Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

By SWAN
QUITO / PARIS, Nov 16 2020 (IPS)

Ecuador’s entry for the 2021 Academy Awards’ International Feature section is a surprising movie, highlighting a story that up to now has been little-known. Titled Vacío / Emptiness and directed by self-taught filmmaker Paúl Venegas, the work focuses on how increasing numbers of Chinese migrants have ended up in Latin America over the past 15 years, and it features a cast of mainly non-professional actors – speaking Mandarin, Spanish, English and some Cantonese.

Even viewers familiar with stories of migration will find this an unexpected look at the issue, after decades of news articles about Europe and the United States. The migrants here are Chinese individuals arriving clandestinely in Ecuador and other Latin American countries, trying to make a living while dreaming of going elsewhere, and speaking not a word of the local language.

Paúl Venegas

This is Venegas’ first feature (after producing several documentaries since 2003), and he clearly draws on his own Ecuadorian background as well as his time living in Asia, where he worked in finance in the Philippines and China. Viewers get a sense of both worlds, the one the characters have fled for various personal reasons, and the new one that is merely a way station for some but still filled with peril for the “paper-less”, the undocumented.

The film follows Lei (Fu Jing) and Wong (Lidan Zhu) who arrive clandestinely in Ecuador after having met on a packed boat heading to what they think will be a land of opportunity. Lei’s objective is to get to New York, while Wong’s aim is to make enough money working so that he can bring his 12-year-old son from China to South America.

Before long, we see them falling into the hands of a seemingly charming but sinister individual, the bipolar gangster Chang (Meng Day Min), who has his own devious agenda, especially as regards Lei. They will have to figure out a way to escape, helped by friends including a fun-loving, good-hearted young Ecuadorian (played by Ricardo Velastegui) and an older immigrant (Yin Baode), who himself yearns to return to his homeland. Yet, even if escaping should prove successful, perhaps this won’t change their fate of forever having to live in the shadows.

Vacío could have been an unbearably bleak movie if Vinegas hadn’t pulled back from leaving the main characters in despair. With his cast, we get a depiction of the many hazards of migration, but also a message of optimism. Lei’s dream could take a long time to be realized; still, she may eventually get to New York and follow the career path she has set herself.

In a videocall, Vinegas told SWAN how and why he made Vacío (which had its première at South Korea’s 2020 Busan International Film Festival in October and has already won awards in Latin America). The edited interview follows.

SWAN: Migration is a universal topic, but your story is special because not many know of this particular movement of people. Can you tell us about the background?

Paúl Venegas: Well, Chinese communities have been migrating all over the world since more than 150 years. In Ecuador and Latin America in general, they started arriving about 120 years ago. Lima (Peru) has a huge Chinatown. They were brought as coolies to work on the Panama Canal too. And then there have been waves of immigration to countries in southeast Asia, for instance. I remember in Cambodia, literally in the middle of the jungle, I found a Chinese community that had been there for over a hundred years. They were farmers. They were just hidden somehow.

So, there’s been this spirit of always leaving … something that has permeated the culture.

Regarding the script, my co-writer (Carlos Terán Vargas) studied filmmaking in Cuba around 2005, and he began to write a script about Chinatown in Havana, because in the late 1800s, there were Chinese helping to fight the war of independence of Cuba. So there’s this long history, and when we met in 2008, I was already going back and forth to Buenos Aires, Argentina, for my work, and whenever I went to a corner shop, it was run by an Argentinian. But as the years went by – and starting around 2012, 2013 – all of a sudden around 99 percent of all these mid-size supermarkets, across all neighbourhoods, became run by Chinese, to the point that nowadays you don’t say I’m going to the supermarket. The expression translated from Spanish in Buenos Aires is: I’m going to the Chinese. It’s amazing.

So, I started observing this phenomenon, and seeing the same thing happening in São Paulo, also in Madrid, in Milan, in Valencia. I took inspiration from what’s happening all over the world, and the script developed and changed.

SWAN: And in Ecuador, specifically?

PV: Here particularly, in 2008, the government opened up the borders completely. You didn’t need a visa, and a lot of nationalities came in, using this as a transit point for the traditional migration to the United States. A lot of Asians came, and also people from Ghana, Cameroon, Nigeria, and from the Middle East as well. They’ve come in large numbers to Ecuador. They stay a few weeks, and then they go to the United States by land or other ways. But a lot of them will also stay and go to southern cities like São Paulo or Buenos Aires.

In 2008 to 2009, around 30,000 Chinese nationals came to Guayaquil (the second biggest city in Ecuador) especially, and it’s said that around 20,000 of them stayed, and they began to enlarge the already existing Chinatown – which had been there for generations but without the name. Last year it was recognized that there is a Chinatown, but even today, when you speak to people from the city about this, they say: What? Where’s the Chinatown? What I mean to say is that Chinese migration is very low-profile. It’s not marginalisation. They arrive under different conditions (from other migrants), and they arrive to already existing economic networks. So, it’s very silent, but it’s very permanent.

That is the interesting fact, I think, about the film – that people don’t realize … because they’re more aware of the terrible conditions of other migrations, with all the tragic things that we know. Still there are a few Chinese nationals now being caught at the border between Mexico and the United States, but not in the numbers compared to Latin Americans.

SWAN: How did you find the members of the cast?

PV: The casting process was one of the most interesting experiences I’ve had with this film. I’ve worked with natural actors before on projects with other directors, and it was always a good result. But it wasn’t my original idea for this film. I started out aiming to co-produce with China, so I went through the process of the Beijing International Film Festival Pitch Forum. I applied there in 2014 and the film won “best project”.

After this, many producers came on … so I started doing casting with professional actors, but they just demanded so much money – half a million dollars! After ten times of going back and forth to China, I gave up. It became so difficult. I said to myself, I’m gonna go for natural actors and do a casting in the Chinese community in Guayaquil. The first thing that we did is that I got in touch with the Chinese immigrant associations in Guayaquil. This was around Chinese New Year in 2017, and they invited me to take part in their celebrations, at big banquets in restaurants. There we were presented in society and we went up to the podium and talked about the film.

So, the word got out and the Chinatown doors opened to me. They used social media to announce the castings … and we did six months of castings and eventually we found the right people. They all have very interesting stories. I interviewed them extensively, and this gave me a deep insight into what human beings they were and what happened to them when they migrated to Ecuador or somewhere else. We rehearsed a lot, every day, and we watched a lot of Wong Kar-wai films – I do take a lot of influence from him, I like his cinema a lot.

The cast gave me feedback about things, too, about how to say certain things. So, we adapted the script, and I adapted the story to their personalities. (The natural actors include a teacher of Mandarin and a miner.)

SWAN: Coming back to the story, the ending is not as sad as one might expect. It could have ended in a much worse way, particularly where the women characters are concerned. You seem to have pulled back from that. Why?

PV: Well, the female character that I try to portray is, to me, this liberated, empowered woman of the new China that is basically somehow escaping chauvinism. It’s clear that she does what she wants, and she manipulates males, in a good way as I see it, to get what she wants. I wished to portray this character as someone that keeps going, even when she has all these things that could stop her. To me, the transition at the end is a metaphor, it’s not complete disappointment, but she is empty inside.

SWAN: It’s probably a good choice because we know of the other story, other endings.

PV: Yes, I didn’t want to fall into the typical abuse story. Actually, there are other films that have done that, by a director in France, for example, where the Chinese migrant character ends up in a prostitution ring. I know this happens, but I don’t see migration like that. It was not my point for the story I wanted to tell. I’ve migrated a lot during my life and I’ve gone through a lot of the emotions, and I’ve seen people go through the emotions. So, that’s what I aimed to do with the film. The criminal aspect is there but that’s not the main point.

SWAN: What do you want the audience to take from your film?

PV: To reflect on the harshness of migration, on these journeys that we go through, the emotions that we go through. I like to say that migration is like jumping into emptiness: you really don’t know what’s going to happen, so you take a jump into a hole, basically. And perhaps what I want to say to people is that: before you take that jump, to think about it, about whether you’re going to be better off in your home country with your own people.

I also think audiences will see that you don’t just migrate for economic reasons, you migrate for existential reasons too. And it’s hard, no matter where you go.

SWAN: And the Academy Awards? How do you feel about the film being selected as Ecuador’s entry?

PV: Of course, I’m very happy about that. It raises the value of the film for distribution and gives more awareness to my film career and to filmmaking in Ecuador. Hollywood is not my thing, and the film is a small film and probably has little chance of making the shortlist. But it gives the story a higher profile. And I’m already in the game, so I have to play the game.

Vacío / Emptiness is an Ecuador-Uruguay coproduction.

This article is published in association with Southern World Arts News (SWAN).

 

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US President Donald Trump addressing the UN General Assembly. Credit: United Nations

By Ameen Izzadeen
COLOMBO, Nov 13 2020 (IPS)

What has happened to the Republican Party? Picking Donald Trump in 2016 as the Republican candidate, giving him victory in primary after primary and later tolerating his idiosyncrasies and unpredictably dangerous behaviour and policy decisions were bad enough however much one tries to digest them as vagaries of the democratic tradition.

But some Republican leaders going to the extent of endorsing Trump’s refusal to concede defeat is shocking if not outright sycophancy and the ultimate insult to the Grand Old Party. Among the praiseworthy exceptions are former President George W. Bush and Senator and former presidential candidate Mitt Romney who had called President-elect Joe Biden to congratulate him and urged President Trump to concede defeat.

Past Republican presidents, if they are alive, will be banging their heads on democracy’s wall in disbelief and, if dead, will be turning in their graves if they hear that Senate Republican leader Mitchel McConnell and some other Republican seniors, tacitly or otherwise, back Trump’s claim without evidence that the November 3 election was a fraud.

Joining this cabal was Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who told journalists there would be a smooth transition to Trump’s second administration. Trump-appointed Attorney General William Barr, meanwhile, ordered the Justice Department’s election crime unit to initiate a probe on Trump’s election fraud claims, prompting the head of the unit to resign in disgust.

According to a poll conducted by Reuters and Ipsos on November 5, as much as 30 percent of the Republicans believed Trump’s claim that he had won the election – an indication of the extent to which Trumpism had penetrated the Republican grassroots.

The party today stands stripped of its hallowed ideology that was the standard bearer during the civil war under the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, a martyr hero who laid his life for abolishing slavery and upholding democracy as highlighted in his immortal Gettysburg speech.

Trump has hijacked the Republican Party and made it a party of and for stooges and illiberal and irrational extremists, conservatives and racists.

Ahead of the 2016 presidential election, some concerned Republicans did foresee the danger to the party and the country if Trump was to be elected as the president of the United States. The then House Speaker Paul Ryan, a loyal Republican and vice presidential candidate in 2012, worked out a framework to protect the party from any harm that an opportunist and wild card entrant like Trump could cause. At a party seniors’ meeting, Ryan presented a set of proposals, describing it as “This is Trump inoculation Plan.”

In the type of politics Trump dabbles in, principles have little place. As president, he became unruly, dismissing democratic traditions and not doing what rightminded people thought was right. As a result, the Republican Party lost its identity and soul. Republican politicians one by one started defecting to Trump’s camp.

All 51 Republican senators sided with Trump to defeat the impeachment resolution passed by majority vote in the House of Representative although there was evidence to back the impeachment charges that he obstructed justice, violated emolument clauses and undermined the independence of the judiciary.

If only two Senators had desisted from voting, the Trump era could have ended in December last year, but the Republican politicians propped him up, though he was the biggest presidential misfit in US history.

That Trump officials kept resigning in frustration or got fired for not carrying out his irrational bidding only confirms the chaos associated with the billionaire businessman turned president. One White House inside source described the chaos as a 12-year-old in an air traffic control tower of a busy airport.

The Republican Party is known with its honorific Grand Old Party (GOP) in recognition of its historic achievements such as abolishing slavery and saving the Union. The party was founded on classical liberalism which believes in freedom, liberty, and equality. Free trade and free market activism, as had been advocated by Reagan-ism, were part of the party policy.

Though the country is politically divided along the lines of Republican and Democratic party affiliations, until Trump came to the scene the two parties had been united by a common belief that republicanism is democratic while democracy is rooted in republicanism. The two parties had their roots in one single Democratic-Republican Party that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison founded in 1792.

Republicanism has its origin in the ancient Greco-Roman democratic tradition. The word Republic is derived from the Latin word Res Public – meaning the thing of the people. Rome was once a republic and had been so since the 5th century BC for more than 500 years.

The excuses trotted out by those involved in the Julius Caesar assassination plot were that he had destroyed the constitutional republic and had established himself as Rome’s first dictator for life.

In ancient Greece, Plato insisted that the republic’s ruler should become a philosopher, or a philosopher should become a ruler to promote the people’s welfare through knowledge. But Trump spurns science and knowledge-based governance and is widely known to be a demagogue acting on impulse, as has been seen in his costly mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

While not respecting the will of the people and not cooperating with President-elect Biden’s team to facilitate a smooth transition, the Republican renegade is throwing multiple legal challenges to his rival’s victory.

Meanwhile, his hardline supporters, his Proud Boys, to whom he told stand down and stand by during an election debate, are flocking to Washington DC to stage tomorrow a show of force dubbed the million MAGA march. It could even be a mini coup d’état if the President’s actions of firing Defence Secretary Mark Esper and appointing loyalists to key positions in the National Security Agency and the Pentagon were an indication. Similar shake-ups are also expected in the CIA and the FBI.

The March for Trump and the President’s intransigence raise fears of further chaos or even a civil war, similar to what is often seen in weak democracies where rulers care little or no two hoots about democratic governance. The manner in which Trump behaves makes him in league with dictators in ‘shithole’ countries, to use his own words.

As the US is being plunged into uncertainty and its democracy’s darkest days, perhaps the hope for the Americans is in the unlikely possibility that his stubborn behaviour is only a face-saving exercise or a narrative to claim he won the election but was deprived of his second term by the establishment or what he and his supporters derisively refer to as the deep state.

It is high time the Republican Party found its sole to once again practise principled politics and save itself from the ignominy of being lumped together with rightwing political parties which have destroyed the democratic fabric of the countries where they operate.

 

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Excerpt:

Ameen Izzadeen is international editor of the Sunday Times, Sri Lanka. He writes a regular column for its sister paper Daily Mirror on global justice and good governance. He is also a visiting lecturer in journalism and international relations. He could be contacted at ameenizzadeen@gmail.com

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With upwards of 200 separate pieces of labour legislation, there is no strict definition in India of ‘labour laws’ to draw any boundaries. | Picture courtesy: Nayantara Parikh

By External Source
DELHI, India, Nov 13 2020 (IPS)

Back in May 2019, we were visiting a large garment factory in Arsikere, Karnataka, when we asked some of the workers, “What would you do if you got Saturdays off?” Their responses to this simple question summed up their priorities. A majority said they would spend time with family or friends and take care of their children. Many said they would use this time to relax or do household chores. Only a few said they’d look for additional pay.

Since garment factories in India are characterised by a predominantly female labour force, it seems almost obvious that a shorter workweek would not only give existing female workers a better work-life balance, but also incentivise prospective women to join the workforce—many of whom are bound by other time constraints.

Since garment factories in India are characterised by a predominantly female labour force, it seems almost obvious that a shorter workweek would not only give existing female workers a better work-life balance, but also incentivise prospective women to join the workforce—many of whom are bound by other time constraints

But the broader question that still remains is: How would giving workers time off affect the productivity and profits of the business? Will the anticipated effect be positive and sizeable, enough to incentivise a policy change in favour of lowering daily or weekly working hours? Answering these questions requires us to examine the link between working hours and productivity. This is particularly relevant in the context of the amendments made to India’s labour laws in the wake of COVID-19.

 

What do India’s labour laws say about working hours?

Globally, labour laws have been put in place with the purpose of protecting employees’ rights and setting forth employers’ duties, and Indian labour laws are no different. The Indian Constitution guarantees every citizen the right to work, secured to the best abilities of the state. However, with upwards of 200 separate pieces of labour legislation in the country, there is no strict definition of ‘labour laws’ to draw any boundaries. The current laws not only regulate the conditions of work of industrial establishments, but also industrial relations, payment of wages, and registration of trade unions, among other subjects.

Without a set definition to serve as a compass, the scope for what can be regulated is wide, and can thus fall at the discretion of the regulators. One area where this has played out is in the context of The Factories Act, 1948 (amended in 1987)—an iconic act relating to minimum conditions of employment, which lays down all the provisions concerning occupational safety and health in factories, including working hours. Section 51 and 59 of the Act state, “No employee is supposed to work for more than 48 hours in a week and nine hours in a day. Any employee who works for more than this period is eligible for overtime remuneration.”

However, the same act also allows state governments to exempt factories from these provisions relating to work hours for three months if factories are dealing with an exceptional amount of work.

Where freedom is allowed, freedom is usually taken.

In light of COVID-19, some states have increased both the daily and weekly work hours with the purported aim of reviving the economy, boosting productivity, and ensuring more workers get jobs.

• Assam, Goa, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Punjab, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh governments issued notifications to increase the maximum daily work hours for workers in their states to 12 hours. Karnataka and Uttarakhand increased maximum daily work hours to 10 and 11 hours, respectively.
• Karnataka, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh subsequently withdrew their notifications for various reasons, including change in the economic conditions from earlier this year and legal challenges via public interest litigation.
• More recently, the Karnataka government passed an ordinance which increases overtime hours in a quarter from 75 to 125.

These amendments violate the Hours of Work (Industry) Convention, 1919 adopted by the International Labour Organisation—to which India is a signatory. Further, they also put at risk the fine balance between productivity and labour rights. But is increasing working hours the only way to increase productivity?

 

An alternative to boost productivity

In 1914, Henry Ford took the ‘radical’ decision to cut daily work hours from nine to eight and double pay for workers to USD 5 a day. Though this move was initially unpopular among most rivals, many followed suit, seeing the overall profitability of Ford’s operations.

Over the last few years, many of us working in urban, ‘white-collar’ jobs have a seen a clarion call for shorter workweeks as well. In 1930, the British economist, John Maynard Keynes, famously predicted that by 2030, workers will be able to enjoy more leisure due to technological advancements. More recently, Microsoft’s Japan office witnessed a 40 percent increase in productivity as a result of putting in place a four-day workweek. One study suggests that productivity may be a decreasing function of time. Even critics of shorter workweeks, at best, call for work hours to remain the same.

In contrast, factory workers in India are at risk of going back to more rigid, less flexible work conditions if changes continue in the direction of the latest labour law amendments with respect to working hours.

To present a balanced view, it is worth asking if factories simultaneously increased any other benefits to ‘offset’ the increase in work hours? This too presents a bleak picture. Madhya Pradesh introduced changes for factories to be exempt from provisions of the Factories Act, 1948, such as those related to dangerous operations, along with those providing for crèches, washrooms, and disposal of waste, for three months. According to a draft of the Uttar Pradesh ordinance, all factories and establishments engaged in manufacturing processes will be exempt from all labour laws for three years, subject to the fulfilment of certain conditions.

 

Who bears the burden of these changes?

It is true that in the wake of this pandemic, businesses were hurt worldwide and were forced to reconsider their business strategies and costs. For labour-intensive industries, concentrated in this part of the world, cost adjustment, of which labour adjustment is a part, assumed importance. But what proportion of this COVID-19 burden should labour bear, and what proportion should businesses? Especially when there is an inherent power dynamic between the two parties involved?

We live in a world where alternative methods to increase productivity exist—methods that don’t achieve ‘the needs of the industry’ at the cost of the working classes, and that take into account labour well-being by reducing, and not increasing work hours.

These recent changes in India’s labour laws show their disguised priority towards businesses over workers. On one hand, one could be hopeful that such support in strengthening business’ capacity to be resilient would ultimately trickle down to workers in terms of employment and growth opportunities. However, in the absence of proper checks and balances, this can snowball into unfair working conditions for a certain class of workers.

 

Lavanya Garg is a development professional, with a special interest in gender. She is currently Chief of Staff and Senior Manager (Strategy and Development), Good Business Lab.

Mansi Kabra is a development practitioner, both professionally and personally, who is trying to understand development through the lens of systems and metaphors. She is currently a Senior Marketing Manager, Good Business Lab.

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

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Community Health warriors (Anganwadi center in Chennai, Tamil Nadu). Credit: Public Services International (PSI)

By Lyndal Rowlands
BANGKOK, Thailand, Nov 13 2020 (IPS)

Fifteen countries will sign a mega-trade deal at the ASEAN conference this weekend imposing secretive restrictions on how governments help workers through the pandemic, trade union leaders and parliamentarians have warned.

The text of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) agreement is so secretive that even elected representatives have not been allowed to see it, even though it will potentially lock future governments into rules that will limit their abilities to make policies required in times of crisis or to improve access to public services and worker’s rights.

Leaked documents have shown that the agreement limits the potential for governments to make policies, including policies to recover from the Covid-19 crisis said Risa Hontiveros a Senator from the Philippines. “This pandemic has shown us that we should never put the economy before our people,” she said at a press conference organised by Unions for Trade Justice on Thursday.

Elected officials across the region fear that the agreement has been kept secret because it heavily favours large multinational corporations who help draft trade rules, over the local small and medium businesses that are struggling most due to the pandemic.

“Even parliaments have no idea what the hell is being signed in the name of the people,” Charles Santiago a Member of Parliament from Malaysia said.

The secretive nature of the agreement is also unusual, given that the text was finalised 12 months ago, meaning that it includes no specific updates recognising the extraordinary challenges created byCovid-19 pandemic, said Andrew Dettmer the National President of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union.

However, Covid-19 isn’t the only major omission from the agreement. Leaked documents have also shown that it does not mention climate change or make provisions for labour rights, including forced labour or child labour.

Considered volunteers, Anganwadi workers and helpers are not part of regular government compensation and social benefit schemes, including pension. Credit: Public Services International (PSI)

The 10 members of ASEAN – Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam – will sign the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) together with five additional countries Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea on 15 November.

Notably, India, recently withdrew despite spending several years in RCEP negotiations, citing concerns it would not protect its own industries and workers, said Kate Lappin, Regional Secretary for Asia and Pacific, at Public Services International. Free trade agreements create a “race to the bottom” said Lappin, encouraging governments to compete to have the lowest possible wages and conditions.

Che Chariya, a Cambodian garment worker and union leader described the real-world consequences that this type of race to the bottom creates. Garment workers in Cambodia have been particularly hard hit by the suspension of major contracts from multinational firms due to Covid-19. However, Chariyasaid that for many garment workers, including herself, the challenges pre-dated Covid-19. Chariyaworked in a garment factory for 18 years until it closed in 2018. She now works in a sweatshop for a piece rate, losing the factory’s minimum wage and social security benefits, despite still making clothes for the same companies. Since the pandemic, she says the cost of living has increased whilethe piece rate has gone down.

Instead of signing new rules that favour big business, and harm workers like Chariya, Lappin said that governments should instead work on agreements for the greater public good, such as India and South Africa’s proposal to have governments waive trade rules in the World Trade Organisation so that all countries will have access to a Covid-19 vaccine and other critical medical information, noting that restrictions on access to medicines were “a prime example of why we shouldn’t be signing trade agreements at the moment.”

Indeed, Santiago described how restrictions imposed by international agreements had already prevented some governments from rolling out mass testing: “even in a pandemic the people are being held hostage by big pharma,” he said.

 

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By Education Cannot Wait
Nov 13 2020 (IPS-Partners)

Despite the various challenges they face, teachers are showing incredible dedication to their profession, writes Leandro Salazar-Lievano, our education expert deployed to UNHCR Mali.

Teaching has always played an important part in my personal and professional life. From my first teacher back in pre-primary to my adult years in university and my own experience as a language teacher in Colombia and France; it has shaped the way I think and perceive this world.

Through teaching, I learned about myself and to be mindful of others by caring about people’s learning and development process. Through teaching, I discovered the important role education plays in every society, which made the education sector my battlefield and people’s learning my life goal.

Through an education, I was able to fulfill my own life goals. Refugee, internally displaced and host community children deserve the same fate\”, writes Leandro Salazar-Lievano, our NORCAP expert deployed to UNHCR Mali (pictured in blue).(Photo: UNHCR Mali)

Preventing conflict and trauma through education

At UNHCR Mali, we place a special focus on teachers’ capacity development and strengthening in our education interventions in conflict-affected zones. We understand how important it is for communities at large to have well equipped, motivated, committed, inspiring female and male teachers as role models for the current and future generations.

For displaced communities in hosting regions, it means an opportunity for children to find safety and protection as we strengthen teachers’ capacity to address stress and trauma through mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) in safe, friendly, and inclusive learning environments.

For the country, it means the promotion and preservation of a peaceful nation, in which youth are essential actors contributing to peace-building processes.

Teachers in Gao, Mali during a training session with UNHCR and NORCAP. (Photo: Leandro Salazar-Lievano/NORCAP)

Teacher training in Mali

Our most recent teachers’ training session took place in Mali’s Gao region during the week the international day of the teacher is commemorated.

Thirty-six female and male teachers and school principals participated in an Education Cannot Wait (ECW) and Japan Ministry of Foreign Affairs-funded six-day training on Covid-19 prevention in schools. Facilitated jointly by the regional education authority and UNHCR Mali’s education unit, the training focused on MHPSS and Education in Emergencies (EiE).

Every teacher had a story and a good practice to share, and the sessions became the right place to exchange about challenges and ways forward. I witnessed the commitment of each of them in giving their best to maintaining children at school – safe and learning – and to contribute to maintaining peace in their communities.

I love what I do

“What motivates me most in my profession is the love for children. I love what I do,” Maria, a young teacher, explains.

Like her, teachers in Mali showcase an intrinsic motivation towards the profession despite the various challenges they face, mostly in terms of security, threats, attacks against them, and limited resources. Other teachers, like Issa, manifest that their motivation lies in contributing to the development of future generations and highlights the role everyone plays as models in society.

One of the teachers participating in the training session in Gao, Mali (Photo: Leandro Salazar-Lievano/NORCAP)

They were also aware of their key contribution in reducing school dropout rates among children, as well as the impact of being out of school has on children’s safety, protection and future. Once children drop out, they become easy targets for early marriage and pregnancy, sexual exploitation and abuse, recruitment into armed groups, child labour, and other protection risks that hinder the fulfillment of their life goals.

Through education, I was able and continue to fulfill my own life goals. Refugee, internally displaced and host community children deserve the same fate, and teachers in Mali are doing all it takes to make that become a reality for hundreds of thousands of children across the country.

To all of them, my sincere admiration and unconditional support.

Responding to COVID-19

Earlier this year, Education Cannot Wait launched a series of COVID-19 education in emergencies responses. In Mali, a total of $1.5 million was allocated to UNICEF ($750,000) and UNHCR ($750,000).

Activities supported through this series of emergency grants run from 6 to 12 months and include:

• Emergency Education Measures: With the total disruption of the usual education systems in emergency-affected areas, grants are to support alternative delivery models, including informal education materials at the household level, as well as scaling up distance education programmes, particularly via interactive radio. Social emotional learning and psychosocial support are prominent components of the academic curriculum to be provided in these alternative delivery models.
• Messaging and Support Around Risks: ECW grants are to support information campaigns and the scaling up of risk communications and community engagement with target populations. Messaging, tailored to local languages and contexts, are to give practical advice about how to stay safe, including through handwashing and social distancing. Refugees, displaced and marginalized people may also experience xenophobia and stigma, requiring mental health and psychosocial support. Parents and teachers are to receive COVID19-specific guidance to promote the resilience and the psychosocial wellbeing of children and youth at home.
• Upgrading Water and Sanitation Facilities in Schools: This is to benefit both students and the wider community as handwashing is a first line of defense against COVID-19. Even when schools and learning facilities are officially closed, in many cases there is still access to these facilities, and they can serve as crucial hubs to increase access to handwashing and distribute hygiene materials and kits.

2019 Update

In Mali, after flooding devastated parts of the country, ECW established school feeding programmes that encouraged children to stay in school or to return if they had dropped out. The intervention reached more learners than planned, feeding 32,689 children (16,746 girls/15,943 boys) in 35 primary schools and 47 early childhood development centres.

Learn more about the impact of ECW-funded programming in Mali and the Sahel Region in our 2019 Annual Report.

 

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The post Promoting Peace in Mali appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Education Cannot Wait investments delivered by UNHCR in Mali are training teachers, reducing dropout rates and protecting vulnerable children from abuse, exploitation and child labour.

 
Special contribution by Leandro Salazar-Lievano. This story was originally published by the Norwegian Refugee Council (Original)

The post Promoting Peace in Mali appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Mostafiz Uddin
Nov 13 2020 (IPS-Partners)

During the past few months, I had worked on a documentary for the BBC which looks at the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the apparel industry of Bangladesh. That documentary caught me at an exceptionally low ebb. I was struggling amid the cancellation of orders and some brands being unwilling to pay for orders which had already been shipped.

Since that time, things briefly did pick up again for our industry as retail outlets began to reopen in the West, following huge self-imposed lockdowns. Since mid-summer, most European markets and the US, the main destinations for Bangladesh apparel exports, have been open for business. I was hopeful that we might be over the worst of the coronavirus in terms of economic impacts, although I was always aware it was going to be a bumpy road ahead.

In recent weeks, however, the mood has changed once again. Brands are putting major orders on hold. I have witnessed this first-hand, as well as hearing anecdotal evidence of this across the industry. The reason for this is clear: as we head into winter, and schools and other educational establishments return from summer holidays, coronavirus cases are once again on the rise. In the wake of over-flowing hospital beds, governments feel they have no choice but to impose lockdowns again in an attempt to control the virus.

This is not to complain about the brands. Since the pandemic started, there have been good brands and bad brands in terms of payments—some have been more supportive of their suppliers than others, and that will always be the way.

Instead, I want to raise the alarm bells for what a second lockdown might mean for Bangladesh’s apparel industry and, more importantly, its workers. In the BBC documentary alluded to above, it was made very clear that many garment workers suffered a lot in the wake of the pandemic in March. Some spoke on film of their fears not being about the coronavirus killing them but about poverty if the factories where they are employed could not continue their operation.

I read that for most people, coronavirus is not a serious illness. Its mortality rate among 20 to 30-year olds—the core demographic of garment workers in Bangladesh—is tiny. Coronavirus kills mainly people who are over 65 and the obese and/or people with serious underlying health conditions. I am not trying to downplay this virus which, after all, has killed a great many people around the world. Rather, I wish to bring into focus the problems facing Bangladesh in the here and now.

Bangladesh has a fairly young population and obesity is certainly not a problem in our country compared to western nations. Bangladesh has had just over 6,000 deaths from Covid-19. By way of comparison, the UK, a country with a far smaller population, has had almost 50,000 deaths. The US has had more than 200,000 deaths from Covid-19.

This, then, is the cruel irony: while our customer countries, with their ageing populations and serious obesity issues, face the Grim Reaper of coronavirus hanging over their heads, in Bangladesh our fear is about something entirely different—poverty and associated starvation. The coronavirus might not kill us directly, but its impacts on global apparel supply chains threaten the very fabric of our industry and its people.

Our apparel industry was teetering on the brink in autumn. We thought we were through the worst but further lockdowns in our key markets this winter could take us right over the edge and into the abyss. The impacts on workers and their families do not bear thinking about. I fear a future in which many will face destitution if this crisis goes on for many more months.

Is there a solution? As well as support from the Bangladesh government, we need support from the global community to provide a safety net for garment workers. We as an industry have talked for years about inclusiveness and fairness, and now is the time for all of us to stand up and be counted on these issues.

Are we, as an industry, serious about the Sustainable Development Goals? SDG number 8 is about promoting sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all.

At full employment, the apparel industry in Bangladesh employs more than four million people, many of them young women. Without support, our industry faces a financial Armageddon, with the potential loss of hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of factories and millions of jobs.

With no safety net for those right at the bottom of our industry pyramid, the ramifications are poverty, malnutrition and even death. An industry that prides itself on sustainability, and whose main actors have repeatedly cited the SDGs in recent years, cannot afford to stand by and allow to happen the slow-motion car-crash we are seeing in supply chains.

Mostafiz Uddin is the Managing Director of Denim Expert Limited. He is also the Founder and CEO of Bangladesh Apparel Exchange (BAE).
Email: mostafiz@denimexpert.com

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

The post What does the second wave of Covid-19 mean for the apparel industry? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Indigenous men and women of Nuñoa in Puno, Peru, spin and weave garments based on the fiber of the alpacas. Credit: SGP-GEF-UNDP Peru/Enrique Castro-Mendívil

By Siddharth Akali
MANILA, Nov 13 2020 (IPS)

This week, 450 public development banks from around the world met for the Finance in Common Summit at the Paris Peace Forum. They gathered to discuss how they can direct their combined investments of over USD 2 trillion – 10% of total investments in the world – “to support the transformation or the global economy” and “build new forms of prosperity that take care of people and the planet.”

However, the summit has done little to fundamentally transform development so it is bottom up, focussing again on government officials, bankers, think tanks, and academics over the real experts at the frontlines, who are living, breathing, and drinking the impacts of these banks policies and practices that have their stolen lands and polluted their ecosystems.

Grassroots communities and human rights defenders directly affected by these banks’ activities did not have a seat at the summit table, or the chance to speak and be heard in the webinar room.

And after ongoing advocacy by hundreds of civil society groups from around the world, and several United Nations special procedures, the final declaration of the summit contains only reference to community-led development and human rights. There are no concrete actionable commitments beyond business as usual dressed in the language of motherhood and apple pie.

The Finance in Common Summit was the first global meeting of the vast family of institutions that intersect between finance and public policy, and was one of the largest international governance and finance gatherings in 2020 since the spread of the pandemic.

The organizers of the summit are heralding public development banks as a “visible hand” that can help mobilize and direct the finance we need for the future we want. Unfortunately, these institutions do not have a great track record, with significant documentation of their projects excluding directly affected communities and doing more harm.

Development banks have repeatedly supported fossil fuel projects that have contributed to climate change, polluted ecosystems causing lung diseases and made people more vulnerable to the worst effects of Covid-19.

They have also engaged in greenwashing, supporting fossil free projects that take traditionally held lands without the consent of local communities and Indigenous Peoples, destroying the biodiverse ecosystems they have protected for generations.

These institutions have also repeatedly looked the other way and been complicit in the human rights violations of corporations and governments they work with. They support activities where armed forces push forward large infrastructure and extractives projects on traditional lands without the participation and consent of Indigenous Peoples.

They indiscriminately fund states where there is corporate capture of institutions, and police and courts violently punish those who speak truth to power rather than those who murder social justice leaders.

For instance, despite warning from local communities in Colombia several development financiers provided support for the construction of the Hidroituango dam, which has had a catastrophic impact for the people and the environment, including forced displacement of hundreds of families, loss of livelihoods, floods, landslides, and mass fish kill.

In the past 11 years, six members of the grassroots organization Movimiento Ríos Vivos and more than 30 other community members have been killed for raising their concerns about the project.

Development banks have also supported privatization of essential services, prioritizing growth and corporate profits over protections for workers and communities. And now, in the middle of a pandemic, many people are left without access to healthcare, shelter, livelihoods, food, sanitary products and medicines, even as stock markets rise.

However, in the name of crowding in private investments, development banks are continuing to pump out billions of dollars to bail out corporations during the pandemic, with few safeguards to ensure the money reaches the people who need it the most.

Indeed, public development banks have contributed to a world where the 22 richest men in the world have more wealth than all the women in Africa. They have done little to challenge systems through which caregiving falls disproportionately on women, focusing instead on farcical women’s empowerment efforts.

They have also failed to confront their role in advancing racism and colonialism, or contributing to increased surveillance and securitization, and inhibiting world peace.

A better world is possible, even as we reel under the shocks of intersecting crises of the pandemic, climate change and rising inequality, violence and militarization. And a better world can benefit from the right kind of public development finance.

But public banks, governments, and businesses need to make changes if we want to move away from a world of self-inflicted existential threats. The response to the current crises of our times cannot be to simply push out more money without consideration for the long-term environmental and social impacts of these funds on local communities and workers.

And who better to assess the long term impacts of these investments than communities and workers themselves?

The very idea of international development finance has to be reshaped under the leadership of communities who have repeatedly called for the lens of collective responsibility and reparations. The existing models of debt and financial aid, focused on states and corporations, only serve to replicate colonial power imbalances, and support the prevailing top-down paradigm.

Instead, people who are the purported beneficiaries of development finance have to be the key decision-makers.

To make future iterations of the Finance in Common summit impactful, the first thing the organizers have to do is to recognize communities are the experts of their own development.

Community-led development and human rights must be front and center on the summit agenda. Indigenous Peoples, grassroots communities and social movements must be invited to share their vision of development.

If governments and their public banks are serious about transformation, and leaving behind old patterns of crises, human rights in common have to come before finance in common.

 

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The post Global Summit of Development Banks Fails to Learn from Destructive Past appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Development banks have repeatedly looked the other way and been complicit in the human rights violations of corporations and governments they work with. They support activities where armed forces push forward large infrastructure and extractives projects on traditional lands without the participation and consent of Indigenous Peoples.

 
Siddharth Akali is an international lawyer who has been trained by local communities, Indigenous governments and peoples in Canada, India and Nepal. He works as director of the Coalition for Human Rights in Development, a global coalition of social movements, civil society organizations, and grassroots groups working together to ensure that development is community-led and that it respects, protects, and fulfills human rights.

The post Global Summit of Development Banks Fails to Learn from Destructive Past appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Masooma Ranalvi
NOIDA, India, Nov 13 2020 (IPS)

“My daughter is eight years old. In May 2017, I had her ‘Khatna,’ her circumcision, done. I had taken her to a traditional cutter. Once back home I made her sleep on the bed. After some time, around 4:00 p.m. I took her to the bathroom, she was bleeding as if she had started her menses. It seemed like she was urinating blood. By 6:00 p.m. my daughter had been bleeding so heavily, the blood had soaked three bed sheets and I was very worried.  And my daughter was quiet and she also kept asking me if she will be fine.” Excerpt from:  How I got her from the hands of death: WeSpeakOut study 2018

The child belongs to the Bohra community, where Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) persists.  A study by my organisation, WeSpeakOut, in 2018 indicates that over 75% of the girls in the community are cut. Their clitoral hoods are removed.  They are not all “fine.”  Some suffer life-threatening infections.  And the procedure leaves girls physically and emotionally scarred and robbed of sexual pleasure for a lifetime.

If FGM in India and elsewhere in Asia remains hidden and unmeasured, if governments collect no data, UN agencies should sponsor the large-scale qualitative and quantitative studies needed, and support groups trying to do this research on the ground

The Bohra community is not in Africa, long the focus of global efforts to stop FGM.  It is in India.  The fact that it happens here came to light when women, including me, spoke about our childhood traumas, researched the prevalence of FGM, and exposed it to the world.  But we are part of a global blind spot on the FGM map.  To many in the Indian government and the international community, we remain invisible.  India has no government database on FGM, a secret and silent practice for centuries

My survivor-led organization, WeSpeakOut, has spent the last five years meeting with top officials from government commissions and ministries, providing evidence and testimony, and circulating petitions, including one that garnered over 200,000 signatures.

We have been imploring the government to pass a law banning FGM.  We and members of Parliament who have asked questions about this have been rebuffed.  .

The Indian government’s official response is that since there is no official data on  the prevalence of FGM in India, FGM in India does not even exist.  They claim this, even though WeSpeakOut provided them surveys as part of the consultations held around the country to track progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Eliminating FGM is a clear target under the SDGs, agreed to by 193 United Nations member countries around the world, including India.  But the government’s obfuscation undermines this goal.  It leaves the United Nations — the global organization that is supposed to be able to shed light, offer guidance, and apply pressure so that nations do the right thing—powerless.

India is not alone.  It is one of at least 60 countries that do not collect or provide national-level data on the prevalence of FGM.  The sustainable development goal 5.3 is to end female genital mutilation or cutting by 2030, and with less than ten years to go we are still not even sure of the extent of this practice globally.

Masooma Ranalvi. Credit: Natasha Sweeney Photography

If our governments continue to pretend the problem does not exist, international organizations should step in.

They could start by including India in official United Nations documents on FGM. At international forums where our government representatives have signed treaties denouncing FGM, Indian officials should be asked about FGM in India. India should not be allowed to hide behind its supposed support for international treaties and conventions promising to end FGM globally, while ignoring and covering up the practice within its own borders.

Countries like India that committed to fast-track progress for achieving the SDGs pledged to Leave No One Behind.  What is the value of this pledge if nations that break this promise cannot be held accountable?  There must be any international mechanism to pull up truant nations.

If FGM in India and elsewhere in Asia remains hidden and unmeasured, if governments collect no data, UN agencies should sponsor the large-scale qualitative and quantitative studies needed, and support groups trying to do this research on the ground.   International funding does not typically reach organizations like mine, and we survive with hardly any local contributions. We can all be part of the larger global effort to end FGM by 2030. We can collaborate to put together the funding, research, legal and technical expertise needed to achieve this collective goal.

All SDGs are interconnected; poverty, development, gender justice, peace and prosperity cannot be viewed in isolation. The SDGs are universal and transcend borders, and neglecting one goal hinders progress on others.  For this to work, governments cannot be evasive or complacent.  They need to mean what they say, and to demand the truth from others.

They failed to do this at the concluded United Nations High Level Political Forum 2020.  But there will be other high-profile international meetings  – more opportunities to ask tough questions and demand honest answers.

 

Masooma Ranalvi is the Founder of WeSpeakOut, India’s largest FGM survivor-led organization. She is a 2020 Aspen Institute New Voices Fellow. Follow her on Twitter @RanalviMasooma

The post In India, Ending FGM Demands Truth and Transparency appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The Berlaymont building in Brussels, headquarters of the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union (EU). Credit EU.

By Joaquín Roy
Nov 12 2020 (IPS)

An anecdote tells, never sufficiently confirmed, that in the hardest moments of the Second World War when Stalin was dictating his orders of battle to his subordinates, he was told that perhaps it would be advisable to consult with the Pope. The Soviet dictator replied: “And how many armored divisions does the Pope have?”

The rationale of the question has been used in international relations theory and practice consistently to illustrate a vision of the realist school, in the company of classical interpretations such as those of Thucydides and von Clausewitz.

Stalin’s reflection has often been adduced to interpret the real level of influence of the European Union on the international scene since the middle of the last century.

It has never been easy to explain the birth and survival of Monnet and Schuman’s invention by means of a variant of realism.

One of the clichés about the soul of the EU is as an example of possessing a “soft power”, according to the founding arguments of Joseph Nye.

Joaquín Roy

It agrees with the birth of an entity whose initial leaders were mostly Christian Democrats, who based their logic on reconciliation and who promoted a new entity based on an unusual “declaration of interdependence.” While the bulk of the history of international relations exuded the phenomenon of war, the EU stubbornly justified its existence on the strategy of peace.

Citizens outside Europe tried to answer the question about the reason for the founding of the EU with strange answers such as competition with the United States, the improvement of the European economy, and the reinforcement of capitalism. The goal of making war “unthinkable, and materially impossible” was rarely alluded to.

Since then it has not been easy to understand the EU, because to do so, “one must be French or very intelligent” as Madeleine Albright once said. She rightly described the EU as extremely complex, especially if you insist on viewing it through the lens of “hard power.”

The funny thing is that its survival has been an enigma for more than 70 years, in an already long existence sown along with experiences as shocking as the Vietnam War, the end of the Cold War, the disappearance of the Soviet Union, and now the questioning of the fundamentals of the United States.

Despite such impressive achievements as the adoption of the euro, the marked improvement in the standard of living of Europeans, their comparatively superior longevity, the pleasant feeling of being able to travel and reside throughout the EU, there is a certain discomfort and inner feeling, their survival is in doubt.

The explosion produced by Brexit, barely softening the effects of the 2008 economic crisis, while some of the evils of the past are reborn (nationalism, authoritarianism, racism), and the community territory is beset by uncontrolled immigration, has not helped to soften fears.

Inside and outside, the predictions of its disappearance are insistent. And specialists wonder why, while many voices disagree with these pessimistic predictions.

 

Anu Bradford, author of “The Brussels Effect” (Oxford University, 2020)

 

Anu Bradford, a law professor at Columbia University in New York, belongs to this sector. She is the author of a book that has been considered as the most influential of the decade in the field of international relations and the EU in particular.  Its title is The Brussels Effect (Oxford University, 2020), repeatedly reproduced as a term that is destined to be enthroned in the permanent vocabulary of the EU. The central thesis is that the EU, despite its lack of “hard power”, has achieved not only its survival, but a position of preeminence in the world theater.

But this nature of a global agent does not come from the traditional methods of imposing its interests, but simply through the use of a weapon of something as simple as law, developed in the design of a network of norms in the internal scene of the industry, business, the environment, agriculture, and protection against climate change.

But these norms are not imposed on the external territories, in a traditional imperialist way, but, exceptionally, they are self-adopted by the external businesses themselves, voluntarily.

How is this achieved, without the imposition of the hard power of the EU? Bradford’s answer is very simple: external actors, in the United States, Latin America, Asia, weigh between the cost of adding the standards of EU regulations or losing such a substantial market. They hesitate before being forced to adopt community standards or even be their goods rejected, once the process of entering the gigantic EU single market has begun.

They wisely choose to make the necessary investment and place the blue sticker with the twelve golden stars of the EU as a guarantee, a courtesy gift from the “pope” Ursula Von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. The EU does not oblige anyone: it is the choice of external economic interests.

Joaquín Roy is Jean Monnet Professor and Director of the European Union Center at the University of Miami

 

The post The Armored Divisions of the European Union appeared first on Inter Press Service.

A farmer in Vietnam's Mekong Delta. Credit: UN Photo/Kibae Park

By Kyle Springer
PERTH, Australia, Nov 12 2020 (IPS)

This was the year that Vietnam was poised to make progress on its rise as a regional leader. Under the auspices of Vietnam’s ASEAN chairmanship, a breakthrough in global trade has been achieved despite rising protectionism and a global pandemic.

Assuming the chair of ASEAN in January, Vietnam’s diplomacy has proven adaptable amid the constraints of COVID-19. The successful completion of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) trade agreement under Vietnam’s watch this year will cement its claim to middle power leadership in the Indo-Pacific region.

The 2020 ASEAN Summit would have been easy to write off, but we have learned to expect a lot from a Vietnam-chaired year. Consider what Vietnam’s leadership has delivered in the past. When Vietnam chaired ASEAN in 2010, it inaugurated the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting (ADMM) Plus, a defence dialogue of all ten ASEAN members and its eight dialogue partners, which includes the US and China.

When Vietnam convened the East Asia Summit (EAS) that same year, the US and Russia attended as Vietnam’s guests, paving the way for their official membership in the summit the following year. The ADMM Plus and the EAS are now key institutions in the political architecture of the Indo-Pacific.

And in the crisis year of 2020, Vietnam’s skillful diplomacy once again comes to the rescue. When Vietnam delivers RCEP during this November’s adjusted Summit process, it will be the most significant development in the global trade system since the establishment of the WTO in 1994.

Eight years in the making and spanning over thirty rounds of negotiations, RCEP promises to buttress the post-COVID-19 economic recovery of its fifteen members. Covering 29 percent of global GDP, its provisions spur the further development of regional value chains and greatly lower regulatory barriers to investment.

Vietnam’s leadership of RCEP marks its transformation to become one of the region’s fastest-growing and most internationally-engaged economies. Thirty years ago, Vietnam emerged from a period of war during which it had fought every permanent member of the UN Security Council except the then-Soviet Union. Vietnam had isolated itself from its Southeast Asian neighbours when it invaded Cambodia in 1978, and it suffered a bloody clash with China at its northern border in 1979.

On the economic front, matters were equally dim. Post-war reconstruction did nothing to boost Vietnam’s inflation-stricken economy. Five-year economic plans failed to stimulate growth and production in its agriculture-based economy. Trade and aid sanctions were placed against it by the US, Australia, and many of its other neighbours. With this context, no one could have foreseen the transformation that would later take place.

RCEP perhaps represents the apex of Vietnam’s efforts to integrate into the global economy starting in the mid-1990s. Coming on the back of its domestically-focused Doi Moi (renovation) economic reforms that began in 1986, Vietnam joined ASEAN in 1995 and acceded to the World Trade Organization in 2007. It eschewed protectionism and began pursuing a number of free trade agreements starting in 2005.

Today, it has signed a number of deals with advanced economies. Vietnam has emerged not only as a participant in multilateral trade efforts, but as a leading proponent of regional trade integration. It is a member of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) with Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. The CPTPP’s predecessor, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), earned fame with US President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the US from the deal after long being promoted as a cornerstone of former President Barack Obama’s “rebalance” to the Asia-Pacific region.

A few months after the US left the agreement, the remaining TPP members met on the sidelines of the 2017 APEC trade ministers’ meeting, hosted by Vietnam. There the ministers reaffirmed the value of the TPP and discussed how to finalise it with the eleven of the original signatories.

Here Vietnam made the decision to stay in the agreement, despite losing market access to its most important trade partner – the US. Vietnam’s participation in the CPTPP makes Vietnam’s stance clear: it is committed to trade liberalisation even though the spirit of the time is decidedly protectionist.

RCEP continues Vietnam’s efforts, and Vietnam once again delivers an important new institution while it presides in its moment as ASEAN chair. RCEP is timely as well. It will put Vietnam and its Indo-Pacific partners in a good place to solve the economic problems pressuring the region, not the least the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, which has hit Southeast Asia particularly hard.

Here again, Vietnam looks like it will come out on top. With its domestic outbreak under control, Vietnam’s standing in the forecasts for economic growth are promising. Even under the most pessimistic modelling, Vietnam’s economy should maintain positive growth in 2020.

By the time Vietnam next takes the reins as ASEAN chair, presumably in 2030, its economy will be well on its way to becoming one of the world’s largest. RCEP will get a lot of credit for that progress.

Along with catalysing post-COVID-19 economic growth in the broader Indo-Pacific region, RCEP will further enhance Vietnam’s ability to attract the investment it needs to propel its economy in this promising direction.

The challenge for Vietnam’s leadership will be matching its regional ambitions with continued domestic economic reforms.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Licence and may be republished with attribution

 

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The post Vietnam Takes the Lead on Indo-Pacific Economic Integration appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Kyle Springer is the Senior Analyst at the Perth US Asia Centre.

The post Vietnam Takes the Lead on Indo-Pacific Economic Integration appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The actual number of children at risk is not known due to a dearth of research on child deprivation and government responses in Zimbabwe. This 16-year-old boy sells sweets and popcorn to earn a living in downtown Harare. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/ IPS

By External Source
Nov 12 2020 (IPS)

The ability of Zimbabwean families to take care of children has been compromised by a collapsing economy, compounded by COVID-19. About 4.3 million people in rural communities, including children, are food insecure this year. The World Food Programme indicates that at least 60% of the population of Zimbabwe need food aid.

The Vendors Initiative for Social and Economic Transformation in Zimbabwe has estimated that over 20,000 children have turned to vending as a means of survival since the COVID-19 lockdown.

According to reports, child vendors in the city of Bulawayo are mostly selling fruit and vegetables. And in the capital, Harare, they sell a variety of goods from vegetables to used clothes and shoes.

The phenomenon of child vendors in Zimbabwe has been topical for some time. But the situation appears to be worsening.

When children spend hours of their day in the streets or at the market, they lose a portion of their childhood that will never be regained. They miss out on education, play opportunities and other childhood activities. This has far-reaching effects on their development

There are no statistics about how much income vendors make, due to the informal nature of this business and a lack of centralised coordination of their activities. Nevertheless, it’s clear that poverty is the reason children are on the streets. But in their efforts to help their families, they are exposed to risks such as exploitation, abuse and missing school.

The situation calls for a critical conversation about the capacity of families to protect and care for their children and the role of social protection policies in the country.

 

Policy to protect vulnerable children

A National Action Plan for Orphans and Vulnerable Children has been in place since 2004. The policy guides the provision of care for these children. My prior experience and observations as a social researcher suggest that the plan isn’t working in practice.

There are number of gaps.

The first is that there’s no clear definition of what the term “orphans and vulnerable children” means, especially in the current economic climate and increasing vulnerability of children in the country. There’s a danger that children will fall through the cracks and go unnoticed without any government support.

Secondly, there is a lack of good data. The actual number of children at risk is not known due to a dearth of research on child deprivation and government responses in Zimbabwe.

Thirdly, government interventions aren’t reaching those in need. The government’s National Action Plan for Orphans and Vulnerable Children is meant to be overseen by a multi-sectoral committee to mobilise resources. Under it poor households were to receive grants varying from US$10 (one person household) to US$25 (four person household) per month (paid bimonthly) through a cash transfer. The funds for this come from the Child Protection Fund.

The first phase of the plan was between 2005-2010 and the second phase between 2011-2015. The evaluations of these two phases showed several gaps in service provision and targeting of orphans and vulnerable children in the country.

Even by 2017 only 23,000 beneficiaries in eight districts had received the cash transfers. However, the number of families in need way surpasses the number that received it. According to social policy experts, the unconditional social cash transfer programmes don’t target all poor households. They only target those that in addition to being extremely poor, also suffer from severe social and economic vulnerability. This, however, is open to interpretation.

The current third phase of the plan was supposed to cover household economic security, basic social services and child protection. The fact that there appears to be a growing child vendor problem in the country in 2020 shows the plan is not reaching everyone in need.

 

Child vendors exposed to risks

The legal working age in Zimbabwe is 16, but children as young as 10 and 12 years old are selling goods on the streets.

Children aren’t being adequately protected from child labour and the risks they face, including exploitation and abuse.

When children spend hours of their day in the streets or at the market, they lose a portion of their childhood that will never be regained. They miss out on education, play opportunities and other childhood activities. This has far-reaching effects on their development.

According to the International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth, the third phase of the National Action Plan for Orphans and Vulnerable Children seeks the involvement of families and the community in child protection.

But the governnment’s ability to drive the plan is severely compromised because it doesn’t have the capacity in the Ministry of Social Services. This is due to a massive exodus of Zimbabweans from the country as a result of the economic crisis. As a result, the plan is heavily reliant on external assistance and development partners.

 

Going forward

So far, the government’s response has been to reunite children found in the streets with their families. The reality is that without alternatives for these families to earn an income and to feed their families, children will go back on the streets.

In addition, it’s proving difficult to change the mindsets of Zimbabweans on the role of children in the society. Culturally, the involvement of children in the family economy is generally regarded as acceptable. Parents feel that it’s a way of training the children to become more responsible adults.

The government can prevent child vending through identifying families that are at risk of losing their livelihood. Social policy programmes need to be expanded to cover more people. This implies increasing the social protection budget to cater for growing numbers of families with children in need.

Policy makers and social service practitioners must consider adopting a bottom-up approach and work collaboratively with the affected and at-risk families. This can be done through participatory approaches such as workshops to hear from the community how best the issue of child labour can be tackled in this economy.

Dr Getrude Dadirai Gwenzi, Early Career Researcher in the Sociology of Child Welfare in Africa, Lingnan University

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

The post More Children in Zimbabwe Are Working to Survive: What’s Needed appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Children study in a Community Based Education class in Miirwais Meena, Kandahar province, Afghanistan. Credit: Fazel/UNICEF

By Guy Dinmore
LONDON, Nov 12 2020 (IPS)

As if four decades of war were not enough, then came the pandemic.

For each of the past five years, Afghanistan has been identified by the United Nations as the world’s deadliest country for children and, despite progress made in peace talks between the government and the Taliban, child and youth casualties from the ongoing conflict continue to mount in 2020.

Education itself has come under fire, with hundreds of attacks on schools and teachers. A 2018 joint report by the Afghanistan Ministry of Education and UNICEF, estimated that as many as 3.7 million children in Afghanistan were out of school, 60 per cent of them girls.

Against this backdrop, Education Cannot Wait (ECW) – the global fund launched at the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit to deliver quality education for vulnerable children and youth in countries affected by armed conflicts, forced displacement, climate-induced disasters and protracted crises – selected Afghanistan as one of the first countries to roll out a Multi-Year Resilience Programme (MYRP). The in-country Steering Committee formed to oversee implementation of the programme appointed management of the MYRP to UNICEF as a grantee.

Sarthak Pal, ECW project coordinator for UNICEF in Kabul, says Afghanistan’s MYRP was designed to focus on ‘out of school children’, by setting up community-based education (CBE) classes close to where they live. Classes are arranged mostly in private homes and sometimes in mosques for those who cannot make the long journey to the nearest school.

“Most of these out of school children live in remote, rural and hard to reach places,” Pal told IPS from Kabul. Pal explained that focusing on out of school children was a context-specific choice for Afghanistan, and may differ from MYRPs in other countries with their own unique contexts.

Children attend a Community Based Education class in Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. Credit: Frank Dejongh/UNICEF

The first year of the MYRP – with teaching starting in May 2019 – saw some 3,600 classes established in nine of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. This required newly recruited teachers, 46 per cent of whom are women, to teach 122,000 children. Nearly 60 per cent of the enrolled children are girls.

“When Education Cannot Wait came to Afghanistan in 2018 there were 3.7 million out of school children. These were the children and youth left furthest behind. Today, results from our multi-year resilience investment in Afghanistan are among the most promising in our global investment portfolio, especially for girls’ access to education now reaching the target of 60 percent of our investment. This shows how we can achieve education outcomes for the most marginalized children and youth in complex crisis settings by bringing together humanitarian and development actors under the leadership of the Ministry of Education. The children and youth of Afghanistan, the Afghan girls, deserve no less,” said the ECW Director, Yasmine Sherif.

One new pupil in the classes is Khalid*, an eight-year-old boy with a permanent foot disability, who was displaced by conflict from Afghanistan’s Kunar province to Nangarhar province. Previously deprived of education by war and poverty, Khalid now attends a CBE class with access to free education and books. His teacher praises his enthusiasm and creativity and says Khalid has gone from being illiterate to learning how to read, write and draw.

The closest school is 4 kilometres away from where Khalid lives, too far for him to go, but now he has a classroom just 300 metres from his home. Both Khalid’s life, and the life of his family, have been transformed.

Khalid’s nine-year-old sister Hosna is able to attend an all-girls government school close-by. “In the evening, Khalid and I study together at home and help each other in our lessons,” she says, expressing how astonished she was by Khalid’s rapid improvement and capabilities. “Khalid is so intellectually improved and motivated.”

Bringing education closer to home helps secure the backing of both the community and the shuras (school councils), and is particularly effective in addressing barriers to girls’ education, such as long distances, a lack of female teachers and safety concerns. The role of School Management Shuras, or councils, has been important in building a sense of community ownership, although there are barriers to girls’ participation remains in some provinces.

UNICEF-Afghanistan staff visit the supported Zanogra Community Based Education cluster to distribute new school bags and notebooks as the school year begins in Surkhrod district, Nangarhar province. Credit: Marko Kokic/UNICEF

ECW classes also reach children in camps set up for those displaced by conflict. Feizia Salahuddin quietly recounts in an IPS video how three of her siblings were killed. The 12-year-old girl also lost her mother. “We face so many hardships here,” she says. But then a smile appears when she describes going to ECW-supported CBE classes in Herat. “I love to study. It makes me happy,” she says.

An additional hammer blow to education this year came not from bombs or landmines but COVID-19. The government ordered all schools closed in March 2020, and CBE classes could only start reopening recently. Children affected by the impact of COVID-19 school closures now also faced increased vulnerability to recruitment by parties to the conflict, particularly boys. The crisis also exacerbated existing vulnerabilities of girls to child marriage and teenage pregnancy.

Dave Mariano, Head of Communications for Afghanistan for Save the Children International, an implementing partner for ECW, said the government had initially decided CBE classes could continue, but subsequently said teaching would have to continue via radio, television and internet, to which millions of children do not have access. Fortunately, classes eventually started to reopen with appropriate COVID-19 safety measures.

“The reopening of CBEs required a lot of coordination to ensure that necessary provisions were in place to safely reopen, such as the availability of PPE, sanitisers, and even general public awareness on how to mitigate COVID risks through basic hygiene and other practices,” Mariano told IPS.

Despite the challenges, UNICEF is already looking ahead to extend the MYRP, supported in this goal by the Ministry of Education and donors. Sweden is the largest in-country donor in Afghanistan, closely followed by Switzerland. However, UNICEF says the MYRP remains “grossly under-funded” with a 70 per cent funding gap across three years.

“We are advocating that three years of MYRP is not enough. The primary school cycle in Afghanistan is six years. We can’t leave the children half-way through. That is our main advocacy agenda now,” said Pal.

ECW has given priority in Afghanistan to improving education for girls with a focus on female teacher recruitment. This is being achieved in Herat, where 97 per cent of teachers are women and 83 per cent of students in accelerated learning classes are girls.

For girls like Feizia Salahuddin, this means a chance to start rebuilding lives shattered by conflict and displacement, giving a sense that through a classroom and her textbooks, she is once more part of a community.

“I get nervous when I get called to the blackboard, but my teachers and classmates support me,” Feizia says. “That is why I like them. They cooperate with me and teach me.”

*Names have been changed in accordance with child safeguarding and communications policies.

 

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President Donald Trump at the UN Security Council (UNSC) when the US held the rotating Presidency of the Council. Credit: UN Photo/Cia Pak

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Nov 11 2020 (IPS)

Now it is clear that Joe Biden is the new president of the United States. It is unlikely that Donald Trump’s legal manoeuvring will change the election results, as when a conservative Supreme Court in 2000 decided in favour of George Bush over Al Gore, who lost by 535 votes.

Even this Supreme Court, where Trump has six sympathetic members (three appointed by him, quite a record), and only three unsympathetic, will dare to change a result coming from too many states.

Trump is gone, but it is sad to say, Trumpism is here to stay. But is that a specific situation of the United States, or is it a more general phenomenon? We think that, in an era of globalisation, we should attempt a global analysis.

This will leave out a zillion of facts, events and analysis, but this is now the destiny of journalism. Anyone can add what they think is relevant and decide what has been left out. This will be a big improvement over this abridged analysis.

But let us start with the United States first. Biden’s victory comes from the unusually high participation in the election, where it attracted 67% of the voters. In American elections, participation rarely exceeds 50%, although the largest participation was in 1900, when 73% of the population votes.

Remember that in the US, voting is defined as a privilege, not a duty. To vote, you have to register, and many states make that a demanding task, automatically excluding the more fragile part of the population.

Biden won the largest popular vote in US history: 71.4 million compared with the 69.4 million obtained by Barack Obama. Nevertheless Trump gathered 68.3 million votes, nearly four million more than in 2016, in spite of a pandemic which, until now, has left more than 230.000 dead, with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and after four years of confrontations, some massive, like Black Lives matter.

Trump has now lost his Teflon, and he is a loser. But he has 68 million followers on Twitter, and he is probably going to open his own TV channel. He is going to be a serious problem for the Republican Party. He is going to cultivate the myth of stolen elections and keep his followers in a state of confrontation. Trump is gone, but Trumpism remains

He doubled the votes of the LGBT community, he obtained 18% of Afro-American votes, white woman increased their vote for him by 6%, and he won Florida thanks to the Latino votes (Cubans, Venezuelans and to a lesser extent Puerto Ricans).

The United States is going through a demographic transformation, which will further exacerbate the polarisation. The Census Bureau estimates that this year the majority of the country’s 74 million children will not be white. And in the decade of the 2040s, the white population will be under 49% with the other 51% made up of Latinos, blacks, Asians and other minorities.

The genesis of the United States differs from that of Europe. It was created by an immigration of English religious radicals, who wanted to create a new world, a “town shining on a hill”, where the secularism and moral corruption of their country would be left behind. Following their arrival, they had to fight against indigenous people who were considered barbarians, without a true religion (very much like the Spanish conquest did in Latin America).

The war of independence from England reinforced the moral value of their action: freedom from tyranny, And, with the Industrial Revolution, wave after wave of immigrants arrived, all escaping Europe because of poverty or oppression They were also uneducated and obliged to integrate into an already existing strong society, which defined itself a ‘WASP’ (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) society.

To do this, the US invented mass media as an instrument for the melting pot (until then in Europe newspapers had small circulations for the elites), and two myths: American Exceptionalism and the American Dream.

The conquest of the west was a national saga, with the cinema as the other instrument for the melting pot. Children of different immigrants reacted with joy to the sound of the trumpet announcing the cavalry charge which would wipe out hordes of attacking Indians.

And beside media and cinema, a strong advertising industry shaped tastes and consumption patterns. An abundance of natural resources, and a permanent arrival of immigrants, fuelled continuous growth. Here the two myths become uncontested truth. America exceptionalism, the fact that US has a different destiny form all other countries, became a staple of public discourse.

In 1850, President James Monroe emitted a declaration, by which no European country was any longer allowed to intervene in Latin America. And still today, a large part of the population thinks that US has the right to intervene in the world, because US is the keeper of order and law in a chaotic world.

To become an American citizen, you have to swear that you forget your origins, because you are born a new man. The inscription on the Statue of Liberty, which was what millions of immigrants saw first after a long journey, bears an inscription which symbolises the myth well:

Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries the Statue with silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-lost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

The second myth, the American Dream, was another powerful tool for patience and hard work. It was part of the Protestant founding legacy. Anybody who works hard will become affluent or rich. If you do not become rich, it is because you did not try hard enough.

This is the myth that evangelical church has adopted: God rewards the hardworking faithful, and not the lazy. As a result, poverty is not contemplated by God. And the evangelical church has achieved a remarkable result (not only in the US, but everywhere, from Brazil to Guatemala): having the poor voting to the right.

US exceptionalism is evident when you look at other English colonies. Australia, for example, was the destination of prostitutes, thieves and bankrupt British citizens. It would never be thinkable that the prime minister of Australia speak on behalf of Australia and Humankind, as the US president routinely does. Nor does the PM of Canada ever speak in the name of God or say that God loves Canada. The US is the only country in the world that does not accept its military personnel being judged by a foreign court.

Roberto Savio

And the US saw confirmation of its exceptionalism, and its role as defender of the humankind, with the Second World War. Despite the enormous loss of Russian troops and civilians (27 million, compared with 419,000 Americans), the clear victor against the evils of Nazism and Fascism was the United States of America. It was able to win the war because of its astonishing military production (one ship in three days), and the construction of the atomic bomb. So, the US entered our contemporary era with all its myths reinforced.

And the Marshall Plan, which resurrected Europe from its ruins, was a measure of containment against the new evil, Communism, but it also become final proof of its superiority and solidarity.

The US also created the United Nations as an institution which would avoid the repetition of the horrors of the war. It was intended to bring all counties together under the same roof, and take decisions trough debates and agreements, not war.

But the world did not freeze, because the American vision of the world became a straitjacket for the US. It preached freedom of trade and investments. Of course, it was by far the strongest country, and so the winner of an American World Order, with the Soviet threat under containment, the strategy formulated by American diplomat George F. Kennan in 1947.

But once the UN expands from the original 50 countries to 187, and you insist on free competition and trade, you become a victim of your rhetoric. Those countries, in a democratic institution, all have a vote. In 1973, the General Assembly unanimously voted for a New World Economic Order, based on international solidarity and the transfer of wealth from the rich countries to the poor for world development.

The United States voted with the General Assembly. But then came Ronald Reagan, an admirer of John Wayne and in many ways a precursor of Trump. Shortly after his election, Reagan went to the North-South Summit of Head of States in Cancun, Mexico, in 1981, to announce that US no longer accepted being a country like all others, and that it would pursue foreign policy that was more convenient to its interests.

Reagan had also a vision of a radical change at home. He believed strongly that the values of social justice, solidarity and fiscal equity, had become a brake on the economy and society. He was the first to introduce the idea that the state (the “beast”) was bloated, costly and inefficient, and the enemy of business and corporations, which should be left untouched to allow all their creativity to be freed.

Among others, he wanted to shut down the Ministry of Education, because he believed that education could be done better by the private system. He was a very good communicator, and a specialist in finding easy answers to very complicated issues, banalising the real issue – an example on environment: industries do not pollute, trees pollute. By his time, the US had reached an impressive level of research and teaching (for a few), as shown by the large numbers of Nobel Prizes.

Reagan was also the first to openly challenge the elites, speaking on behalf of ordinary citizens: the people. And it is here that US story lose its individual identity and starts to merge with the world. Reagan had a counterpart in Europe, Margaret Thatcher, who shared the same vision, and went to fight trade unions, cut state spending, privatised railways, airports and whatever else possible. She famously declared that ”society does not exist, only individuals”. Together they launched what was called neoliberal globalisation and they withdrew from UNESCO. The main basis was that the market and no longer man, was the basis of the economy and society. US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said that globalisation was the new name for American Domination.

All this was reinforced by three historical events:

1. The fall of Berlin Wall in 1989 which eliminated the threat of communism and gave capitalism total freedom for manoeuvring.
2. The Washington Consensus, established by the US Treasury, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The Consensus ordered worldwide that social costs were unproductive, that any national barrier should be abolished for allowing investments and free trade to prosper and privatise as much as possible.
3. UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s ‘Third Way’ theory according to which, because it was impossible to halt globalisation, it would be best for the Left to ride it and become its human face. So, for two decades, under American influence, neoliberal globalisation became the norm of governance, both at national and international level. According to its apologists, it would lift all boats.

But then in 2008, an earthquake shook Wall Street. In 1999, under Bill Clinton, the Steagall-Glass regulation, adopted after the crash of 1929, was abolished. That regulation kept investment banks separate from traditional commercial banks. A giant tsunami hit investments, i.e. speculation.

Free of any control and international control (the banking sector is the only one in the world without any regulator or comptroller), the banking system took on a life of its own, leaving the real economy. And it went into more and more speculative operations until, in 2008, the American banks went practically bankrupt.

That crisis expanded worldwide, and in Europe in 2009 banks also went into bankruptcy. According to OECD estimates, to rescue the banking system, the world had to invest two trillion dollars. That comes to 267 dollar per person in a world in which nearly 2 billion people then lived on less than two dollars a day.

The crisis of 2008-9, and the consequent uncertainty and fear, obliged a critical examination of neoliberal theory, For nearly three decades, citizens, media, civil society, economists, sociologists and statisticians had been denouncing that globalisation in fact exacerbated social injustice, dispossessed many people of their income through delocalisation of companies to cheaper places, created unequal growth between towns and rural area and heavy damage to the planet, and that it was urgent to counter those abuses.

After 8 years of George W. Bush, wars and lack of attention to the social problems of the country, in 2009 America elected a man with a message of hope, integration and peace: Barack Obama. But if Obama really wanted to unravel a system that had been established for 20 years, it was beyond his reach. In 2015, the US Senate passed into the hands of Republicans, and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell blocked every possible move by the Obama administration.

In 2017, he refused to even consider Obama’s proposal for the Supreme Court, because there would be elections in ten months (the same Mitch McConnell who, in just three weeks, obtained the appointment of Catholic integralist and traditionalist Amy Coney Barrett on the eve of the just-held elections).

While the dreams evoked by Obama started to fade, the crisis of 2009 brought some unprecedented political developments. Uncertainty and fear were also exasperated by the flow of immigrants from countries destabilised by the interventions of the US and Europe in countries like Iraq, Libya, and Syria, and those escaping dictatorial regimes and hunger.

All over the world, that led to a flourishing of nationalism and xenophobia, with so-called ‘sovranist’ parties being established in every country of Europe, and progressively all over the world. They all based themselves on xenophobia against migrants, denunciation of world and regional institutions as illegitimate and enemies of national interests, and speaking on behalf of the people who were victims of globalisation: workers of factories that had closed due to delocalisation, calls to a glorious past (Brexit, 2016), people from rural areas left behind by the faster development of towns (the Yellow Jackets in France in 2018), Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s brutal annexing of Kashmir to India in 2019, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s astonishing elimination of protection of the Amazon in 2019, Xi annexing of Hong Kong 2020.

So, it would be a mistake to single out Trump, when we are facing a much more serious problem. Trump, of course, now leaves the others naked. Maybe this is the beginning of a new political cycle … but the system is now broken, and it is nearly impossible to fix it.

The coronavirus pandemic has put another nail in the coffin. The negationist wave is another symptom of how the crisis of trust has eroded our society. And, by the way, we have now two proponents of the Qanon theory of conspiracy elected in the House of Representatives. The Qanon theory is that Hillary Clinton and several other important figures, from Bill Gates to George Soros, gather to drink the blood of young boys in the cellar of a pizzeria in New York. Trump is supposed to be the saviour. The fact that the pizzeria in question has no cellar is irrelevant.

To return to the United States, the myths of exceptionalism and the American Dream have now evaporated in the United States. Trump did surprisingly well if you look at the situation with the eyes of a cultivated guy. He is the first president of the United States who never spoke on behalf of the people: on the contrary, he portrayed those who did not vote for him as un-American.

In his government, he had very few Cabinet meetings and he governed through tweets, rarely consulting his staff. He mobilised the fears of the white population against immigrants and other minorities; he proclaimed law and order against any mobilisation, demonising the participants.

He is the quintessence of narcissism, he loves only himself, he does not care about anybody else, and he does not trust anyone. He is an example of misogynism, he paid his taxes in China, but not in the US. He has inaugurated the post-truth era, by making several false affirmations every day.

He has used the public administration as his personal staff, changing public servants continuously and putting people who share his views in their jobs. The Minister of Education does not believe in the public school. The Minister of Justice believes that the president has power over the judiciary. The person responsible for the environment is against clean energy. It looks as if vampires are in charge of blood banks!

It is useless to list all Trump’s disasters in international affairs as they are well known. He has withdrawn from the idea of international cooperation, from the Paris agreement on climate, from the World Health Organization, he has jeopardised the World Trade Organization (a US creation), shown preferences for dictators like Putin and Kim Il Jong, and banalised the NATO alliance (another US creation), and we could go on and on.

He represents classical American isolationism: let is withdraw from a world in chaos, which does not appreciate us, but just wants to exploit us. But we are now living in a multipolar world and globalisation is being played by many hands. By 2035, China will have surpassed the US as the world’s strongest power.

Yet, Trump has drawn votes form all the sick strata of American society. The whites that feel threatened; the rural people who feel left behind; the workers from factories that closed because of delocalisation; the affluent middle class of the suburbs who felt threatened by the poor people encroaching on their properties; the blacks who become middle class and looked with horror to the miseries of the majority of Afro-Americans; the evangelicals who were happy with a Supreme Court becoming right wing and having a vice-president, Mike Pence, and a Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, who are evangelicals; those who keep the myth of the Far West, its individualism, its macho value and its weapons; all those who look at the state, the public, as an enemy of freedom; the policemen who found their impunity under judgement; those who decided that women, gays, abortion and human rights were tilting America into the opposite of its founding values.

All those people exist, they were united by Trump, but they survive him. And in a country where there is now hate and opponents have become enemies, in a country plagued by the opioids epidemy, where one American under six has psychological problems, where more people die each year because of weapons than in the Vietnam War, creating unity is a very, very difficult task.

Democrats thought that to put up an elderly and civilised candidate, Joe Biden, would bring back empathy and dialogue as a rallying factor. In fact, it looks more like Trump has lost the elections than that Biden has won them.

Progressives look at him as an epitome of the establishment and will keep pressing him to become freer from the system. We will only know on January 6th if the Republican Party holds on to the Senate, as is likely, and if the Senate returns under the control of Mitch McConnell the blockage it placed in front of Obama will look like gentle times.

Biden will be able to undo many of Trump’s executive orders but, for example, he will be unable to change the composition of the Supreme Court, which will last for at least a couple of decades. He will not be able to increase health coverage.

The chance of increasing the minimum wage and increasing taxation on the very rich will be near to zero. Republicans will now again become the guardians of fiscal austerity, after having left Trump increase the national deficit to an unprecedented level. And the increasingly powerful left-wing of the Democratic Party will try to condition and push Biden, who they elected just to get rid of Trump.

Trump has now lost his Teflon, and he is a loser. But he has 68 million followers on Twitter, and he is probably going to open his own TV channel. He is going to be a serious problem for the Republican Party. He is going to cultivate the myth of stolen elections and keep his followers in a state of confrontation. Trump is gone, but Trumpism remains.

And this is true for the world. Until we eliminate neoliberal globalisation, the Trumps, the Bolsonaros, the Viktor Orbans and so on of this world will be just be the visible part of the iceberg. But what is going to do that? We have a ray of hope from civil society. Climate drama has brought young people back to acting. And then there are the other two world mobilisations, Me Too for the dignity of women dignity and Black Lives Matter for combatting racism (which is not just an American phenomena), which have brought together millions of people worldwide.

We are in a period of transition. It is not clear to what, but we can only hope that it will be without blood. In the end, it will depend on men and women all over the world, on the ability to find common values in our diversities for establishing relations of peace and creating social justice, solidarity and participation as global bridges. Controlling climate change and saving our planet is an immediate and urgent task. This will depend on each one of us, and we must make this the first bridge to walk, with all humankind.

 

Publisher of OtherNews, Italian-Argentine Roberto Savio is an economist, journalist, communication expert, political commentator, activist for social and climate justice and advocate of an anti neoliberal global governance. Director for international relations of the European Center for Peace and Development.. He is co-founder of Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and its President Emeritus.

The post Trump Is Gone, But Trumpism Remains appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Credit: United Nations

By Natalie Seeto
CANBERRA, Australia, Nov 11 2020 (IPS)

UN peacekeeping dangerously overlooks the reality that peace operations have both unintended and negative consequences. Any intervention into the politics and culture of a community is bound to create tensions between local practices and foreign peacebuilding practices.

Since its inception in 1948, peacekeeping and peacebuilding operations have been hailed by the international community as an effective, vital tool to stabilise conflict-ravaged countries and promote global peace. For everyday citizens unaffected by such conflicts, peacekeeping is generally perceived as a well-intended, necessary intervention to protect innocent civilians, prevent further conflict and assist with peacebuilding efforts.

Peacekeeping involves the deployment of UN troops to support the implementation of a ceasefire or peace agreement during a conflict, though they often oversee overall peacemaking processes.

Peacebuilding aims to reduce the risk of conflict reoccurrence by strengthening a state’s conflict management capabilities and facilitating reconciliation. However, these efforts do not guarantee success or local acceptance. In fact, peacekeeping and peacebuilding may do more harm than good.

Implicit ethical messages behind peacekeeping

The role that UN peacekeeping missions play in conflict-ravaged countries cannot be meaningfully examined without considering the implicit ethical messages that international officers, whether they be peacekeeping troops or administrative staff, carry through their attitudes and actions.

While implicit ethical messages ideally promote mutual respect and inter-group collaboration with the local stakeholders of a given conflict, they often enforce notions of privilege and power held by foreigners. Attitudes of entitlement vis-à-vis local citizens can manifest through the presence of armed guards, excessive leisure activities and even modes of transportation.

For example, in Cambodia, the 1991-1993 United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) forged a disparate economic divide between expatriates and non-UN employed locals. Outside of their mission, many UNTAC international officials spent their leisure time at hotels, shopping centres, restaurants, brothels, and bars, none of which the locals could afford.

Although these lifestyle patterns did not directly affect the substantive work or agenda of the peacekeeping mission, they nevertheless acted as a lens through which local citizens, leaders, and stakeholder groups perceived the legitimacy of the mission itself.

Indeed, this was particularly salient when UNTAC international officials became increasingly associated with prostitution. The rampant rise of HIV-AIDS saw the acronym UNTAC become ridiculed as the “UN Transmission of Aids to Cambodia.”

Further examples of the negative implicit ethical messages that can seep through peacekeeping missions are the 1999-2002 United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) and the subsequent United Nations Mission of Support in East Timor (UNMISET) from 2002 to 2005.

While the overriding agendas of these UN operations were peacebuilding and state-building respectively, the practices adopted by the programs’ international administrators and officers signaled attitudes of privilege.

By accommodating UN officials in “floating hotels” and using the same headquarters as the previous Indonesian administration, an “us vs them” mentality was cemented between the foreigners’ luxurious, flagrant lifestyles and the widespread poverty experienced by locals.

Rather than integrating locals into a new post-conflict world, they were continually economically and culturally marginalised. Not only were locals restricted to menial jobs, but they were also confronted with the upheaval of Timor-Leste’s conservative, Catholic traditions as foreigners raised the demand for prostitution, pornography, and less conservative clothing.

The implicit message that arose from these socio-cultural clashes between the local and international spheres was that UN administrators were privileged and prioritised their own comfort over bottom-up state-building and peace efforts.

This resulted in local resentment, criticism, and frustration towards the foreign administration, some of which was expressed by damaging UNTAET vehicles.

The displacement of the “local” in peacebuilding

Current peacebuilding efforts tend to take a top-down approach to conflict resolution through state-building. State-building focuses on improving the administrative capabilities of the state to exercise authority and stability over its society.

It carries the implicit view that conflict-ravaged countries are “failed states” that need assistance and support from external countries to prevent further escalations of violence. This mentality is flawed as it fails to fully involve and appreciate the totality of local populations.

Without an awareness of the inherent cultural differences between local and expatriate communities, any peacekeeping operation is bound to result in local clashes and resentment. However, cultural awareness alone is insufficient for implementing successful peacebuilding operations. The substantive content and strategies of peacebuilding must also be localised, rather than externally imposed.

Without meaningfully engaging with the insights and aggravations of local populations, the root causes of a conflict cannot be addressed to achieve long-term peace. It is especially important to allow for voices from various societal groups to be heard, rather than allowing elites, or a single religious or ethnic group, to dominate peacebuilding discussions.

By creating platforms for open dialogue between domestic actors, at minimum there is an opportunity for grievances to be constructively shared and negotiated. Without this dialogue, grievances are more likely to be exacerbated through state-building efforts that entrench certain political groups or fail to truly understand the conflict in the first place.

For example, in 1991 the United Nations Observer Mission in El Salvador (ONUSAL), which was established to oversee the post-civil war agreements between the government of El Salvador and Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, sought to reform the country’s armed forces, police, and judicial systems, but the imposition of liberal economic governance frameworks also entrenched existing elite structures.

Where to now?

Instead of displacing the “local” by carrying implicit presumptions that more international intervention and top-down state-building are the only means of instigating sustainable peace processes, the international community should find ways to empower – not silence – local voices.

This is not to say, however, that we should idealise local actors, nor that they will face fewer difficulties or criticisms in the methods they choose to resolve conflicts. But where local actors express a willingness to resolve conflict, international resources must be purposefully mobilised to support local peacebuilding efforts and leadership.

Even where local actors are resistant to conflict resolution efforts and continue to be belligerent, the international community should nevertheless take a bottom-up approach in understanding the socio-cultural, political, and economic dimensions underpinning the conflict.

For the United Nations to maintain its legitimacy and status as a leader of global peace, it must reassess its conventional approaches to peacekeeping and peacebuilding.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Licence and may be republished with attribution.

Source: Australian Institute of International Affairs

 

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The post Peacekeeping is a Double-Edged Sword appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Natalie Seeto is studying a Bachelor of Arts (International Relations)/Bachelor of Laws at the Australian National University. She focuses on Southeast Asian affairs, peace and conflict studies, and post-colonial legacies. She is currently an intern at the AIIA National Office.

The post Peacekeeping is a Double-Edged Sword appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America, addresses the high-level segment of the General Assembly in September 2020. Credit: UN Photo/Rick Bajornas

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 11 2020 (IPS)

The ouster of Donald Trump from the US presidency last week may well be the dawn of a new era for multilateralism – and perhaps for a besieged United Nations— after nearly four years of misguided political rhetoric emerging from the White House.

As a hard-core unilateralist, Trump was openly antagonistic towards multilateral institutions and contemptuous of the world body.

In a front-page story November 10, the New York Times said President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. “makes no secret of the speed with which he plans to bury ‘America First’ as a guiding principle of the nation’s foreign policy.”

The proposed reversal of Trump’s edicts—largely against all norms of international diplomacy– is being described as “The Great Undoing.”

Phyllis Bennis, who directs the New Internationalism Project at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), focusing on the Middle East, U.S. wars and UN issues, told IPS there is no doubt that Biden will return to active engagement with the United Nations.

She said Biden has committed to re-joining the World Health Organization (WHO) on his first day in office, though whether he will commit the U.S. to the WHO-backed COVAX vaccine coalition, that aims to ensure access to any future globally-equitable Covid vaccines, remains a big question.

Activists are already organizing campaigns to challenge potential Biden cabinet and other picks that reflect the longstanding “revolving door” between major corporations and the federal agencies tasked with overseeing them, said Bennis, author of ‘Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today’s UN’.

Since he took office back in January 2017, Trump either de-funded, withdrew from, or denigrated several UN agencies and affiliated institutions, including the WHO, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), the World Trade Organization (WTO), the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the UN Human Rights Council, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and the International Criminal Court (ICC), among others.

Dr. Simon Adams, Executive Director of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), told IPS: “I suspect the first thing Joe Biden will do as soon as he sits down at his Presidential desk in the oval office next January is rejoin the Paris Agreement (on Climate Change)”

Biden understands that climate change is a conflict multiplier and poses an existential threat to humanity. “As for the JCPOA (the Iranian nuclear deal), he might wait a week or two for that one, but I suspect that will happen too”.

The election of Biden is good news for the ICC, Dr Adams said.

“President Trump has tried to destroy the ICC and took the unprecedented step of imposing sanctions on Court officials simply for doing their jobs and investigating war crimes and torture allegedly perpetrated by American forces in Afghanistan”.

But the United States, he predicted, is still unlikely to become a State Party to the Rome Statute, “but I hope Biden will get the US government back to constructively cooperating with the Court.”

That’s bad news for any war criminals and other atrocity perpetrators – wherever they may be in the world – who were sleeping a little more soundly with Donald Trump in the White House. declared Dr Adams, a former member of the international anti-apartheid movement and of the African National Congress in South Africa.

Despite the mostly empty threats of legal challenges against the President-elect, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres congratulated the American people for “a vibrant exercise of democracy in their country’s elections last week”.

Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for Guterres, said the Secretary-General specifically congratulated the President-elect and Vice President-elect and reaffirmed that the partnership between the United States and the United Nations is an essential pillar of the international cooperation needed to address the dramatic challenges facing the world today.

On Twitter, the President of the General Assembly Volkan Bozkir sent his warmest congratulations to the President-elect of the United States, Joe Biden, who he said “has a long history of supporting the United Nations, and to Kamala Harris, whose historic election as the United States’ first woman Vice-President is a milestone for gender equality”.

He said he looks forward to deepening UN-US ties and working together towards a safer and more prosperous world.

Bennis, of the Institute for Policy Studies, said making sure the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the new head, for instance, does not come out of, and view themselves, as accountable to Big Pharma, will be a crucial but difficult struggle for social movements.

It might be possible to persuade the Biden administration to restore its funding to UNRWA, the UN agency that supports Palestinian refugees, given the staggering level of uncritical pro-Israel largesse Trump provided to Tel Aviv, and the exclusion of Palestinian rights from any Trumpian “diplomacy” in the Middle East, she noted.

But it is unlikely, Bennis pointed out, that there will be any serious shifts in substantive support for Palestinian rights at the UN (or elsewhere) – unless Biden’s team agrees to model themselves after the last months of Obama’s second term, in which the U.S. abstained on a Security Council resolution criticizing Israeli settlements, allowing it to pass.

“As to UNESCO, while the Biden administration might decide to return to the UN’s cultural organization, it is unlikely to agree to repay the almost $600 million in unpaid dues Washington has accrued since it stopped paying dues in 2011,” she said.

Meanwhile, under Biden, Dr Adams predicted, the US will systematically re-engage with the multilateral system, rather than seeking to undermine, withdraw or destroy it.

“I, for one, would like to see the US quickly rejoin the Human Rights Council and stop denigrating organizations like UNESCO who are the guardians of humanity’s shared cultural heritage”.

“I think Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are acutely conscious of past injustices in US history and the human rights challenges their country has faced over the last four years,” he added.

“I hope they will carry that awareness onto the global stage and become consistent champions for human rights and international justice everywhere. We need them to strengthen the international norms and laws that Trump tried so hard to ignore or undermine during his Presidency,” Dr Adams declared.

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

  

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Thailand’s COVID-19 response an example of resilience and solidarity: a UN Resident Coordinator’s Blog

By Asoka Bandarage
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, Nov 10 2020 (IPS)

SARS-CoV-2, the corona virus that causes COVID-19, has been spreading exponentially across the world over the last ten or so months. As of November 6th, according to the Center for Systems Science at Johns Hopkins University, there have been 49,195,581 cases of COVID-19, including 1,241,031 deaths.

More than a third of the global population has been placed on lockdown. The global economy is experiencing the deepest global recession since World War 2 and massive numbers of people are losing livelihoods and suffering serious effects on their physical and mental health.

The pandemic has allowed states and corporations to tighten technological surveillance and authoritarianism, curtailing privacy and democratic protest. As virulent second and even third waves of the pandemic speed across countries, people are gripped with fear and despair over their own survival and what the future holds for humanity.

The origin and prevention of the virus are mired in controversy and conflict between conventional and ‘conspiracy’ theories.

This unprecedented, multi-faceted global crisis, however, calls for deeper exploration and broader discourse on its causes and long-term solutions. Biomedical science, social science and ecological and ethical perspectives need to be integrated to overcome this pandemic as well as other pandemics predicted in the years ahead.

Controversy over Origin and Prevention

Given the lack of media coverage, there is scarce public awareness of the likely laboratory origins of previous pandemics like the H1N1 outbreak of 1977-78. The global scientific and media establishments attribute the origin of COVID-19 to an animal-to-human (i.e. zoonotic) transmission at a seafood market in Wuhan, China, in December 2019.

While US intelligence sources also originally asserted this, they conceded in March 2020 that the pandemic may have originated in a leak from the lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

The Wuhan Institute is linked to the US army’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which does research and testing involving bats and coronaviruses and gene editing ‘bioweapons’.

The Wuhan Institute also has a close, decades-old partnership with the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Maryland, the leading US military laboratory for ‘biological defense’ research. USAMRID is known for periodic shutdowns due to its problematic record on safety procedure.

Gain-of-Function Research (GOF) involves “manipulating viruses in the lab to explore their potential for infecting humans.” This type of research is criticized by many scientists on ethical grounds because of the risks GOF viruses pose for human health from accidental release. Due to public health concerns, in October 2014, the US government banned all federal funding for efforts to ‘weaponize three viruses’: influenza, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

In the face of this ban in the US, Dr Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), reportedly “outsourced in 2015 the GOF research on bat coronaviruses to China’s Wuhan lab and licensed the lab to continue receiving US government funding.”

In early 2018, US embassy officials in China raised concerns about “inadequate safety” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. US science diplomats warned that, due in part to a lack of adequate safety personnel, the research that the lab was conducting in relation to bats “represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.”

Yet, action was not taken and despite the controversies, Dr. Fauci was appointed as the leading doctor in the US Coronavirus Task Force and continues to function in that position.

Hollywood films, such as 2011’s Contagion presented eerie premonitions of the COVID-19. In 2015, billionaire and global population control proponent, Bill Gates warned of a huge threat of a global pandemic.

A pandemic simulation called Event 201 was conducted in October 2019 by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum projected up to 65 million deaths due to a coronavirus.

However, the global biomedical, political and business leaders who were well aware of the impending Covid pandemic did not take the precautionary action needed to safeguard people. The United States, Europe and other countries found themselves without adequate testing kits, respirators, hospital beds and medical personnel when the virus started to spread.

A failure of leadership lies behind the massive destruction of human life, livelihoods and social life that we are experiencing today.

Controversy over Mitigation

While lockdowns, curfews and the isolation of entire communities and regions seem to be the norm, the effectiveness of this approach and its enormous negative consequences on the economy, society and mental health are coming into question.

The success of the mainstream approach depends on a host of local socio-economic factors, such as the age of the population, health infrastructure, leadership, mobilization of people as well as just, uniform and compassionate enforcement of preventative measures.

Double standards in enforcing Covid health protocols can contribute to resentment and weaken overall conformity jeopardizing the health and safety of entire populations. Apparently, under strict Covid guidelines in Australia, some individuals have been prevented from visiting with dying family members while at the same time, VIPS and celebrities have been exempt from strict quarantine measures.

Likewise, in Sri Lanka, high powered delegations from China and the United States (led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo) arrived in the midst of the worsening second wave in October 2020, seemingly foregoing national Covid guidelines.

Many countries in the global south, such as, Vietnam, Cambodia, Senegal and Rwanda have contained the pandemic more successfully than the United States and the rich European countries.

As of November 1, Rwanda and Senegal, reported 0.28 and 2.04 Covid deaths per 100,000 people respectively, whereas the corresponding number for the US is a staggering 70.4.

The vast majority of those infected recover easily and only the elderly and those with other pre-existing illnesses are the most vulnerable. Thus far, on November 6th, of the total confirmed 49,195,581 cases, 32,368,883 have recovered.

Given this reality, many epidemiologists are suggesting ‘focused protection’ of the most vulnerable groups, allowing the rest of the population to develop ‘herd immunity;’ the point at which the majority of a population becomes immune and limits the spread to those that are not immune.

Sweden is the leading example of a country that went against the global norm of mandatory lockdowns, social distancing and use of face masks. Sweden experienced much higher numbers of cases and deaths than its Scandinavian neighbors during the first wave of the pandemic.

However, Sweden has had relatively fewer deaths during the current second wave while other Scandinavian and European countries which imposed strict lockdowns early in the pandemic are facing massive spikes in infections and deaths.

Given the relative failures of the mainstream lockdown approach and its negative socio-economic and psychological impacts, alternative long-term approaches like that of Sweden warrant consideration.

A May 2020 report from the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy in the US suggested that the COVID-19 outbreak will not end until 60% to 70% of the human population becomes immune to the virus, which could take anywhere from 18 to 24 months.

Meanwhile, many virologists and global leaders argue that the only way to eradicate the virus would be with a vaccine ‘delivered to every human being’ as quickly as possible. Pharmaceutical companies are now racing to provide a vaccine, the magic bullet to end the pandemic, and a highly profitable one at that.

However, there is no certainty that a vaccine against COVID-19 would act as effectively as previous vaccines against viruses such as smallpox.

The Gates Foundation, which has funded the UK’s Pirbright Institute that is currently working on a vaccine against COVID-19, stands to benefit from vaccine marketing. Bill Gates is calling for a ‘digital certificate’ to identify individuals receiving the upcoming COVID-19 vaccine.

Backed by a massive organization called ID2020, these certificates are expected to grant access to other social and economic rights and services. Mass vaccination to eradicate COVID-19 is seen as the opportunity to introduce a worldwide digital ID, and ID2020 is already testing one in Bangladesh that is ‘biometrically-linked’ to fingerprints.

Reportedly, a ‘covert way to embed the record of a vaccination directly in a patient’s skin’ – called a ‘quantum dot tattoo’ – is also being researched at MIT with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

What would happen to those who refuse to get vaccinated for COVID-19, or other mandatory, possibly gene-altering, vaccines in the future? Will they be denied access to essential services and cast off from society?

Do the kind of research and practices introduced in the name of disease prevention, such as Gain-of-Function Research and bioweapons development, pose greater threats than they provide protection of human and planetary life?

And how do the unprecedented shifts in human behavior seen this year, with increasing reliance on artificial intelligence, undermine age-old patterns of human connectedness to nature and to each other?

Moving Forward

Notwithstanding political and cultural differences, the rising economic power of China is pursuing the same growth driven developmental model as the declining Euro-American alliance. The pandemic has brought to light the dangers inherent in this technology- and market-driven system.

While conventions against biological weapons and bans of Gain-of-Function Research and the like are necessary, the multifaceted Covid crisis calls for a fundamental change of the global military-industrial system.

It is said that a crisis is a turning point, an opportunity to change. To understand where and how to turn, it is necessary for more and more people to question the values of the dominant globalization paradigm, including the management of the Covid crisis.

How has prioritizing unbridled economic growth over environmental sustainability and human wellbeing contributed to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic? How have deforestation, climate change and human expansion into the habitats of other animals contributed to easier transmission of viruses between species?

How has the pollution of the earth’s water, air and soil by industrialized agriculture and militarism, led to the depletion of human immunity and increase susceptibility to new viruses and diseases?

How has the reliance on the globalized import and export economy resulted in massive losses of employment and shortages of essential food and medicine during the Covid crisis?

It is time to fashion a more balanced, ecological way of living that respects the environment, upholds bioregionalism and local communities. More and more people are questioning the prevailing notions of success and development and shifting to agroecology, community-based and healthier ways of living.

These developments need to be complemented with demands for greater transparency, ethics and accountability in the use of technology, especially biotechnology and vaccines against COVID-19 and other viruses.

The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic is making people more sensitive to the fragility and insecurity of life and our physical and emotional interconnectedness to each other and the rest of nature.

The crisis can teach us to overcome fear, excessive greed and individualism and develop compassion for the suffering of humanity and other species of life. It offers an opportunity to overcome despair and powerlessness and to collectively challenge oppressive political and economic structures and turn the world in a more equitable, ecological and healthier direction.

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

 

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The post The Covid Pandemic: Broadening the Discourse appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

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

The post The Covid Pandemic: Broadening the Discourse appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 10 2020 (IPS)

The World Bank has finally given up defending its controversial, but influential Doing Business Report (DBR). In August, the Bank “paused” publication of the DBR due to a “number of irregularities” after its much criticized ranking system was exposed as fraudulent.

Anis Chowdhury

Apparently, data from four countries – China, Azerbaijan, the UAE and Saudi Arabia – was “inappropriately altered”, according to the Wall Street Journal. Exposure of these irregularities was the final straw: now, it is uncertain whether the DBR will return after its suspension.

Exposing the lie
After Chief Economist Paul Romer told the Wall Street Journal two years ago that he had lost faith in the “integrity” of the DBR, and apologized to Chile for possibly politically motivated data manipulation, he was forced to resign. The Economist commented then, “His resignation may not end the controversy”.

Romer later received the so-called Economics Nobel Prize following his resignation. Almost two decades ago, Joseph Stiglitz also received the Prize after being forced to resign following differences with US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers following the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis.

When Justin Sandefur and Divyanshi Wadhwa of the Center for Global Development (CGD) exposed how ostensibly methodological tweaking changed Chile’s and India’s DBR rankings to bolster “market-friendly” Piñera and Modi vis-à-vis their more centrist opponents. Simeon Djankov, founder of the Bank’s Doing Business index, dismissed the CGD and the two authors as “reformed Marxist”.

Doing Business vs SDGs
Djankov insisted that the DBR is about the costs of doing business, not “the benefits of running a society”. He contemptuously told those who criticised the DBR for failing to consider social or environmental impacts, to create their own “index that says the benefits of …regulation”.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

For the DBR, it did not matter if reducing regulations harmed the environment or employment conditions, or if lowering taxes constrained governmental capacity to fund public investment and provide decent public health or social protection as long as such “reforms” lowered the costs of doing business.

Singlehandedly, Djankov exposed the shallowness of the Bank’s commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). By undermining social and environmental dimensions, Djankov exposed the Bank’s actual attitude to sustainable development.

Hence, the Bank had little choice but to ditch the DBR, which has already done enormous damage to development by encouraging harmful tax competition and ‘races to the bottom’ with regard to the protection of the environment and labour rights.

Racing to the bottom for nothing
Governments seek improvements in their country’s DBR ranking believing that it will increase growth via increased investment, especially foreign direct investment (FDI). However, the evidence has been disappointing.

For example, a World Bank Policy Research Working Paper found that, “on average, countries that undertake large-scale reforms relative to other countries do not necessarily attract greater [foreign direct investment] inflows”. For developing countries, it found an insignificant statistical relationship. Another study concluded, “the various studies do not provide guidance on which of the wide range of possible [investment climate (IC)] reforms are most strongly correlated with increased growth”.

Such ranking competition has encouraged debilitating investor-friendly government behaviour. The index has become a tool for governments to formulate, evaluate and legitimize their economic policies. Some now game the system to notch up their countries’ ranking with essentially cosmetic reforms.

Indonesia’s recent “Omnibus Bill” ostensibly for job creation includes many market-friendly reforms that would most certainly boost Indonesia’s DBR ranking. The bill, from a government increasingly influenced by the Bank, is now widely criticised for heavily favouring powerful business interests at the expense of workers, human rights and the environment.

Agrarian counter-revolution
Ditching the DBR may be a good start, but is far from enough. The Bank must also end other similar ‘ideologically driven’ exercises, such as its Enabling the Business of Agriculture (EBA) and Investing Across Borders (IAB) indicators, which prioritise FDI, typically at the expense of some SDGs.

The Bank’s EBA indicators project is an extension of its Benchmarking the Business of Agriculture (BBA) programme, first launched in 2013. BBA, partly based on the DBI methodology, was created after the G8 asked the Bank in 2012 to develop such an index for the G8’s controversial New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition programme.

The Bank claimed, “The indicators provide a tangible measure of progress and identify regulatory obstacles to market integration and entrepreneurship in agriculture”, leading to a more modern commercial agriculture sector. Private agribusiness investors will be the main beneficiaries of its proposed land policies and environmental protection deregulation.

But the Bank does not bother to explain how farmers, especially smallholder or peasant farmers, will benefit from the proposed reforms or from large-scale commercial agriculture. Our Land; Our Business highlighted that the EBA will encourage corporate land grabs and undermine smallholder farmers who produce 80% of food consumed in the developing world.

In January 2017, over 158 organizations and academics from around the world denounced the EBA to the WB President and its five Western donors (USAID, DFID, DANIDA, the Netherlands, and the Gates Foundation), demanding its immediate end.

In response, the Bank made some cosmetic changes and dropped its controversial land indicator. However, its latest (2019) EBA still reflects its strong bias for commercial agricultural inputs and mono-cropping, undermining food security, sustainability as well as customary land holdings.

Favouring Foreign Direct Investment
The Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) introduced its Investing Across Borders (IAB) indicators in 2010. Heavily influenced by Hernando de Soto, the IAB indicators were designed to complement the Bank’s DB indicators.

The IAB indicators claim to help accelerate economic growth by giving primacy to FDI as a driver for job creation, technology transfer, upgrading skills, fostering competition and fiscal consolidation. In fact, IAB indicators encourage frameworks that limit benefits for host countries besides enhancing the harmful effects of cross-border investment deals.

The indicators also violate the letter and spirit of the IFC’s Performance Standards for Environmental and Social Sustainability; Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment respecting rights, livelihoods and resources; Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests; and various other international instruments.

One size never fits all
The rise and fall of the DBR expose the dangers of using and exaggerating the significance of standardised rankings for very different countries and business environments. An IC is typically complex and difficult to reduce to a few key indicators, let alone a meaningful composite index.

Reforming only certain aspects of business regulation because of the influence of Doing Business cannot possibly be optimal, especially when government capacity is constrained. Academic literature reviews conclude, “while there is empirical evidence that institutional reform can promote growth, it is less clear which reforms matter most, how to prioritise possible IC reforms, and what kinds of institutional frameworks and functions are needed”.

Growth drivers and constraints are very context specific, so reform priorities should also be context specific. Therefore, a one-size-fits-all approach to measuring and understanding complex investment environment issues is very problematic, especially one based on the interests and priorities of particular institutions and powers.

The Bank should stop doing harm by concentrating on its original mandate of intermediating finance at the lowest possible cost for sustainable development, relief and recovery in our extraordinary times. It should stop misleading the world, especially developing countries, with its highly biased supposed knowledge products.

 

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Ethiopia's Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed shrugged off concerns that Ethiopia could descend into civil war, even as reports of clashes between federal soldiers and those loyal to the Tigray region’s governing party continued. Courtesy: GCIS

By Alison Kentish
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 10 2020 (IPS)

Already reeling from conflict, extreme weather events and growing displacement due to the COVID-19 pandemic, escalating tensions in Ethiopia’s Tigray region have placed the country on the brink of civil war and many are looking to Nobel Peace Prize-winning Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to avert a potential humanitarian disaster.

The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) has called the Prime Minister an ‘illegitimate leader,’ after Abiy announced that he would postpone elections due to the pandemic. The country’s parliament has in turn declared the Tigray administration illegitimate and last week voted for its dissolution. Prime Minister Abiy confirmed that air strikes had been carried out in the region and warned of further action against military targets.

In a social media post on Nov. 9, the Prime Minister however shrugged off concerns that Ethiopia could descend into civil war, even as reports of clashes between federal soldiers and those loyal to the Tigray region’s governing party continued.

Abiy’s statement came less than a week after United Nations Secretary General António Guterres expressed ‘grave concern’ over the reports of violence and attacks on civilians, while calling for ‘inclusive dialogue’ to diffuse tensions.

The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) has joined the growing number of agencies calling for dialogue to end the conflict. The NRC operates in seven regions in Ethiopia, including the northern Tigray region. The Council’s Regional Director for East Africa and Yemen, Nigel Tricks, spoke to IPS about the current refugee situation in Ethiopia and why the country can ill afford further escalation in violence.

Excerpts of the interview follow:

Inter Press Service (IPS): In your statement you noted that the escalating tensions in Ethiopia are adding to an already tenuous situation that includes mass displacement. What are some of the current humanitarian needs in Ethiopia?

Nigel Tricks (NT): Ethiopia has been a centre for humanitarian response for some time; a situation driven by conflict and erratic weather that have caused cyclical droughts and floods. In 2020 alone, over 19 million people across the country are in need of humanitarian assistance, a situation that has been compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result of recurring food crises, the U.N. estimates 687,000 children will require treatment for severe acute malnutrition. On top of that, Ethiopia is home to 792,000 refugees mainly from Somalia and South Sudan as well as close to two million internally displaced people. The country has also been affected by the recent desert locust infestation, which risks further aggravating the food situation for millions of people. 

More specifically to Tigray and according to the U.N., more than two million people in the region need some form of humanitarian assistance, including 400,000 people who are food insecure, or unable to meet their food needs. The region is also home to 96,000 refugees, approximately 12 percent of the total number of refugees in Ethiopia.

IPS: What would heightened tensions mean for the people of the Tigray region?

NT: Escalating tensions that could result in conflict threaten the safety of thousands of people. Both local communities and displaced people and refugees hosted in the area, are at the risk of being caught up in violence. Conflict would also make it more difficult for vulnerable families, who already rely on aid, to safely exercise their right to access humanitarian assistance like food, health and education especially in the context of a global pandemic. As a result, more people will be forced to migrate, putting them at different risks and making them dependent on humanitarian aid.

IPS: You called for an end to military action. What do you think it would take now to diffuse this situation?

NT: Concerted efforts between the national government as well as leaders in the Tigray region will be paramount in de-escalating tensions. Given the country’s influence across the region, actors such as the African Union can also play a role in helping Ethiopia find a lasting solution to the crisis and enhance greater regional stability.  We would also like to see Ethiopia’s many friends in the wider international community offer their help in finding satisfactory outcomes for all parties.

IPS: Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Do you think that this situation presents an opportunity for him to live up to the ideals of this award and prove that a peaceful resolution is possible?

NT: Ethiopia, in general, has been perceived as a beacon of reconciliation since Prime Minster Abiy Ahmed initiated reforms in the country in 2018. Regionally, the country has also been an important regional influence for good, for example in South Sudan’s peace processes. Ethiopian leaders, including regional and national authorities, have the opportunity now to focus efforts towards a peaceful resolution to the crisis and avoid more violence.

IPS: The eyes of the world are on the United States’ elections, but is it time for world leaders to address the ongoing conflict in Ethiopia?

 NT: World leaders, including international governments, have played their part in supporting Ethiopia both in responding to the current humanitarian situation as well as in their nation-wide development efforts. However, the international community including African regional leaders should step up the involvement in helping Ethiopia find peaceful solutions before there is widespread conflict. The U.S. can make a difference.  How it communicates on the conflict in the coming days could contribute to or reduce tension. 

IPS: The NRC has spoken out on the Ethiopian humanitarian situation. Going forward, how do you proceed? Is it a case of monitoring the situation and continuing to provide shelter and assistance on the ground or does it also mean preparing for a possible influx of refugees?

NT: NRC will continue to monitor the situation while delivering its humanitarian mandate across the country including in the Tigray region where we have been working for several years. We will also work closely with government authorities as well as local and community organisations to ensure that aid reaches those that need it the most in an efficient manner and ensure that, should the situation call for it, we are sufficiently prepared to increase our response.

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In this Reuters file photo taken on September 11, 2017, smoke is seen on the Myanmar border as Rohingya refugees walk on the shore after crossing the Bangladesh-Myanmar border by boat through the Bay of Bengal, in Shah Porir Dwip, Bangladesh.

By UNB, Dhaka
Nov 9 2020 (IPS-Partners)

The United Kingdom wants the new government in Myanmar to take steps towards safe, voluntary and dignified return of the Rohingyas to their place of origin in Rakhine State.

“The new government must work to address the valid concerns of people across Rakhine,” Lord Tariq Ahmad, Minister for South Asia and the Commonwealth at the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), told UNB while exclusively responding to a few questions.

Millions voted in Myanmar’s general polls on November 8 — with election cancelled in Rakhine and the Rohingya disenfranchised — just the second since military rule ended in 2011.

Aung San Suu Kyi remains hugely popular in Myanmar and is expected to win.

The UK minister reminded that the solution lies in Myanmar, and the UK is working tirelessly for accountability and justice. “We’ll also provide the political support needed to resolve this crisis in the long-term.”

He said they also want the Rakhine Advisory Commission recommendations to be implemented, including recognising the Rohingyas as citizens of Myanmar and allowing them freedom of movement, as well as making sure they can access essential services, like schooling and jobs.

The government of Bangladesh has planned to relocate 100,000 Rohingyas to Bhasan Char, to ease the burden on Cox’s Bazar camps and avoid the risk of deaths due to landslides during the rainy season.

Several Bangladeshi media outlets have recently visited Bhasan Char and found the facilities there far better than that of Cox’s Bazar camps.

Asked about the relocation plan, Minister Ahmad said the UK is absolutely clear that the relocation of Rohingya refugees to Bhasan Char must be “safe, voluntary and dignified”.

“We’re extremely concerned to hear of reports of alleged abuse, including sexual abuse, taking place on the island,” he said.

Bangladesh, however, ruled out such allegations terming those reports completely false.

“We support calls by the UN for a protection mission to the island to assess whether it’s safe for people to live there. Full and detailed assessments are needed to determine this,” said the UK minister.

CONCERNED OVER CLASHES IN CAMPS

There are incidents of clashes and killings at Cox’s Bazar Rohingya camps and Foreign Minister Dr AK Abdul Momen recently said the regional and international security will certainly be jeopardised if the Rohingya issue remains unresolved.

Asked how Bangladesh can avert such security threats, the UK minister said they are “extremely concerned” by the recent escalation of violence in Cox’s Bazar and they are relieved to see the situation has calmed for now.

“We’re grateful to our humanitarian partners for their work to help those facing this in the camps,” said Minister Ahmad.

Unfortunately, he said, the trauma and violence the Rohingya people have suffered, and the prolonged crisis, have led to fears of a lost generation within the camps.

“This sense of hopelessness is likely contributing to worsening tensions and increased crime. That’s why our UK aid programmes support access to education, jobs and skills development opportunities for Rohingya people and host communities, to help people see a meaningful future for themselves,” said the UK minister.

He said their programmes also promote the rule of law and access to justice, to help keep people safe.

REPATRIATION OR LONG-TERM SUPPORT

Bangladesh wants to repatriate Rohingyas to Myanmar without further delay while a conference on sustaining support for the Rohingya Refugee Response was held on October 22.

When asked if this conference was conflicting with Bangladesh’s repatriation plan, the UK minister said they welcome the government of Bangladesh’s longstanding commitment to voluntary, safe and dignified returns and share this aim.

He said they are pressing Myanmar to address the root causes of the crisis so that this can become possible.

However, Minister Ahmad said, the continued violence and threat to Rohingya people’s lives in Rakhine State mean this is not possible right now.

“Until that can happen, we’ll help refugees and Bangladeshi families, and take steps that will give the Rohingyas the confidence to return home,” said the UK minister.

“The UK is raising these issues with Myanmar and at the UN, and we’ve convened the UN Security Council three times this year with a focus on the situation in Rakhine and Chin States,” said minister Ahmad.

He said they have sanctioned two generals in the Myanmar military, as recommended by a UN independent investigation, which found them responsible for atrocities, amounting to ethnic cleansing.

UK’S SUPPORT

Minister Ahmad said the UK is extremely grateful to Bangladesh for hosting the Rohingya in their time of need and will continue to help the country until the crisis is resolved.

“Last month we announced £10 million to support Bangladesh’s coronavirus response and preparations for natural disasters such as cyclones and monsoon flooding,” he said.

The UK also announced a further £37.5 million of new support to alleviate the suffering of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees and Bangladeshi people in Cox’s Bazar, said minister Ahmad.

He said this UK aid will provide food, water and sanitation, as well as care and counselling for those traumatised by the horrific violence they have experienced.

“It’ll also improve access to education for 50,000 young people, as well as support isolation and treatment centres for people suffering with coronavirus,” he said.

Minister Ahmad said they remain committed to supporting host communities in Cox’s Bazar.

“Our new funding will support more than 10,000 people from local Bangladeshi communities to cope with the economic impact of the pandemic, including through providing training and supporting business start-up funds,” he said.

The UK minister said they are also currently providing 50,000 people with food assistance to help the Bangladeshi communities living around the camps.

To date, minister Ahmad said, the UK aid has helped get more than 20,000 Bangladeshi women into better-paid jobs, more than 120,000 children and teenagers into quality education and helped over 110,000 people to access clean water.

NOT FORGOTTEN

The UK minister said last month’s conference demonstrates that the world has not forgotten the plight of the Rohingya people and the burden that Bangladesh in particular is shouldering in providing refuge and protection.

As a force for good in the world, he said, the UK is proud to have co-hosted the conference and will continue to work with Bangladesh.

“It’s been more than three years since the latest crisis in August 2017 but the Rohingyas’ suffering continues, and we must not abandon them,” said Minister Ahmad.

Along with their co-hosts, the United States, the European Union and the UN Refugee Agency, the UK urged countries to pledge new support for Rohingya refugees, host communities such as those in Cox’s Bazar, and internally displaced Rohingyas in Myanmar.

Bangladesh is now hosting over 1.1 million Rohingyas in Cox’s Bazar district.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

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