 2022 (IPS)

Driven by unprecedented hardship to pass round the begging bowl, Sri Lanka has become the centre of a tussle between Asia’s two superpowers.

There was a time in Asia’s predominantly Buddhist countries when saffron-robed monks walked from house to house in the mornings, standing outside in silence as lay people served up freshly cooked food into their ‘alms bowls’. The food was then taken to the temples, where it was shared among the monks.

That religious tradition has now largely given to other ways of serving alms to monks.

Today, governments and their aggrandising acolytes have converted this respected and virtuous tradition into one of begging richer nations to rescue them from economic deprivation, brought on largely by failed promises and disjointed and ill-conceived foreign and national policies.

This ‘begging bowl’ mentality in search of ‘alms’ is more likely to succeed if a nation is strategically-located in an area of big power contestation. Sri Lanka is just that, situated in the Indian Ocean and only a few nautical miles from the vital international sea lanes carrying goods from West to East and vice versa.

The country’s economy has been caught in a real bind. Buffeted by the Covid pandemic on the one hand and, on the other, ego-inflating economic and fiscal policies introduced by the new president Gotabaya Rajapaksa shortly before the country was pounded by the pandemic, Sri Lanka now has to beg or borrow to keep its head above water.

By December, Sri Lanka’s parlous foreign reserves situation had dropped to a perilous $1.2 billion – enough for three weeks of imports. The foreign debt obligation of $500 million that needed to be met last month was only the beginning. Another $1 billion is due in July. The total pay-off in 2022 will amount to some $7 billion.

Meanwhile the pandemic has virtually killed tourism, one of the country’s main foreign exchange earners, driving the hospitality industry into free-fall. If this was not bad enough, the Central Bank’s attempts to put a tight squeeze on incoming foreign currency led the country’s migrant labour remittances to drop drastically as overseas workers turned to the black market to earn real value for their money sent to families at home.

But nothing has had such widespread political repercussions as the government’s ill-advised policy of banning overnight chemical fertilisers last May, ahead of the country’s main agricultural season between October and April.

Its over-ambitious agenda of trying to turn Sri Lanka into the world’s first totally ‘green agriculture’ was laudable enough, but was botched when the sudden ban on chemical fertilisers and other agrochemicals – used by farmers for the last 50 years or so – left rice farming and other cultivations in disarray and farmers inevitably confused.

The government’s agenda of trying to turn Sri Lanka into the world’s first totally ‘green agriculture’ was botched.

While agricultural scientists and other experts warned of an impending food scarcity due to failed harvests and sparsely cultivated fields, the government ignored the warnings, sacking heads of the Agriculture Ministry and removing its qualified agricultural experts for spreading doom and gloom.

Against this backdrop of confused governance, probable food shortages due to poor harvests and slashing of imports and even essential medicines for lack of foreign currency, growing public unrest has seen even farmers take to the streets.

Consequently, a once-buoyant government confident of public popularity, especially among the Sinhala-Buddhist voters and the rural community, began to look beyond its faithful ally and ‘all weather’ friend China for ‘alms’ to pull it out of the morass.

China has already planted a large footprint in Sri Lanka, with massive infrastructure projects such as sea and airports in strategic areas, which allowed a monitoring of international sea lanes to make neighbouring India worry.

A major Chinese presence in Sri Lanka could endanger India’s security at a time when China continues to militarily pressurise India in the Himalayas.

From the early 1950s Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, and China had established close ties. Despite threats of sanctions by the US, Colombo sold natural rubber to China – then involved in the Korean War –in exchange for rice, marking the beginning of the long standing ‘Rubber-Rice Pact’.

As long as China’s immediate concern was the Pacific theatre, where the US and its allies remained dominant, and China faced territorial disputes in the South China sea and elsewhere, India was not overly concerned with China-Sri Lanka bilateral ties.

But as soon as China began to expand into the Indian Ocean, challenging what India considered its sphere of influence, New Delhi’s concerns multiplied considerably, as did its disquiet over China’s growing influence over Colombo.

The 70th anniversary of that Sino-Ceylon agreement, which cemented bilateral relations at a time when the People’s Republic of China was not even a member of the UN, was commemorated last month when China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited Colombo in early January during an influence-building visit to Africa, the Maldives and Sri Lanka.

This is the third high level visit by a Chinese official in little over a year, beginning with former foreign minister and Politburo member Yang Jiechi in October 2020, and followed last April by Chinese Defence Minister Gen. Wei Fenghe, a visible signal to India and US-led ‘Quad’ countries the importance that China attaches to its relations with Sri Lanka.

But Sri Lanka’s struggle against dwindling reserves, the need for foreign investment and expansion of trade relations at a time of economic hardship has shown the Rajapaksa regime that reliance on China alone will not suffice.

A more balanced foreign policy and an equidistant relationship between Asia’s two superpowers cannot remain at the level of diplomatic rhetoric. It is an imperative, given Sri Lanka’s geographical location in close proximity to India and the historical, cultural and ethnic ties with it huge neighbour.

Sri Lanka’s ambassador to Beijing, Dr Palitha Kohona, said recently that Colombo should not depend on China forever – a valid piece of advice Colombo should seriously consider.

India also cannot ignore that, security-wise, Sri Lanka lies in India’s underbelly, whose vulnerability was exposed during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. So a major Chinese presence in Sri Lanka could endanger India’s own security at a time when China continues to militarily pressurise India in the Himalayas.

Last December Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa’s hurried visit to New Delhi, even as his maiden budget was still being debated in parliament, was indicative of Sri Lanka’s anxiety to seek India’s economic and financial assistance, without depending solely on Beijing.

That visit led to the two countries agreeing on ‘four pillars’ of cooperation in the short term, including emergency support of a $1 billion line of credit for importing food and medicines and a currency swap to bolster Colombo’s dwindling foreign reserves.

Other assistance included investment in an oil tank farm for oil storage in northeastern Trincomalee, close to the vital natural harbour that served the British well during the Second World War.

An Indian company, the Adani Group, has already won a stake in the Colombo port, where it will engage in developing the western terminal while the Chinese build the eastern wing.

Meanwhile, Colombo is having talks with China for a new loan besides the $500 million loan and a $1.5 billion currency swap.

While the two major Indian Ocean powers tussle for supremacy in this vital maritime region, Sri Lanka is beginning to understand that it sometimes pays to dip one’s oars in troubled waters.

Source: Asian Affairs, a current affairs magazine.

Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who held senior roles in Hong Kong at The Standard and worked in London for Gemini News Service. He has been a correspondent for foreign media including the New York Times and Le Monde. More recently he was Sri Lanka’s deputy high commissioner in London

 

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A garbage picker walks down Santa Fe Avenue, one of the main avenues in Buenos Aires. Argentina suffered a deep economic and social decline in 2018 and 2019, which was accentuated in 2020 by the pandemic. Although in 2021 there was a rebound, the most vulnerable did not benefit. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Feb 2 2022 (IPS)

Accustomed for decades to recurring economic crises, and hit hard in recent years by a steady loss of purchasing power, Argentines were informed on Friday Jan. 28 of a last-minute agreement with the IMF which, in the words of center-left President Alberto Fernández, takes “the noose off their necks”.

The understanding, which will refinance a gigantic 45 billion dollar loan that the IMF (International Monetary Fund) gave Argentina in 2018, was reached within hours of the first installment falling due in 2022. Argentina owed 18 billion dollars in payments this year, which the country could not afford and which have now been postponed until 2026.

After exhausting other sources of financing and resorting to the IMF in 2018, Argentina underwent a pronounced economic and social decline, which led to then center-right President Mauricio Macri’s failure to win re-election in late 2019.

When recovery was expected in 2020, the country was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and a historic collapse of more than 10 percent of the economy. And although there was a rebound in 2021, it did not benefit the most vulnerable, as inflation exceeded 50 percent and was even higher in the case of staple foods.

This South American country of 45 million inhabitants which is the third largest economy in Latin America has, according to official data, a poverty rate of more than 40 percent, a proportion that climbs to 54 percent among children under 14 – a phenomenon that is partly explained by the higher proportion of large families among the poor.

However, Argentina was heading for an even greater economic and social catastrophe, warned the president, if it did not reach an agreement with the IMF.

“We had an unpayable debt that left us with no present and no future, and now we have a reasonable agreement that will allow us to grow,” said Fernández.

Thus, the IMF is once again lending money to Argentina to pay its debt, thanks to an agreement subject to quarterly reviews of the national accounts that -according to the government- do not imply a structural adjustment, like the many that the country has experienced in the context of its traumatic relationship with the multilateral financial organization.

“The best thing about this agreement with the Fund is what was avoided,” economist Andrés Borenstein, professor of public finance at the public University of Buenos Aires (UBA), told IPS in Buenos Aires.

“Without this understanding, the country would run out of financing and the consequences would be paid by those who have the least, because there would be more inflation, a greater decline in the real value of wages and a sharper devaluation of the currency,” he explained.

The government sought to allay the fears of the public who, based on past experience, associate agreements with the IMF with public spending cuts that lead to a decrease in economic activity and to general impoverishment.

“Compared to previous agreements that Argentina signed, this one does not contemplate restrictions that postpone our development,” said Fernández. “There will be no drop in real spending and there will be an increase in public works investment by the national government.”

Analysts, however, do not take the president’s words at face value. “It is true that the agreement is quite reasonable for the situation Argentina was in, but, as in any IMF program, there will be adjustments,” said Borenstein.

“Sharp increases in utility rates are coming and that will have an indirect impact on inflation and consumption,” he added.

Indeed, in a brief communiqué, the IMF pointed out that it had agreed with the Argentine government to reduce the large state subsidies to energy companies, with the aim of gradually reducing the fiscal deficit – which will increase the burden

Argentine President Alberto Fernández announced on Jan. 28 the agreement with the International Monetary Fund which, he said, took “the noose off the country’s neck”. CREDIT: Casa Rosada

on society.

 

Between realism and skepticism

Although the agreement was described as positive by most economists and even by the opposition, it sparked an internal crisis in the government, with one wing believing that the negotiation was too soft.

The clearest sign of the crisis was the resignation of Máximo Kirchner (son of former president and current vice-president Cristina Fernández Kirchner) as president of the ruling party’s bloc in the Chamber of Deputies, with a letter in which he stated that the IMF has been “the key trigger for every economic crisis since the return of democracy” in Argentina in 1983.

On the street, skepticism prevailed. In response to questions from IPS, the most frequently heard comment was that this news will not change anything for ordinary people, who see inflation as their main daily problem and believe it will continue to be so.

Juan Galíndez, who commutes almost two hours a day from a poor suburb of Buenos Aires to the city center to watch over cars parked outside a club, told IPS: “I don’t care about the IMF agreement because I know it won’t change anything for me. As long as I can get a few pesos to live on, I’m fine.” Galíndez works in the informal economy and depends on tips from customers of the club.

The plight of the poor in Argentina, however, is cushioned by a strong social assistance scheme that benefits almost 45 percent of the population in its various forms.

“Argentina has had a decade of economic stagnation and 30 years of a more structural deterioration,” Agustín Salvia, director of the Social Debt Observatory at the private Argentine Catholic University (UCA), told IPS. “Since 2018, what we have seen is a debt crisis to which the pandemic was added and this had very harsh consequences: it raised poverty levels from 35 to 48 percent at its peak, in 2020.”

The expert said that as of 2021, when the COVID vaccines began to arrive, restrictions on movement were relaxed and a process of economic recovery began, and poverty decreased although it has not returned to pre-pandemic levels.

A clothing and footwear store in downtown Buenos Aires tries to attract customers with big sales, despite constantly rising prices in Argentina. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

“It stabilized at around 40 percent, because there is little investment from small or large companies that generate quality employment. What is growing the most is precarious informal work, with low wages that lose against inflation, and self-employment,” said Salvia.

The inflation that hits the poor especially hard is fundamentally driven, according to economists, by a fiscal deficit that in 2021 reached three percentage points of gross domestic product (GDP) and that is difficult to lower without social costs, in a country that spends 40 percent of its budget on pensions and other social security benefits.

In the understanding with the IMF, a path of progressive reduction of government spending was established, which postpones the zero deficit goal until 2025, in the next presidential term, which begins in December 2023.

“The agreement imposes some conditions of course, but this time the IMF is not demanding structural reforms that affect pensions or labor rights, as it has in the past, which means that they are a little more lax,” said economist Martín Kalos.

Kalos told IPS that reducing the fiscal deficit was a path that Argentina was going to have to go down with or without IMF surveillance: “While no country likes to be audited on its sovereign policy decisions, this was an agenda that Argentina was not going to be able to escape.”

Young mangrove plants, Puttalam Lagoon, Sri Lanka. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Feb 2 2022 (IPS)

This is about Wetlands, which are considered as a natural solution to the global threat of climate change. They absorb carbon dioxide, help slow global heating and reduce pollution, hence they are often referred to as the “Kidneys of the Earth”.

Specifically, peatlands alone store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests combined. However, when drained and destroyed, wetlands emit vast amounts of carbon, adds the UN on the occasion of the World Wetlands Day, marked 2 February.

“Wetlands also provide a buffer against the impacts of floods, droughts, hurricanes and tsunamis, and build resilience to climate change.”

And though they cover only around 6% of the Earth’s land surface, 40% of all plant and animal species live or breed in wetlands.

The World Day also reports that:

• Coastal wetlands sequester and store carbon up to 55 times faster than tropical rain forests.
• Rice, grown in wetland paddies, is the staple diet of 3.5 billion people.

 

But… what are wetlands?

Wetlands are ecosystems where water is the primary factor controlling the environment and the associated plant and animal life, explains the UN.

A broad definition includes both freshwater and marine and coastal ecosystems such as all lakes and rivers, underground aquifers, swamps and marshes, wet grasslands, peatlands, oases, estuaries, deltas and tidal flats, mangroves and other coastal areas, coral reefs, and all human-made sites such as fishponds, rice paddies, reservoirs and saltpans.

 

In the Ciénaga de Zapata, Cuba, the biggest wetlands in the Caribbean. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

 

Where?

“Although present in all world’s regions, about 30% of the world’s wetlands are located in North America. Some of them developed after the previous glaciation created lakes. Asia and North America combined contain over 60% of the world’s wetland area.”

 

Critical to people and nature

The World Day also explains that these lands are critical to people and nature, given the intrinsic value of these ecosystems, and their benefits and services, including their environmental, climate, ecological, social, economic, scientific, educational, cultural, recreational and aesthetic contributions to sustainable development and human wellbeing.

“Wetland biodiversity matters for our health, our food supply, for tourism and for jobs. Wetlands are vital for humans, for other ecosystems and for our climate, providing essential ecosystem services such as water regulation, including flood control and water purification.”

 

A billion people depend on wetlands

“They are vital habitats for wildlife, as well as important tools for mitigating the effects of climate change. They help to manage extreme weather events like floods and storms, and can store 10-20 times more carbon than temperate or boreal forests on land.”

“Add to all that, more than a billion people across the world depend on them for their livelihoods – that’s about one in eight people on Earth.”

 

Why are they in danger?

Wetlands are among the ecosystems with the highest rates of decline, loss and degradation, explains the World Day.

Indicators of current negative trends in global biodiversity and ecosystem functions are projected to continue in response to direct and indirect drivers such as rapid human population growth, unsustainable production and consumption and associated technological development, as well as the adverse impacts of climate change.

 

The most threatened ecosystem

But not only are they disappearing three times faster than forests–they are the “Earth’s most threatened ecosystem.” In just 50 years — since 1970 — 35% of the world’s wetlands have been lost.

“Human activities that lead to loss of wetlands include drainage and infilling for agriculture and construction, pollution, overfishing and overexploitation of resources, invasive species and climate change.”

In the specific case of the Mediterranean, for example, the region has lost 50% of its natural wetlands since 1970 – and we continue to destroy them, warns the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM).

 

The vicious circle

This vicious circle of wetland loss, threatened livelihoods, and deepening poverty is the result of mistakenly seeing wetlands as wastelands rather than life-giving sources of jobs, incomes, and essential ecosystem services, the World Day concludes.

 

Logging on Kolombangara Island, Solomon Islands. Credit: CE Wilson.

By Catherine Wilson
CANBERRA, Australia, Feb 2 2022 (IPS)

Corruption continues to have a crippling effect on the lives of many people in southwest Pacific Island countries, exacerbating hardship and inequality and eroding human and national development.

Islanders speak of the mismanagement of public funds and assets by political elites at the national level, but also by organizations and individuals in communities, the loss of resource wealth and revenues as a result of corrupt deals between politicians and extractive companies, and the widespread practice of paying bribes for public services.

“High-level white collar corruption is still a big issue in the country. Kickbacks offered to government officials to facilitate payment is still rampant. Most big civil and building contracts tend to have very strong political connections and ties, which means that the procurement process is still weak,” said Busa Jeremiah Wenogo, a development economist who works for the Centre for Excellence in Financial Inclusion in the capital of Papua New Guinea (PNG), Port Moresby.

“Bribes are offered to secure drivers’ licenses and accident reports. There are also cases of criminals who have been released from jail due to bribes, despite the severity of their criminal offences, without the knowledge of the court and the aggrieved party,” Wenogo told IPS.

Corruption has become so widespread that people have accepted it as part of the way we live in this country. Corruption by politicians and within government is bringing our country down when we are blessed with natural resources to provide for all our citizens

PNG’s corruption ranking, as reported by Transparency International, has improved gradually in recent years. On a scale of 0-100, where 100 is ‘clean’, the Melanesian nation received a score of 25 in 2015, progressing to 27 in 2020 and 31 last year. But there is still a long way to go.

In the Solomon Islands, a rainforest-covered archipelago nation with a dominant logging industry, “the predominant forms of corruption we encounter in our work—that is the misuse and abuse of entrusted power for private gain—are conflict of interest and abuse of discretion, embezzlement, bribery, extortion and fraud,” Ruth Liloqula, Chief Executive of Transparency Solomon Islands, told IPS from the capital, Honiara. She believes that the most corrupt individuals and institutions in the country are members of parliament and companies extracting natural resources.

The latest 2021 Global Corruption Barometer, published by Transparency International, reveals that 96 percent and 97 percent of people in PNG and the Solomon Islands respectively believe corruption is a big problem in government, while 82 percent and 90 percent believe it is also a serious issue in the business world.

“The main impacts of corruption are poor health, medical and education infrastructure and services, lack of socioeconomic development throughout the country, benefits raised from the exploitation of natural resources leave the country to develop other countries and not the Solomon Islands, lack of employment opportunity for Solomon Islands’ rapidly growing population. And the rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” Liloqula continued.

At the centre of many allegations of high-level fraud are the political elite and the extractive industry. PNG is endowed with substantial deposits of gold, copper, silver, nickel and cobalt, as well as oil and natural gas. Prior to the pandemic, the mining sector accounted for 60 percent of the country’s total exports, while in the Solomon Islands, timber is the largest source of export earnings.

‘Corruption risks in this sector are high. Across the region transnational criminal groups use corruption to exploit natural resources, such as forests, fish stocks and gold and manganese deposits. Common tactics include bribery and capture of environmental law enforcement bodies, often involving high level politicians, government officials and private sector leaders and intermediaries, who may act with impunity,’ Transparency International reports.

In 2015 alone, an estimated $1.4 billion was lost from PNG’s government revenues due to fraud. Meanwhile in the Solomon Islands, the Auditor General’s report in 2019 claimed there were massive variances in the country’s national accounts and millions of dollars in unexplained payments and expenses. The cost of corruption is also high in the region’s fisheries industry where, from 2010 to 2015, the total value of illegally harvested or transhipped tuna in the Pacific Islands was more than $616 million, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

‘Corruption is the single greatest obstacle to economic and social development around the world,’ claims the UN crime agency. And its most visible effects in countries such as PNG and the Solomon Islands is low human development, poor governance and national development outcomes, low standards and reach of public services, lack of employment growth and entrenched poverty. PNG is ranked 155 out of 189 countries for human development, while 56.6 percent of its people live in multi-dimensional poverty.

“Corruption has become so widespread that people have accepted it as part of the way we live in this country. Corruption by politicians and within government is bringing our country down when we are blessed with natural resources to provide for all our citizens,” said Dorothy Tekwie, President of PNG’s West Sepik Provincial Council of Women.

She told IPS that if corruption was effectively reduced, “development projects much needed by the people would be completed, so services can reach the people, especially in rural areas. It would mean more economic activities for rural people, more schools for children, thus an educated population, better health and the reduction of maternal and child mortality in rural and remote areas.”

The extent to which citizens and the media demand clean governance and hold their leaders to account will go a long way in progressing anti-corruption efforts. The political will to strengthen laws against corrupt practices and zero tolerance of fraud by the private sector is also crucial.

The initiative of the present PNG Government, under Prime Minister James Marape, to establish an Independent Commission against Corruption (ICAC) is a significant public signal that the government is taking the issue seriously. The agency is expected to be fully operational by 2023. However, Wenogo believes that for it to be a success, the new ICAC must be independent with wide-ranging powers to investigate and prosecute wrongdoers at all levels of power, and its investigations and findings must be transparent and free from political influence.

Success in reducing corruption in PNG is even more urgent as the country continues to grapple with the health and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. In January, PNG recorded 37,145 cases and 597 deaths. The pandemic could set the goal of eliminating poverty in the region back by a decade and, in some Pacific Island countries, by up to 30 years, warns the regional inter-governmental organization, Pacific Islands Forum.

A young child being given polio drops in Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Pakistan recently reported that it had been a year since the last case of polio was detected. Credit: OC KP

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Feb 2 2022 (IPS)

“It was like a heavy burden had been lifted, and I could breathe easier,” said Irum Khan, a polio worker, recalling the cloudy, gloomy, winter morning of January 28, 2022, when her supervisor announced Pakistan had not reported a single case of a child afflicted with polio since January 27, 2021, when the last time a polio case was reported from the province of Balochistan.

“There were 16 of us, and we all burst in applause. It was the best news we had heard in years,” said the 20-year-old Khan, working with the polio eradication programme since 2018, in Dera Ismail Khan (DI Khan), in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, once a hotbed of polio.

Health workers mark a finger with indelible ink to indicate that a child has been vaccinated. The campaign to eradicate polio reached a critical milestone with no cases reported for a year. Credit: Zofeen T. Ebrahim/IPS

The day passed like a breeze as she went about her work, administering polio drops to children under five. On a daily basis, she visits between 30-50 households, and each home may have between three to five families living together.

“I was on some sort of a high; even those who refused and sent me away failed to dampen my mood,” she added.

“Without the unwavering support of the 380,000 polio workers, we would never have been able to reach this milestone,” said Dr Shahzad Baig, national coordinator for the Pakistan Polio Eradication Programme, speaking to IPS over the phone from Islamabad.

The director-general for health at the ministry of national health services, Dr Rana Safdar, Baig’s predecessor, agreed. He gave all the credit to “hundreds of thousands of our frontline workers who demonstrated an unprecedented commitment to battle polio”.

In 2015, there were 54 cases, 20 in 2016 and only 8 in 2017. Pakistan thought it would be possible to eradicate polio, having reached single-digit cases, but then the country saw a surge with 12 cases in 2018. And in 2019, 147 cases were detected.

Safdar, who had left the polio programme in 2019 after working there for six years, returned when the surge began and was tasked with reorganising it so that work on polio eradication could be carried out in tandem with the routine childhood immunisation.

In 2020, like in the rest of the world, Pakistan was in the grip of Covid-19. Both the anti-polio campaigns and routine immunisation had to be suspended to ensure the safety of the workers and communities, explained Safdar. That year, up to 84 cases were reported.

“We enhanced our outreach to vaccinate eligible children against all vaccine-preventable diseases in an organised manner and were able to reach them in the remotest pockets where communities were finding it difficult to access our healthcare facilities, taking full Covid-19 precautions,” said the director-general.

But it is not the time for the government to sit on its laurels. Although the “finish line is visible”, for him “the job is far from over”, and Pakistan cannot let its guard down, Baig said.

The reason for caution, explained Irum Khan, was because the virus is still lurking around in the environment and her district. “The virus was found in some environmental samples,” she said, and therefore the “danger is not over yet”.

Baig said that in the last three months of the environmental samples collected from 64 sites, two were found to have the poliovirus in the towns of Lakki Marwat and Tank, in DI Khan district.

Polio spreads quickly, and chances of an outbreak could become imminent. “We need to kill the virus on its turf before it reaches other bigger cities of, say Quetta, Karachi or Islamabad,” he said.

His apprehension is palpable. DI Khan is the hub from where large swathes of the population move, both from bordering Afghanistan (the only other country where polio is endemic after Pakistan) and the tribal belt of the province and then inward to other provinces.

“Instead of fighting the polio battle across the country, if we can focus the fight in these districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), we can become polio-free in the next three years,” says the polio programme head.

Although the virus does not respect borders, be it Pakistan or Afghanistan, a much stricter border control since the takeover of Kabul by the Taliban on August 15, 2021, has meant the free and frequent movement of Afghan nationals has been contained to some extent.

In addition, the persistent refusals by anti-vaxxers could also lead to the spread of the virus. “I am worried the virus may reach the children who are kept hidden from polio workers,” said Baig.

“They tell us the child is not home, or he or she is sleeping and to come later, or that they are busy and to come later; some will hide their children,” said Bushra Khan, a polio worker from KP’s capital city, Peshawar. She said they have to make as many as “four visits” just to administer two drops because the time is not convenient for the parents, or they don’t want to get their children vaccinated.

This attitude of nonchalance, according to Irum Khan, is because the vaccine is free, and people do not value it because they are not paying for it.

“Put a price tag on this vaccine, and you will see parents bringing their kids to the health centres,” she said.

Polio health worker walking in snow in Quetta, Balochistan province. Credit: EOC Balochistan

According to Baig, the two drops cost the government Rs 130 (74 cents)/per child, and over 40 million under-five children were administered these drops in the last nationwide campaign.

Providing security to the polio workers is another task. As many as 70 polio workers have been killed by militants since 2012, a majority in KP. But those providing them with the security are also on the radar of miscreants. In December 2021, two policemen accompanying polio vaccination teams were killed and two injured in separate incidents in Tank and Lakki Marwat. And last month, in January, one more police officer was killed in KP’s Kohat.

“This saps the morale of the team. The families get scared and are reluctant to send the workers out in the field. This means we have to organise the 2-member team all over again, train the ones who are new, some of whom may be new to the community they are serving,” said Baig. “And it’s not even that we are paying handsomely for it to be worth their life,” he added, referring to Rs 1,000/day (USD 5.67) wage.

Still, according to Dr Safdar, the biggest challenge is the burnout of polio workers and “keeping teams motivated on both sides of the borders (between Pakistan and Afghanistan) till we reach the finish line”.

 

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US Congress.
In the midst of the current crisis, what about progressives in the US Congress? It’s a dangerous crisis in decades that risks pushing the world into nuclear war, very few are doing anything more than mouth safe platitudes. Credit: Commons Wikipedia.Org

By Norman Solomon
SAN FRANCISCO, USA , Feb 2 2022 (IPS)

Hidden in plain sight, the extreme hypocrisy of the U.S. position on NATO and Ukraine cries out for journalistic coverage and open debate in the USA’s major media outlets. But those outlets, with rare exceptions, have gone into virtually Orwellian mode, only allowing elaboration on the theme of America good, Russia bad.

Aiding and abetting a potentially catastrophic — and I do mean catastrophic — confrontation between the world’s two nuclear superpowers are lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Like the media they echo and vice versa, members of Congress, including highly touted progressives, can scarcely manage more than vague comments that they want diplomacy rather than war.

Imagine if a powerful Russian-led military alliance were asserting the right to be joined by its ally Mexico — and in the meantime was shipping big batches of weapons to that country — can you imagine the response from Washington?

Yet we’re supposed to believe that it’s fine for the U.S.-led NATO alliance to assert that it has the prerogative to grant membership to Ukraine — and in the meantime is now shipping large quantities of weaponry to that country.

Mainstream U.S. news outlets have no use for history or documentation that might interfere with the current frenzy presenting NATO’s expansion to the Russian border as an unalloyed good.

“It is worth recalling how much the alliance has weakened world security since the end of the Cold War, by inflaming relations with Russia,” historian David Gibbs said last week. “It is often forgotten that the cause of the current conflict arose from a 1990 U.S. promise that NATO would never be expanded into the former communist states of Eastern Europe.

Not ‘one inch to the East,’ Russian leaders were promised by the U.S. Secretary of State at the time, James Baker. Despite this promise, NATO soon expanded into Eastern Europe, eventually placing the alliance up against Russia’s borders. The present-day U.S.-Russian conflict is the direct result of this expansion.”

The journalists revved up as bloviating nationalists on the USA’s TV networks and in other media outlets have no use for any such understanding. Why consider how anything in the world might look to Russians?

Why bother to provide anything like a broad range of perspectives about a conflict that could escalate into incinerating the world with thermonuclear weapons? Jingoistic conformity is a much more prudent career course.

Out of step with that kind of conformity is Andrei Tsygankov, professor of international relations at San Francisco State University, whose books include Russia and America: The Asymmetric Rivalry. “Russia views its actions as a purely defensive response to increasingly offensive military preparations by NATO and Ukraine (according to Russia’s foreign ministry, half of Ukraine’s army, or about 125,000 troops, are stationed near the border),” he wrote days ago.

“Instead of pressuring Ukraine to de-escalate and comply with the Minsk Protocol, however, Western nations continue to provide the Ukrainian army with lethal weapons and other supplies.”

Tsygankov points out that Russian President Vladimir Putin “has two decades of experience of trying to persuade Western leaders to take Russia’s interests into consideration. During these years, Russia has unsuccessfully opposed the U.S. decision to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and build a new missile defense system in Romania, expand NATO, invade Iraq and Libya, and support Kyiv’s anti-Russian policies — all in vain.”

The professor nails a key reality: “Whatever plans Russia may have with respect to Ukraine and NATO, conflict resolution greatly depends on the West. A major war is avoidable if Western leaders gather confidence and the will to abandon the counter-productive language of threats and engage Russia in reasoned dialogue.

If diplomacy is given a fair chance, the European continent may arrive at a new security system that will reflect, among others, Russia’s interests and participation.”

In the midst of all this, what about progressives in the US Congress? As we face the most dangerous crisis in decades that risks pushing the world into nuclear war, very few are doing anything more than mouth safe platitudes.

Are they bowing to public opinion? Not really. It’s much more like they’re cowering to avoid being attacked by hawkish media and militaristic political forces.

On Friday, the American Prospect reported: “A new Data for Progress poll shared exclusively with the Prospect finds that the majority of Americans favor diplomacy with Russia over sanctions or going to war for Ukrainian sovereignty.

Most Americans are not particularly animated about the escalating conflict in Eastern Europe, the poll shows, despite round-the-clock media coverage. When asked, 71 percent of Democrats and 46 percent of Republicans said they support the U.S. striking a diplomatic deal with Russia. They agreed that in the effort to de-escalate tensions and avoid war, the U.S. should be prepared to make concessions.”

The magazine’s reporting provides a portrait of leading congressional progressives who can’t bring themselves to directly challenge fellow Democrat Joe Biden’s escalation of the current highly dangerous conflict, as he sends still more large shipments of weaponry to Ukraine with a new batch worth $200 million while deploying 8,500 U.S. troops to Eastern Europe.

Asked about the issue of prospective Ukraine membership in NATO sometime in the future, Rep. Ro Khanna treated the situation as a test of superpower wills or game of chicken, saying: “I would not be blackmailed by Putin in this situation.”

Overall, the American Prospect ferreted out routine refusal of progressive icons in Congress to impede the spiraling crisis:

** “The 41 co-sponsors of a sanctions package moving through the Senate include progressive heavyweights like Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Jeff Merkley of Oregon. In a press release on the bill, Markey said the legislation was designed to ‘work in concert with the actions the Biden administration has already taken to demonstrate that we will continue to support Ukraine and its sovereignty.’”

** “Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, put out a statement on Wednesday with Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA). ‘Russia’s strategy is to inflame tensions; the United States and NATO must not play into this strategy,’ the representatives said. The statement raises concerns over ‘sweeping and indiscriminate sanctions.’ But pressed on what, exactly, the United States should be prepared to offer in diplomatic talks, a spokesperson for Lee did not respond.”

** “Reached by the Prospect, spokespeople for leading progressives, including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), declined to comment on questions including whether the U.S. should commit not to bring Ukraine into NATO and whether it should provide direct military aid to Ukraine. Sanders declined to weigh in. In a statement, Warren said, ‘The United States must use appropriate economic, diplomatic, and political tools to de-escalate this situation.’”

** “Spokespeople for Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, who have previously criticized American interventionism in the Middle East, did not respond to questions from the Prospect, including ones on sanctions policy and NATO commitments.”

Progressives in Congress have yet to say that Biden should stop escalating the Ukraine conflict between the two nuclear superpowers. Instead, we hear easy pleas for diplomacy and, at best, mildly worded “significant concerns” about the president’s new batch of arms shipments and troop deployments to the region.

The evasive rhetoric amounts to pretending that the president isn’t doing what he’s actually doing as he ratchets up the tensions and the horrendous risks.

All this can be summed up in five words: Extremely. Irresponsible. And. Extremely. Dangerous.

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of a dozen books including Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State, published in a new edition as a free e-book in January 2022. His other books include War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

 

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In Raposos, a Brazilian city of 16,500 inhabitants, two-thirds of the homes were flooded by the rising waters of the Das Velhas River. The city grew on both banks of the river, between hills, which led to recurrent flooding. CREDIT: Das Velas River CBH

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 2 2022 (IPS)

People living in Jardim Pantanal, a low-income neighborhood on the east side of the Brazilian megalopolis of São Paulo, suffer floods every southern hemisphere summer. Many residents remember the three months their streets and homes were under water in late 2009 and early 2010.

The community is an extreme case of irregular occupation of land on a low bank of the Tietê River, which crosses the southern city. But it is a “structured neighborhood, with brick houses, some of which are two stories tall” to enable residents to avoid the water, said Igor Pantoja, mobilization advisor of Rede Nossa São Paulo, a social organization working for “a just and sustainable city”.

Flooding also occurs in other poor and not-so-poor neighborhoods in São Paulo and other Brazilian metropolises.

In January torrential rains hit the outskirts of Belo Horizonte, capital of the southern state of Minas Gerais, where multiple floods especially affected the cities in the upper reaches of the basin of the Das Velhas River, the source of the region’s water.

In one of the most affected cities, Raposos, two-thirds of the 16,500 inhabitants had to leave their homes when the river rose more than 2.5 meters in the second week of January. At least 12 people died as a result of the rains in outlying neighborhoods.

“When the cities expanded the rivers and streams were ignored, and were only used as a place to dump waste and sewage. Flood-prone areas were occupied, settled by the poor, pressured by economic necessity, and the rich, (fleeing the city) because of their fears,” said Ronald Guerra, a member of the Das Velhas River Basin Committee (CBH).

Guerra, a rural tourism entrepreneur in the town of São Bartolomeu, in the historic municipality of Ouro Preto, listed deforestation, unregulated urbanization and mining as the major factors in the degradation of the watershed and sedimentation of the rivers, which especially threaten the downstream population.

Mining tailings dams pose a particularly serious risk for the basin that supplies water to 60 percent of the six million inhabitants of neighborhoods on the outskirts of São Paulo.

Three years ago one of the dams burst in a neighboring municipality, Brumadinho, leaving 264 dead and six missing, as well as silting and poisoning another river, the Paraopebas.

“Floods and landslides are not the fault of the river itself. There was human action that resulted in the elimination of vegetation and the occupation of slopes,” Guerra told IPS by telephone from São Bartolomeu.

The streets were transformed into veritable rivers during days of heavy rains in the Brazilian city of Raposos, in the upper part of the Das Velhas River basin, 30 kilometers upstream from Belo Horizonte, capital of the state of Minas Gerais, with a population of 2.5 million. CREDIT: Das Velhas River CBH

Putting pressure on the government

“The State failed to play its role as regulator of land occupation, it let people occupy the banks of the rivers, without implementing a serious housing policy,” said Marcus Vinicius Polignano, secretary of the Das Velhas River CBH. “Today we have a chaotic situation that is entrenched. The great challenge is how to rebuild the cities.”

“We have to seek 21st century solutions that take the climate crisis into consideration, and we have to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past as we are doing,” he said in a telephone interview with IPS from Belo Horizonte.

The Das Velhas River CBH and other social movements successfully pushed for inclusion in the new Belo Horizonte Master Plan, in force since February 2020, of the directive that watercourses will no longer be channeled and that the valley bottoms will be cared for, to avoid new “scheduled floods,” the activist celebrated.

“Respecting natural infrastructure, seeking harmony with nature, allowing rivers to flow, not committing the stupidity of boxing them in could be a good route to take,” he said.

The Basin Committee mobilizes the local population, seeks to “change mentalities” and pressures decision-makers to adopt more adequate water policies. “We also propose better alternatives” to avoid new disasters, said Polignano, a physician with a master’s degree in epidemiology and a doctorate in social pediatrics.

It did not rain an exceptional amount in January, according to the expert, who said the problem was that the rainfall of an entire month fell in just 10 days. However, the damage caused by repeated urban floods can be mitigated by “open-minded” management, he argued.

In Belo Horizonte, capital of the southern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, home to 2.5 million people, torrential rains in January 2022 destroyed streets and flooded some neighborhoods, in a repeat of disasters that are becoming more frequent every year. CREDIT: Das Velhas River CBH

Rescuing nature

“Multifunctional nature-based solutions” are proposed by urban landscaper Cecilia Polacow Herzog, a graduate professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro.

Creating a “rain garden” with diversified plants in a limited area to retain and infiltrate water is one aspect of her proposal that has recently drawn attention.

However, “it’s not only that, but everything that absorbs rain and promotes biodiversity, without which there is no soil to infiltrate and replenish the water table,” Herzog said in an interview with IPS by telephone from Lisbon, where she is currently based.

“Renaturalize,” or bring nature back to the cities, is her slogan. Parks of all sizes, small or large gardens; we must “turn gray infrastructure into green,” she said.

This requires “a systemic view,” understanding the city as a large complex system in which things have multiple effects and functions.

Diversified tree planting, for example, “makes the soil more alive, sequesters carbon and reduces pollution and noise, improves habitat for other species, produces fruit, attracts bees that pollinate, birds and fish that eat the fruit, and with more fish aquatic life expands,” she explained.

“A park represents more water, less heat, more recreation and social cohesion, it encourages urban agriculture,” Herzog added.

But she does not ignore the hurdles: “real estate interests, politicians keen on getting votes, the automobile industry that wants asphalt and waterproofing, together with the oil industry.”

Cities are not prepared for torrential rains and will require time to adapt to the climate crisis, she said.

Building the city by destroying nature results in chaotic floods when it rains with any intensity, as happens almost every year in the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte, warned Marcus Vinicius Polignano, secretary of the Das Velhas River Basin Committee, which supplies water to most of the local inhabitants. CREDIT: Das Velhas River CBH

Millions at risk

Brazil had 8.26 million people at risk of landslides and floods in 825 municipalities, according to a study by the National Center for Natural Disaster Monitoring and Alerts (Cemaden), of the Ministry of Science and Technology, based on data from the 2010 census conducted by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics.

Cemaden was created in February 2011 after landslides caused by heavy rains in towns in the hills near Rio de Janeiro left 947 people dead and nearly 300 missing, according to the Center.

In fact, the data indicate that 4.3 percent of the Brazilian population at that time faced a threat of flooding. If this proportion remains steady, 9.2 million people out of a current population of 214 million are now at risk, although there may have been an increase, given that there are now more extreme events.

The two metropolitan regions whose undulating topography tends to increase the danger, those of São Paulo and Belo Horizonte, show a higher proportion of people at risk in the study: 7.3 percent and 16.4 percent, respectively.

The Territorial Risk Areas Base (Bater) methodology is “robust and makes it possible to update the data” when a new census is carried out in Brazil, which should occur in the second half of 2022, after it was postponed in 2020 and 2021, said Regina Alvalá, deputy director of Cemaden and coordinator of the study.

“Torrential rains do not have repercussions if they fall in uninhabited areas, but rather because of their social impact,” which is why the risks are growing, given global warming, more frequent extreme events and the concentration of the population in large cities, the cartographic engineer with a doctorate in meteorology told IPS by telephone from the southern city of São José dos Campos, where Cemaden is based.

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Restrictive immigration policies such as Title 42 have serious consequences on migrants. Credit: Esteban Montaño/MSF

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE, USA, Feb 1 2022 (IPS)

The specters of slave patrols and Ku Klux Klan night riders haunted the viral videos. They showed cowboy-hatted Border Patrol agents on horseback insulting and threatening Haitian families with children as they crossed the Rio Grande into Texas. The outrage reverberated around the world and inside the Beltway. But the story soon disappeared from the news cycle.

Immigrant justice groups at the border said it was the latest in a long parade of abuses inflicted by immigration enforcement. And they called for broad and deep changes.

The theatrical brutality against mainly Black immigrants, and the government’s contradictory responses to the large encampment where it took place, shone a harsh light on the exclusionary immigration policies of the Donald Trump administration, some of which have been continued by the Joe Biden administration.

The Del Rio episode laid bare internecine conflicts over how to roll back Trump’s restrictions and move towards Biden’s stated goal of a more “humane” immigration system.

The theatrical brutality against mainly Black immigrants, and the government’s contradictory responses to the large encampment where it took place, shone a harsh light on the exclusionary immigration policies of the Donald Trump administration, some of which have been continued by the Joe Biden administration

Ultimately, the encampment should be understood as a massive campaign of civil disobedience asserting the right to seek asylum. It ended with starkly contrasting outcomes. Many thousands of refugees were flown back to Haiti without a chance to make their case, but a number half again larger was taken into the United States immigration system and allowed to pursue asylum.

 

Border Patrol follies

The drama began in early September, when thousands of migrants began arriving at the Mexican border town of Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila. Fording the river’s shallows carrying children and possessions, they improvised a tent camp under the International Bridge in Del Rio, Texas.

Most sought to ask the United States for asylum, which U.S. and international law allow them to do anywhere on U.S. territory. The majority were Haitians and many others were Central or South Americans. Two-thirds traveled in family groups.

Few Haitians, however, came to the U.S. border directly from Haiti: most had left their home country years ago after a devastating 2010 earthquake and settled in South America, mainly in Chile and Brazil. The pandemic and the ensuing economic crash reportedly left many without jobs and visas there.

The incoming Biden administration flatly told migrants that the U.S. border would remain closed to them during the pandemic. Yet many displaced Haitians heard rumors to the contrary, and apparently decided the trip north was worth the risks and costs.

Previous efforts of large groups of immigrants to reach the U.S. border together often took the form of “caravans” on foot. By contrast, many of the Haitians traveled in smaller groups, coordinating by cell phone. Some reportedly took public transportation, while others boarded a large number of buses and other vehicles arranged by organizers and possibly smugglers. Some observers said they must have had the acquiescence of Mexican officials.

Del Rio hosts a small border crossing about halfway between more crowded ports of entry downriver in the lower Rio Grande valley and upriver around El Paso. These migrants may have chosen it because of reputedly smaller presences of organized crime on the Mexican side and of border-enforcement authorities on the U.S. side. By converging together on one crossing, they sought safety in numbers.

U.S. officials were caught off guard, and thousands of migrants were able to enter the U.S. to ask for asylum. They needed to buy food and necessities, but were blocked from going to stores in Del Rio. So they had to cross the river to Ciudad Acuña to buy supplies, and then cross back to bring them to the camp. Although the border was officially closed to most migrants, U.S. authorities initially accepted this informal arrangement.

The Border Patrol officers who assaulted the migrants September 19 were apparently breaking this tacit agreement. Their performative thuggishness seemed stage managed to incite Trump’s rabidly anti-immigrant base. But it served no enforcement purpose. The migrants were not trying to escape into the U.S. interior. They had strong incentives to wait there for a chance to ask for asylum.

President Biden and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas condemned the Border Patrol actions and vowed to quickly investigate the events and punish those responsible. The Department of Homeland Security opened an investigation that Mayorkas said would be concluded in “days, not weeks”. Nearly two months later, however, DHS issued a statement that the investigation was ongoing.

“These investigation and discipline systems at the border agencies are really broken and need a complete overhaul,” Clara Long of Human Rights Watch warned. Civil-society organizations say there has long been systemic anti-migrant prejudice undergirding a culture of impunity in CBP, making it very difficult to hold officers accountable for abuses.

“Suddenly the nation realized that we have a Border Patrol that beats up Black immigrants or people of color”, Fernando García of the Border Network for Human Rights told me. “We’ve been telling that story for years. … Yesterday, they were the Haitian refugees. But in the past, we talked about Guatemalan children dying in detention centers.” These and other abuses show that “the Border Patrol acts with impunity. … So we responded by denouncing the aggression, but also by calling for systemic change.”

 

Breaking camp

By the time of the Border Patrol aggression in mid-September, the encampment had grown to an estimated 15,000 people. Conditions there were called “deplorable” by United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi. Republican politicians loudly accused Biden of creating a crisis at the border.

Border authorities, some said, failed to heed reports of large groups of migrants heading north. “The arrival of vulnerable asylum-seekers is not a crisis,” Wade McMullen, an attorney at RFK Human Rights, told Michelle García of The Intercept. “The militarized response and lack of preparation — that’s the crisis.”

As the situation in Del Rio degraded, the Biden administration abruptly shifted into high gear. It deployed federal personnel from several agencies to process all the immigrants.

On September 24, DHS Secretary Mayorkas announced that the camp had been completely emptied. However, the conflicting methods employed revealed clashing policy approaches among Biden’s advisors.

The number of migrants summarily expelled to Haiti without a chance to ask for asylum rose from Mayorkas’s estimate of 2,000 to 8,700 by mid-November. A larger number – 13,000 was later reported – were allowed to request asylum in immigration courts. Of these, 10,000 were released to sponsors around the U.S., while 3,000 were held in immigration detention as their cases proceeded. Another 8,000 “voluntarily” returned to Mexico, Mayorkas said, and roughly 4,000 were still being processed by DHS.

The U.S., Mayorkas announced, had established a $5.5 million program to assist the repatriated Haitians, to be distributed through the United Nations. The cost of flying the migrants to Haiti, however, amounted to $15 million paid to a private prison company.

The mass expulsions to Haiti represented a dereliction of U.S. obligations under international and U.S. asylum law. Yet a number of migrants half again larger than those expelled was allowed to enter the immigration system and request asylum. The Biden administration said little about how it triaged people to their divergent fates.

 

Expulsions to Haiti

Dissension has reportedly surfaced within the administration between advisors favoring “aggressive enforcement” to deter immigrants, and others favoring more welcoming policies towards asylum seekers.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a close Biden ally, publicly broke with Biden’s policies. He called for an end to the expulsions back to Haiti, which he said “defy common sense”, and termination of Trump’s “hateful and xenophobic” policies. Asylum seekers, he said, should be offered due process at U.S. ports of entry.

Haiti, a small Caribbean nation, is in the throes of cascading disasters: an earthquake that killed more than 2,000, followed by a hurricane; the assassination of the president; and the dissolution of the legislature and much of the police force. Major swathes of the capital are controlled by gangs that rob and kidnap with impunity, bringing much of the already struggling economy to a halt. Haiti clearly has no capacity to receive returning emigrants.

Two veteran U.S. diplomats assigned to Haiti resigned in protest against what one called “inhumane, counterproductive decision” to expel thousands of Haitians back to a “collapsed state … unable to provide security or basic services”. The other warned that returning individuals to places where they “fear persecution, death, or torture” violates asylum law, and asserted: “Lawful, more humane alternatives plainly exist.”

International human rights authorities condemned both the summary methods used to expel the migrants and their forced return to Haiti.

Four human rights organizations of the U.N. issued a joint statement calling on governments “to refrain from expelling Haitians without proper assessment of their individual protection needs”, to uphold their human rights in mobility, and to offer better access to “regular migration pathways.”

“International law prohibits collective expulsions and requires that each case be examined individually”, they explained. “Discriminatory public discourse portraying human mobility as a problem risks contributing to racism and xenophobia and should be avoided and condemned.”

 

Public-health measure or asylum ban?

The mass expulsions began in March 2020, when the Trump administration invoked an obscure federal law to rapidly expel nearly all migrants at the border without any chance to request asylum. U.S. Code Title 42 enables the government to suspend normal immigration procedures in a public-health emergency. U.S. Code Title 8 codifies pre-pandemic due process allowing immigrants to petition for asylum and other relief before immigration officials.

Trump used Title 42 to expedite removal of migrants of all ages. The incoming Biden administration decided not to expel unaccompanied children, and one Mexican state has refused to accept families with small children. Yet Biden has continued Title 42 expulsions of most families and adults in the face of a crescendo of criticism. A court blocked use of Title 42, but the ruling was stayed on appeal. Meanwhile, some migrant families have sent their youngsters to request asylum alone, getting them out of the dangerous borderlands, but separating yet more families.

Numerous authorities have discredited the law’s public-health rationale, highlighted the damage it has done, and advocated for its termination.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s top medical advisor, told CNN: “Let’s face reality here. The problem is within our own country. Focusing on immigrants, expelling them … is not the solution to an outbreak.” Were immigrants were a major reason why COVID-19 was spreading here? “Absolutely not.”

A letter to the Biden administration from leading scientists condemned Title 42 as “scientifically baseless and politically motivated” and urged the administration to rescind the order. Signatories recommended implementing public-health measures that “process asylum seekers at the border and parole them to live in safety in their communities.” In a commentary, two public-health experts wrote that forcing migrants back to Mexico put them again “at the mercy of the violent Mexican cartels they were so desperate to escape.”

Internationally, a United Nations Refugee Agency official asserted that “protecting public health and protecting access to asylum … are fully compatible.” During the emergency, many countries deployed “health screening, testing and quarantine measures, to simultaneously protect both public health and the right to seek asylum.”

Filippo Grandi, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, criticized the expulsions of hundreds of thousands of people without screening, and called for the government “immediately and fully to lift its Title 42 restrictions.” Denying access to asylum procedures, he said, “may constitute refoulement” (forced return to the location of previous persecution). “Guaranteed access to safe territory and the prohibition of pushbacks of asylum-seekers are core precepts of the 1951 Refugee Convention and refugee law,” he explained.

Before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, advocates submitted an emergency request for protection of 31 asylum seekers excluded from the U.S. under Title 42. The commission adopted a resolution providing guidance for governments “to protect the rights of Haitians” who are migrants or otherwise displaced.

While the Biden administration has ended many of Trump’s injustices, it has persisted in defending some of his most widely condemned measures, including Title 42. “It’s like [former Trump adviser] Stephen Miller’s ghost is still pulling the strings of Biden’s immigration policies”, commented Nicole Phillips of the Haitian Bridge Alliance. The administration “needs to do more to root out Stephen Miller’s ghost.”

 

A door opened for some

As it summarily expelled some of the Del Rio migrants, the U.S. also accepted many more to pursue asylum in the pre-pandemic Title 8 system.

DHS Secretary Mayorkas said that 13,000 of the migrants would be allowed to “have their asylum claims heard by an immigration judge in the United States”, nearly 50 percent more than the 8,700 sent back to Haiti. Of those accepted, 10,000 were released into the U.S. to family or sponsors, while the other 3,000 were detained by ICE while their cases proceed. “The numbers placed in immigration court proceedings are a function of operational capacity and also what we consider to be appropriate,” was Mayorkas’s non-committal explanation.

The 10,000 immigrants released from Del Rio were sent initially to a network of non-governmental shelters, where they could arrange transportation to locations around the country.

The arrival of the refugees at Annunciation House in El Paso elicited an outpouring of solidarity from the local community, Hannah Hollandbyrd of Hope Border Institute told me. Volunteers took people to the airport, and tested them for COVID-19. According to shelter director Ruben Garcia, nearly all of the 2,000 refugees released there were able to move on to their final destinations after spending only a few days there.

The proportion of migrants at Del Rio released to pursue asylum followed the trend for all border encounters during the past year.

With little publicity, Biden’s immigration enforcement began to gradually reduce its reliance on Title 42. Border Patrol enforcement actions under the measure were 88.3 percent of encounters during October-December 2020, Trump’s last full quarter, denying any possibility of asylum in nearly all cases. They dropped sharply to 49.4 percent during July-September 2021 under Biden, so that half of the cases were handled under Title 8’s due process allowing for asylum claims.

 

“Voluntary” returnees to Mexico

Of the migrants in the Del Rio camp, Mayorkas said that some 8,000 returned to Mexico “voluntarily”, a number nearly equal to those flown back to Haiti. Many of these migrants will likely try again to enter or re-enter the U.S. at some point

Most of these migrants have relocated downriver to Mexican border cities in the lower Rio Grande valley, according to Camilo Cruz of the International Organization for Migration. Many Haitians, he said, have been applying to Mexico to regularize their migration status there. Mexican government data showed that more than 26,000 Haitians asked for asylum in Mexico in the first three quarters of 2021, up from under 6,000 in both 2019 and 2020.

In an interview in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, over 400 miles upriver from Del Rio, Cruz told me that few Haitians had appeared there, but that the shelters were still beyond capacity with other migrants excluded from the U.S.

In Haiti, where the IOM gives returning Haitians financial aid after their arrival, IOM Chief of Mission Giuseppe Loprete told EFE that thousands of migrants are leaving because of the earthquake and other crises. But he noted that many who had been living in Chile or Brazil are going directly to those embassies in Haiti and asking for permission to return there.

According to an IOM report, from January through October 2021 an estimated 100,000 migrants, 62 percent of them originally from Haiti, crossed the Darien Gap between South and Central America.

However, despite some reports that more large groups of Haitian migrants might be heading north, CBP reported that border encounters with Haitians fell by 93 percent from September to October, and remained very low in November.

 

Welcoming the stranger

Despite the white sado-nationalism that surfaced at Del Rio, the outcome could be seen by future migrants as a partially successful campaign of non-violent civil disobedience to thwart unjust laws, such as Title 42, and brutal enforcement.

The migrants in the camp were able to request asylum relatively more frequently than asylum seekers nationally during the same period. About 60 percent of those processed by the U.S. were accepted into the asylum process under Title 8, while 40 percent were expelled to Haiti under Title 42. For all immigrants reaching the border in September, the ratio was roughly 47 percent accepted versus 53 percent expelled.

These ambiguous outcomes aside, the Biden administration’s removal of Haitian migrants to Haiti remained a gratuitously cruel operation that threw the victims into a life-threatening situation. Title 42 should have been terminated at the beginning of Biden’s term, and none of the Haitians should have been expelled to Haiti.

The global backlash against the expulsions has been politically costly. Yet ironically, the Del Rio incident did foster a consensus across a surprisingly wide political spectrum on ways to avoid future recurrences of those kinds of injustices.

The mayor of Del Rio, Bruno Lozano, and the Val Verde County executive, Lewis Owens, had criticized the Biden administration’s handling of the border. Yet both agreed that the process has to be reformed to allow migrants to ask for asylum at ports of entry.

Hollandbyrd of Hope Border Institute also emphasized the urgent need to open ports of entry to asylum seekers and end Title 42. Longer-term solutions, she said, will require restoring and expanding the asylum system, diversifying other legal pathways for immigration, and addressing the root causes of migration.

U.S. Representative Veronica Escobar, Democrat from El Paso, has introduced a bill into Congress that would establish “a humane and equitable asylum process designed for America’s immigration realities in the 21st century.”

U.N. High Commissioner Grandi voiced an international consensus: “I encourage the US administration to continue its work to strengthen its asylum system and diversify safe pathways so asylum-seekers are not forced to resort to dangerous crossings facilitated by smugglers.”

On issues of border-enforcement reform, the Border Network for Human Rights has been meeting with the local Border Patrol for many years, Executive Director García said, and has negotiated accountability mechanisms with them including standards for use of force and training in de-escalation techniques.

BNHR is part of a coalition, the New Ellis Island Border Policy Working Group, which is partnering with congressional representatives to codify transparency and accountability of border security operations in legislation.

In its foreign policy, the Biden administration has emphasized the need for a “rules-based” international order. Among the most fundamental international rules are human rights, and of these, asylum and refuge are existential. Yet human rights defenders from the United Nations to local NGOs are spotlighting grave U.S. failures to protect human beings in motion. A truly “rules-based” immigration policy would uphold these rules and welcome the stranger.

* * *

Peter Costantini is an independent analyst based in Seattle. For nearly four decades he has written about migration and Latin America, and has volunteered with immigrant justice groups.

The full referenced analysis on which this piece is based can be downloaded as a PDF file from:
https://tinyurl.com/costantini-delrio

 

Zimbabwe’s smallholder farmers are reliant on rain, which impacts the country’s food security efforts. Credit: Ignatius Banda/IPS

By Ignatius Banda
Bulawayo, ZIMBABWE , Feb 1 2022 (IPS)

On January 10, the Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP) arrested three men found with fertilizer worth about 130,000 US dollars.

The “loot” was identified as part of inputs provided by the government to smallholder farmers in the country’s efforts to boost food security.

The case was one of many that exposed the dilemma of the country’s food security efforts. The multi-million dollar government-financed scheme that provides seeds and fertilizer to smallholder farmers has fallen short in aiding food production.

The abuse of farming inputs has been a thorn on the government’s side, with officials seeing it as deliberate sabotage of the country’s ambitions to feed itself. At the same time, analysts contend that such government schemes are open to abuse by well-connected individuals.

In recent years, Zimbabwe has redoubled its efforts to boost the production of the staple maize, with the government last year aiming to provide 1,8 million rural households with maize seed and fertilizer.

The bulk of the southern African country’s maize production – up to 70 percent – comes from rural smallholder farmers, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), but it is also here where widespread poverty is rife, with the World Bank noting that almost 8 million people in Zimbabwe earn under USD1 per day.

Such conditions, analysts note, have led to the diversion of farming inputs for reselling, effectively slowing the country’s efforts to feed itself.

During the 2020-21 season, Zimbabwe produced 2.7 million tonnes of maize, triple the previous year thanks to above-normal rains, yet concerns remain about maintaining production levels.

“As the painful experience of the past 20 years since the land reform has shown so clearly, such gains are not necessarily sustained,” said Ian Scoones, an academic and researcher at the University of Sussex’s Institute of Development Studies. He has written widely about agriculture in Zimbabwe.

This 2021-22 season, climate uncertainty has seen many farmers delaying planting as they keep waiting for the rain. The agriculture ministry reported early January that the country had missed its target of 2 million hectares of maize.

According to the ministry, only about 1 million hectares had been planted at the beginning of the year. Under the Agriculture and Food System Transformation Strategy, Zimbabwe targets 8 billion US dollars for agriculture production by 2025.

Grain production has fluctuated in the past two decades. For example, during the 2001 cropping season, about 1.5 million hectares were planted, which represented a 15 percent drop from the previous season according to FAO figures.

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) noted that Zimbabwe’s 2021-22 maize harvest, which stood at 2.7 million tonnes, was the highest since the 1984-5 season.

These fluctuations highlight the country’s struggle to feed itself.

The USDA says the bumper harvest was due to “favourable weather conditions,” exposing the limits of government maize and seed subsidies in the largely rain-fed sector.

Analysts say it will take more for the country to realize its goals beyond providing inputs to farmers amid other challenges such as climate uncertainty.

“Government will need to provide incentives, such as food crop production quotas, to large scale farmers who tend to specialize on non-food cash crops, which worsens the food security situation,” said Stanley Mbuka, an analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).

“An unstable currency also makes it hard for smallholder farmers to cushion themselves as they sell to the grain marketing board in the local currency, which loses value very quickly,” Mbuka told IPS.

Researchers have also noted that other innovations to encourage farmers to adopt new methods to boost food production, despite showing promise, have been abandoned for, among other reasons, being too labour intensive.

Much of rural agriculture in Zimbabwe is not mechanized and relies on rainwater.

Added to this is a combination of longer-term underlying factors, including macroeconomic challenges, increased occurrence of climatic shocks, COVID-19 pandemic, and the cumulative effects of two consecutive years of drought, says the World Food Programme (WFP).

“To break the cycle of relapses into food crises, stakeholders are increasingly aware that more investments are needed in resilience-building and early warning,” said Maria Gallar, WFP-Zimbabwe spokesperson.

“The chances that smallholder farmers fall into food insecurity repeatedly decrease if they have access to productive assets such as dams,” Gallar told IPS by email.

Despite last year’s above-average maize harvest, the WFP says the latest figures show that more than 5 million people are estimated to be food insecure. This includes 42 percent of the urban population – about 2.4 million people – where the government has promoted urban farming.

“Sustainable change, after so many years of setbacks, will require continued efforts and time,” Gallar said.

 

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Protesters attend a march against the military coup in Myanmar. Credit: Unsplash/Pyae Sone Htun via UN News

By Shawn W. Crispin
BANGKOK, Thailand, Feb 1 2022 (IPS)

One year since a democracy-suspending coup, press freedom is dying in Myanmar. A military campaign of intimidation, censorship, arrests, and detentions of journalists has more recently graduated to outright killing, an escalation of repression that aims ultimately to stop independent media reporting on the junta’s crimes and abuses.

In January, military authorities abducted local news reporter Pu Tuidim shortly after he interviewed members of the anti-coup Chinland Defense Force armed group in the restive Chin State. Soldiers confiscated his laptop computer, used him as a captive human shield in a live-fire combat zone, and then summarily executed him, dumping his bound corpse in the muddy outskirts of a local village, his editor at the Khonumthung Media Group told CPJ.

Pu Tuidim’s murder followed the killing of two other Myanmar journalists in December, including one independent photographer who was picked up for photographing an anti-coup silent protest in the commercial capital of Yangon, held at a military interrogation center, and then pronounced by a military hospital as dead without explanation to his family.

A third reporter, Sai Win Aung, was killed on Christmas Day in a military artillery attack in Kayin State while reporting on the plight of internally displaced people in border areas that have become full-blown war zones since the coup. His editor told CPJ it is unclear if he was targeted in the shelling attack, but the reporter had weeks earlier fled Yangon for the insurgent-controlled frontier region after coming under military surveillance for his news reporting.

Myanmar’s generals, already the target of Western sanctions for their rights abuses, have a cynical incentive to suppress reporting that exposes their daily assault on Myanmar’s people. The Assistance Association of Political Prisoners, an independent rights monitoring group based in Thailand, reported on January 28 that the junta has killed 1,499 and detained 8,798 since last year’s February 1 coup.

Those imprisoned include dozens of journalists, CPJ research shows, making Myanmar the world’s second-worst jailer of journalists in 2021, trailing only China, after having none in jail in 2020. The majority are being held on bogus charges under the penal code’s vague and broad Article 505(a), which effectively criminalizes critical news reporting as causing instability or purveying misinformation. Most were detained after reporting on anti-military street protests.

The generals are reaching next for an online kill switch. New proposed cybersecurity legislation aims to make virtual private networks (VPNs) illegal, a bid to stop Myanmar citizens from accessing banned websites and social media including Facebook, which many news organizations, including small local language outfits in ethnic areas, use as their sole platform for posting news. The legislation also gives junta authorities arbitrary powers to access user data, ban content, and imprison regime critics.

If passed, a near certainty without an elected legislature in place, the law will give the junta the legal tool it needs to roll back the press freedom gains achieved between 2012 and the coup, a period where hundreds of independent media outlets bloomed from the darkness of an earlier era of military dictatorship, when all broadcast media was soldier-controlled and all newspapers were forced to publish as weeklies to give censors time to cut their content.

Nothing more belies the junta’s claim that it is only holding power for an interregnum period to prepare for a return to democratic elections, originally in 2022, now supposedly in 2023, than its ongoing and intensifying assault on the free press – a crucial pillar in any functioning democracy that holds its leaders to account.

The effect of the military’s repression is seen clearly in the rising tide of journalists who are fleeing for their lives to face uncertain futures across the country’s borders with India and Thailand, in the growing number of once-vibrant news publications that have gone dark through shuttered bureaus, halted printing presses, and abandoned web sites and Facebook-hosted news pages.

That’s, of course, not to say the flame of press freedom has been completely extinguished in today’s benighted, military-run Myanmar. Tech-savvy reporters have launched upstart news publications that continue to defy bans, threats, and even the murder of their reporters to publish the news and keep the world informed of abuses and atrocities that may be driving their nation towards full-scale civil war.

Myanmar’s journalists and independent news outlets have a long and storied history of evading military censorship to get out the news. The next chapter in the history is now being written as a new generation of undercover journalists risk their lives for exile-run and other unauthorized publications to report the news the junta is desperately trying to suppress. And therein lies the hope for a one-day revitalized democratic Myanmar.

Shawn W. Crispin, is Senior Southeast Asia Representative at Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). He is based in Bangkok, Thailand, where he has worked as a journalist and editor for more than two decades. He has led CPJ missions throughout the region and is the author of several CPJ special reports.

 

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