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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 Farhang Jahanpour
OXFORD, Nov 18 2020 (IPS)

American democracy has survived a dangerous virus, and it has even come off the ventilator, but whether it will be restored to full health or will suffer for a long time (like a long Covid) from the negative effects of the virus of personality cult, chauvinism, populism, racism, militarism and, yes let’s say it, fascism, remains to be seen.

So far, President Trump has refused to accept that he has lost the election, and instead of conceding he has alleged massive fraud and vote rigging. Instead of conceding, on November 17the he fired Christopher Krebs, the director of the federal agency that vouched for the reliability of the 2020 election.

Trump continues to claim that the election was stolen from him. His personal lawyer Rudi Giuliani has been engaged in desperate efforts in the courts to prove his boss’s unsubstantiated claims, so far without success. As late as November 15th, Trump tweeted: “He [Biden] only won in the eyes of FAKE NEWS MEDIA. I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go. This was a RIGGED ELECTION!” [Caps as in the original].

Whether ultimately Trump will be forced to concede and move on, his repeated claims of vote rigging and a stolen election have discredited US democracy and have undermined the US reputation as a law-abiding country with a smooth transition of power


In the midst of a deadly pandemic which so far has infected more than 11 million and killed nearly a quarter of a million Americans, the largest number in the world by far, Trump’s refusal to cooperate with the incoming administration to stem the tide of the infections and the resulting economic recession is highly irresponsible.

However, whether ultimately Trump will be forced to concede and move on, his repeated claims of vote rigging and a stolen election have discredited US democracy and have undermined the US reputation as a law-abiding country with a smooth transition of power. There have already been many clashes between Trump’s supporters and opponents, and tension may increase and result in violence before he leaves office.

Four years ago, when the reality TV star and property developer Donald Trump, who had never held any elected office, pushed all his competitors aside and elbowed himself into the White House, despite all the predictions and despite having received three million votes fewer than his opponent, many people were wondering whether the US Constitution’s famed checks and balances would work.

As he broke every rule in the book, blasted the media, sidelined Congress, appointed partisan justices to the Supreme Court, openly criticized the US security services, pulled out of many international treaties, alienated many democratic allies and cozied up with a bunch of authoritarian rulers, it seemed that checks and balances had failed.

The longstanding fear of Trump’s use of force to stay in power, his constant belittling and insulting of his opponent, his encouragement of his base to stick by him, and various attempts to outlaw or at least delegitimize postal votes had caused a great deal of concern among ordinary citizens and even politicians and pundits about a peaceful transition of power.

However, American voters took the matter into their own hands and by voting him out of office as one of only five one-term presidents over the past 100 years they have restored grounds for hope and optimism, but whether the next administration can repair all the damage that has been done to democracy and the rule of law will remains to be seen.

President Trump’s efforts to hold on to power have been unlike anything that Americans have experienced in recent memory, and they resemble the efforts of some rulers in third-world banana republics where the defeated candidates resort to force to subvert the will of the people. “What we have seen in the last week from the president more closely resembles the tactics of the kind of authoritarian leaders we follow,” Michael Abramowitz, the president of Freedom House, which tracks democracy, told the Times. “I never would have imagined seeing something like this in America.”

Apart from undermining democracy at home, Trump and his aides may also engage in some catastrophic adventures abroad before leaving office. According to a New York Times’s scoop, in a meeting with his senior advisors on November 12th, Trump asked them if there were options for a US strike on Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment facilities.

Apparently, they opposed Trump’s course of action because it could kick off a major war in the last weeks of his presidency. The fact is that Iran has not engaged in an illegal activity and has carried out civilian uranium enrichment under the IAEA supervision in keeping with the Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) which Trump violated, and as a part of his “Maximum Pressure”, imposed crippling illegal sanctions on Iran.

Therefore, not only would an attack on those facilities have constituted a war crime, it would also have resulted in massive casualties among civilians living near those installations. A 2012 study found that a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would kill between 5,000 and 70,000 people from the release of 1%-20% of the uranium hexafluoride gas at the Isfahan facility. However, if 50% or more of the gas were released the radioactive fallout would be proportionately larger. Even contemplating such an attack shows the extent of his irresponsibility and even criminality.

Another cause for concern is that even if there is a peaceful transition, the long-term effects of the election are still unpredictable. The vote was not a clear, one-sided repudiation of Trump’s authoritarian tendencies and a return to the rule of law. Although the Biden-Harris ticket prevailed by an almost five million votes margin, Trump too received more votes than he did in 2016.

He continues to have a devoted base, and even after seeing the disastrous record of his rule during the past four years, nearly half of the voters voted for him again. This shows that although Trump was defeated by a small margin, Trumpism is still alive and well, and may pose a serious threat to democratic governance during the next four years.

The Democrats lost seats in the House and, contrary to predictions, failed to gain a majority in the Senate. The runoff elections in Georgia on January 5th may reduce the Republican majority in the Senate but the situation is far from ideal. So, it is still premature to predict the end of Trumpism and a return to political health.

The recent election has highlighted some flaws in the US’s electoral system. Although both Al Gore in 2,000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016 received more popular votes than their rivals they failed to be declared president on the basis of the number of Electoral College votes. This clearly goes against the principle of one-person one vote, and the majority vote deciding the outcome.

The Electoral College is a remnant of the debates in the summer of 1787. The Constitutional Convention debated three options about how to elect a president, election by Congress, selection by state legislatures and a popular election. It should be remembered that at that time the right to vote was generally restricted to white, landowning men.

The choice of the Electoral College was to provide a buffer from what Thomas Jefferson referred to as the “well-meaning, but uninformed people” who “could have no knowledge of eminent characters and qualifications and the actual selection decision.”

Surely, in the age of universal education and mass communication, those condescending arguments are no longer valid. The return to the principle of the majority vote will put an end to this anomaly among democratic countries.

 

Drop box outside the Maricopa County Recorder’s office in Phoenix, Arizona. Credit: Peter Costantini.

 

The whole system of voting also needs changing. At the moment, there is no uniform pattern of voting and different states have their own rules. As a result, there have been unnecessary disputes about postal votes, votes received too late, etc. In most other democratic countries there are clear rules of voting and the results are often announced shortly after the end of the election.

The third problem is the duration of transition from one administration to the next with the possibility of mischief by an irresponsible incumbent. In Britain, for instance, the outcome of the election is usually known by the following day when the transfer of power takes place, and the new prime minister moves into 10 Downing Street as the previous one leaves.

These are surely issues for consideration before the next presidential election. However, whatever happens, the fact remains that American democracy has been dealt a major blow as the result of Trump’s populist and authoritarian rule, and it will need a great deal of hard work, national unity and determination to reverse the trend. Sadly, the raging pandemic, the worsening economic recession and a divided society will make that task very difficult.

 

Farhang Jahanpour is a former professor and dean of the Faculty of Languages at the University of Isfahan and a former Senior Research Scholar at Harvard. He has also taught at Cambridge and Oxford universities. He also served as Editor for Middle East and North Africa at the BBC Monitoring from 1979-2001.

The post The Unprecedented US Presidential Election and its Consequences appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Saul Escobar Toledo
MEXICO CITY, Nov 18 2020 (IPS)

As many have observed worldwide, the outcome of the US presidential elections has been, as expected – full of hope and fear. Many people had the bad feeling that if Trump were to be re-elected, the uncertainty, already enormous due to the pandemic and its effects, would jeopardize the economic recovery worldwide. The triumph of Democrat Biden does not guarantee great solutions, but at the least offers a little more of transparency, certainty, and stability.

Saul Escobar Toledo

For Mexico, the result could impact in different senses: the policy towards Latin America; pressures to stop undocumented migration; and the economic and commercial ties between both nations. There is, however, a special issue that deserves more attention because it has been less well known: labor relations in Mexico.

To understand the issue, it is worth remembering that to renegotiate NAFTA and the signature of the T-MEC or USMC (United States, Mexico, and Canada Agreement) anew labor chapter was introduced. It is Annex 23-A which is entitled “The representation of workers in collective bargaining in Mexico”. There is no doubt that this annex was agreed to try to prevent in Mexico the existence of “contratos de protección patronal” or protection labor contracts which favor employers as they are signed without the knowledge and of course the acceptance of the workers. In short, labor agreements are legally valid but fraudulent because there was no bargaining at all between employers and employees. This kind of contracts have made easier the permanent fall of wages of Mexican workers. The purpose for this has been to attract investments and companies from the US to Mexico.

As a result of the labor chapter agreed in USMC, Mexico had to reform its labor legislation, which happened in April 2019. The new administration headed by President Lopez Obrador was keen to these changes as he was convinced that companies have abused Mexican workers too much and too long.

The constitutional and law amendments gave light to a new labor model. The one that was in force for more than a hundred years was based on tripartite justice (government, employers, and workers); it is now supported by judicial courts. The old order gave the government the power to recognize and control the unions; the new is based on a broad freedom of association. For the first time in many years, Mexican workers will have a real chance to choose by secret, personal and direct vote their leaders and representatives; and join the organization of their choice.

Despite these reforms, the vote of the (new) Agreement in the Congress of the United States was a complicated matter. It was finally resolved when the bill HR- 5430 was adopted on January 3, 2020 by US lawmakers. In Title VII there is a “labor monitoring and enforcement “chapter. It includes an Interagency Labor Committee designed to monitor the implementation and maintenance of Mexico’s labor reform. The Committee will also have the task of establishing a web-based hotline, monitored by the Department of Labor, to receive confidential information regarding labor issues directly from Mexican workers.

The bill authorizes hiring of up to 5 additional full-time officers of the Department of Labor and assign them to the United States Embassy in Mexico. Their duty is: “Submitting to the Interagency Labor Committee on a quarterly basis, reports on the efforts undertaken by Mexicoto comply with its labor obligations”. The bill also established an ‘‘Independent Mexico Labor Expert Board’’, to be responsible for monitoring and evaluating the implementation of Mexico’s labor reform and compliance with its labor obligations. The Board will be composed of 12 members appointed by the government and both parties represented in Congress (Democrats and Republicans).

In summary, the Treaty contemplates a heavy bureaucratic apparatus that will monitor the conditions of Mexican workers , especially in industries such as: automobile assembly; auto part; aerospace; electronics; call centers ; mining and steel and aluminum. In case of finding violations and if they are not corrected, the goods produced in these companies would be detained at the border unable to enter the US and Canada, or rather receive a special tariff. This legal and institutional machinery is going to remain despite the political changes that take place in Washington due to the November 3 elections.

Meanwhile, in Mexico, things changed in more ways than one: the effects of the pandemic and the economic slowdown had a response from the government that consisted of maintaining its original program , planned since last year and, in addition , carrying out an adjustment to public spending . This austerity policy was confirmed in the draft budget sent to Congress for 2021.

Thus, the collapse of the employment, formal and informal, and the income of families have had no compensation, causing a huge social debt that is reflected in an increase of poverty and extreme poverty. It is also expected that the economic recovery will be much slower for the rest of the year and 2021. All this will undoubtedly make more difficult collective bargaining as companies will seek to cut staff, provide fewer benefits or freeze wages. In addition, while the health problem is resolved, the resumption of economic activities may cause more infections and deaths among industrial workers, as seems to be happening in the maquiladora industry along the northern border of the country.

Under these conditions, the implementation of the labor reform, with surveillance and in some cases direct inspection of US personnel could be the cause of disputes and controversies. Biden´s victory will probably put more pressure on Mexico. Labor unions in the US and Canada will support the “monitoring” is carried out effectively and on time.

The president and the Congress of Mexico cannot be indifferent and wait to see what happens. A decisive set of actions to curb poverty and unemployment, protect workers and revive the economy with lower risks is necessary and urgent. Only in this way can workers’ bargaining capacity be strengthened.

The future of the labor reform cannot depend on US pressure on Mexico. Even if we admit that the intentions are laudable,Mexican workers cannot become pieces of a mechanism at the service of a foreign country: nothing more and nothing less than the most powerful nation in the world.

saulescobar.blogspot.com

 

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Technical experts measure the salinity of groundwater wells on Vaitupu Island, Tuvalu. This month work will begin on building the network of tanks and pipes which will eventually convey clean water from the north of Vaitupu Island to the 1,500 people who live in the villages of Tumaseu and Asau in the south. Courtesy: Pacific Community

By Catherine Wilson
CANBERRA, Nov 18 2020 (IPS)

Rural communities on one of the nine islands that make up the Polynesian nation of Tuvalu are anticipating how life will change when they are connected to piped clean water for the first time.

Despite being surrounded by millions of square kilometres of ocean, just over half of the 12 million people who live in the Pacific Islands region have access to clean water, the lowest of any region in the world. In remote island communities in Tuvalu, and across the region, the deficit of clean water is a major obstacle to disease prevention, lifelong health and development progress.

Pisi Seleganiu, whose family live in villages on Vaitupu Island, which is located about 120 kilometres northwest of Tuvalu’s main Funafuti Atoll, told IPS: “It very much affects their daily lives. The only source is rainwater; the issue is when it becomes dry there is no supplementary water supply. People use a lot of fuel to drive to the far end of the island to get water and bring it back to the villages.”

This month work will begin on building the network of tanks and pipes which will eventually convey groundwater from wells in the north of Vaitupu Island to the 1,500 people who live in the villages of Tumaseu and Asau in the south. It’s the culmination of years of consultation between the island’s customary leaders and the regional development organisation, Pacific Community, which is headquartered in New Caledonia, about traditional knowledge of water resources.

Located in the Central Pacific Ocean between Kiribati to the northeast and Fiji to the south, Tuvalu’s estimated population of 10,580 people reside on low lying islands; the highest elevation is 4.6 metres. Surface sources of freshwater are very scarce. There are no rivers, for instance, and islanders are overwhelmingly reliant on capturing rainwater for drinking, cooking and hygiene.

“Tuvalu is blessed to have plenty of rain annually…rainwater harvesting with adequate storage is the only sustainable means to maintain supply for the population,” Uatea Salesa, project manager at the Pacific Community for the Vaitupu Water Security Project, told IPS. But he added that, during times of drought, even the rainwater wasn’t enough.

The atoll nation is highly vulnerable to the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate phenomenon, an alternating pattern of changes in the water temperature of the tropical Pacific Ocean, known as El Niño and La Niña, that, in turn, drive warm and cool atmospheric changes and fluctuating periods of rainfall. In 2011 Tuvalu experienced a severe drought, attributed to La Niña, following months without rain, which led to the government announcing a state of emergency and supplies of freshwater being airlifted into the country by international donors.

Population growth has also increased pressures on the country’s water resources. Tuvalu has a total land area of only 26 square kilometres and a population density of 408 people per square kilometre, resulting in a huge demand for consumption of a fragile natural resource.

Boosting the country’s water security is a major priority for the Tuvalu government and, to this end, desalination has been explored.

“Desalination was installed to supplement the water supply by the government on Funafuti Island [where the capital is located] and on some of the northern islands as a backup during periods of low rainfall and during drought,” Salesa said. “But desalination is an expensive technology and will not be sustainable if it becomes an alternative source of water supply.”

Staff of Tuvalu’s Public Works Dept conduct geophysical surveys to identify the thickness of underlying freshwater lens to determine the potential for groundwater development. Courtesy: Pacific Community

Soseala Tinilau, the Tuvalu government’s director of the Department of Environment, told IPS that the challenges of managing and supplying water also included the low capacity of households to store clean water and continually maintain guttering and water tanks.

The importance of clean water for life and human, as well as national development, was stressed by Dr Stuart Minchin, director general of the Pacific Community, on World Water Day, Mar. 22, this year.

“Lack of access to safe drinking water and sanitation poses a serious health risk, particularly to children, and a fundamental development constraint for Pacific nations….While access to potable water and sanitation is a basic human right that many of us take for granted, it is a right currently denied to over two thirds of Pacific Islanders, especially those in rural areas, informal communities on the fringes of the region’s growing urban areas and on the hundreds of small islands scattered across the Pacific,” Minchin stated.

Clean freshwater is an essential agent, at the moment, in the battle against COVID-19, but also in reducing the prevalence of waterborne diseases in the Pacific Islands, such as diarrhoea and cholera, which are fatal illnesses for young children. And, in an island state, such as Tuvalu, which is increasingly linked to the fortunes of climate change, it’s an imperative for continued human habitation.

“Water is an issue of survival for people in Tuvalu, water is life,” Tinilau told IPS.

And in the Pacific, it’s an issue of greater magnitude in rural communities, where only 44 percent of people have access to water, compared to 92 percent in towns and cities. In Tumaseu and Asau on Vaitupu Island, villagers whose livelihoods are mostly associated with fishing, have access to health clinics and sanitation, but life is challenging without a consistently reliable source of water in the communities.

This is now set to change after technical experts from the Pacific Community drew on the traditional knowledge held by village elders of where sources of well water were located and carried out scientific investigations in 2014. It resulted in the groundwater potential on Vaitupu Island being mapped and quantified for the first time.

“We checked out where they said the location would be, the possible sites. We used technology where we passed electrical signals down to the ground and then we knew exactly where the water was, the level of the water….it was great to see the science behind the assessment actually proving the local knowledge,” Salesa told IPS.

As the elders had said, the most expansive groundwater lens was in the far north of the island, near the coast. The island council then led successful applications to secure funding from the New Zealand Government’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade for the construction of overhead tanks at the well site and pipes to convey water direct to the villages. Clean water is expected to be on tap in Tumaseu and Asau by June 2022.

“It will be so beneficial to implement this project. It will help to improve the status of living of people in both communities. It will make a big difference to health issues,” Seleganiu said, adding that villagers will also have more time to devote to income earning and community development activities, without the time-consuming labour of transporting supplies of water by road.

 

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For every dollar earned by a man in manufacturing, services and trade, women earn just 70 cents. Credit: UNDP

By Odette Kabaya and Angela Lusigi
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia, Nov 18 2020 (IPS)

Africa has over 700 companies with an annual revenue of more than $500 million, including 400 with revenue above $1 billion. The ability of these companies to thrive rests on building and retaining talented women and men.

Empowering both women and men employees, suppliers, distributors, and customers and ensuring they succeed is not only a human rights obligation, it is good business and increasingly a core part of their mission and values.

Private sector engagement is key to gender equality
Deepening engagement with the private sector, both large and small is key to achieving the global 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (SDGs). Achieving targets related to full and productive employment and decent work for all women and men, and equal pay for work of equal value (SDG 8) and gender equality and empowering all women and girls (SDG 5) among others is possible.

Growing jobs in retail, food and agri-processing, health care, financial services, light manufacturing, and construction are already impacting communities. Companies can advance sustainable development and women’s economic empowerment by choosing to do business in ways that ensure women and men can contribute and benefit equally.

By making gender equality central to business practices, the private sector can be a driver of economic and social progress that benefits all.

Gaps remain
Despite progress, gender gaps remain and women’s prospects in the world of work are far from being equal to men’s. Today, more women are both educated and participate in the labour market and there is greater awareness that more gender equality reduces poverty and boosts economic development.

Yet, six out of ten women participate in the labour force compared to seven out of ten men and the unemployment rate for women (8.2%) is higher than men’s (6.4%). For every dollar earned by a man in manufacturing, services and trade, women earn just 70 cents.

Opportunities exist
Globally, advancing gender equality could grow GDP by 12% by 2025, this translates to 300 million more economic output in Sub-Saharan Africa. UNDP’s report on closing gender gaps in labour and productive resource in Africa finds that if women participated in the workforce at the same rate as men, an additional 74.4 million women would enter the workforce and economic output would increase by USD 962 billion.

Closing gender gaps in women’s labour force participation, paid work, employment and productivity could increase economic output by 3% to 16%.

The Government of Nigeria and UN Women last week launched the Generation Equality campaign in Nigeria. The Minister of Women Affairs, Dame Pauline Tallen declared the campaign officially launched in the presence of a high-level UN delegation including UN Deputy Secretary-General, Amina J. Mohammed. November 11, 2020. Credit: UN Women Nigeria

Barriers to overcome
Deep rooted obstacles to achieving women’s full potential at work include low-paying jobs, few channels to voice their concerns and structural and cultural barriers to career advancement. These include education gaps, stereotypes, lack of female role models, the absence of good childcare options and decent maternity leave, as well as risks to their personal safety and security.

Only 22 countries in sub-Saharan Africa meet or exceed the ILO standard of 14 weeks paid maternity leave.

Women in male dominated sectors such as mining risk harassment and gender-based violence and limited inclusion in mining value chains. Social norms assign women and girls the primary responsibility for care and domestic work, hence, on average they spend twice as much time as men.

Empowering women is good for business and livelihoods
Unilever is lifting profits through a Sustainable Living Plan with gender equality in its business model. As women represent over 70% of Unilever’s consumers, increasing their incomes allows increased consumption and empowering women as micro-entrepreneurs selling Unilever products brings in new customers, many in poor and rural areas.

Fifty companies in Uganda and Rwanda are empowering women and achieving the SDGs through UNDP’s Gender Seal Certification Programme for Private Sector (Gender Seal). The Gender Seal initiative certifies that a company promotes and integrates measures for gender equality as an integral part of corporate governance and “good business”.

This programme was pioneered by UNDP in Latin America in 2009 to provide tools, guidance and assessments towards eliminating gender-based pay gaps; increasing women’s roles in decision-making; enhancing work-life balance; enhancing women’s access to non-traditional jobs; eradicating sexual harassment at work; and using inclusive, non-sexist communication.

Participating companies are changing organisation culture, shifting cultural norms and societal expectations and providing more equal opportunities for women and men in the workplace by implementing a Gender Equality Management System (GEMS).

This creates career advancement for women, more participation in leadership, and improved human resource management, strategic planning and communication.

As more public and private organisations in Gambia, South Africa and Gambia partner with UNDP to advance gender equality, UNDP in Africa is developing a cadre of African Gender Seal experts.

Cross regional collaboration with Latin America includes training and customisation of tools taking place in November 2018 in Kampala, Uganda for experts from 20 countries.

 

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Excerpt:

Odette Kabaya is Regional Programme Advisor at the UN Development Programme’s (UNDP) Regional Service Center for Africa (RSCA) and Angela Lusigi is Strategic Advisor, UNDP Africa

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Civil-military operational meeting in the middle of the street in Chile, as part of the actions to contain the covid-19 pandemic. Credit: Ministry of Defense of Chile

By Maurizio Guerrero
NEW YORK, Nov 17 2020 (IPS)

During the Covid-19 pandemic, armed forces in Latin America have been taking on essential tasks: manufacturing protective equipment, delivering food and treating civilians in hospitals. In at least a dozen countries, soldiers have been deployed to enforce containment measures, often using brute force, on populations made up of largely poor informal workers.

In Venezuela and Bolivia, the armed forces have also been used to repress political opposition and to shore up governments with questionable democratic legitimacy.

Disillusionment with democracy in the era of neoliberal austerity has led to a steady decline in satisfaction with this model of government in Latin America

Observers of the situation in Latin America fear that permanent militarisation will become the new normal, and that, in the absence of adequate civilian institutions, many governments will use their armed forces to provide basic services and to clamp down on their critics at the same time. Democracy in Latin America, they warn, may be reduced to no more than a façade once the pandemic is over.

“It will take Latin America a long time to recover from the pandemic. People will feel more insecure and will probably have less confidence in governments. In a great many countries, we will see a strengthening of ‘tutelary democracy’,” says Adam Isacson director of the Defense Oversight programme at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a research and advocacy organisation advancing human rights in the Americas.

In ‘tutelary democracies’, according to the Polish-American theorist Adam Przeworski, civilian authorities run governments in which the military has the final say.

In the context of Latin America, these pseudo-democracies could take hold as a form of government. Isacson is particularly concerned about Honduras and Guatemala, where the presidents recently dismantled international anti-corruption commissions with the backing of the army, and El Salvador, where the president attempted to intimidate parliamentarians by calling the military into the Legislative Assembly earlier this year.

The region, beset with high rates of violence andpoor justice and accountability systems, is forecast to see a 9.1 per cent fall in GDP this year, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

The deployment of armies in response to natural disasters and health emergencies is standard practice, across the globe. No civilian institution is able to mobilise on such a scale. Analysts, however, agree that the worry in the Latin American context is that, in the absence of competent civilian institutions, the military will continue to play a central role once the current emergency is over.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, military units have been stationed in urban areas of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela to carry out patrols, man checkpoints, temporarily close borders and, in some cases, to detain citizens for violating health regulations. During the first few weeks of lockdown, armed forces arrested over 18,000 people in Peru and hundreds in El Salvador.

Although this backdrop may bring to mind the Latin American military dictatorships of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the prominence of the armed forces today does not necessarily presage new military coups, according to Kristina Mani, director of Latin American studies at Oberlin College in Ohio and author of the 2011 book Democratization and Military Transformation in Argentina and Chile: Rethinking Rivalry. She is, however, in no doubt that the military’s growing role in civilian tasks cuts into the space usually controlled by democratically elected governments.

“The armed forces will undertake the tasks they are called on to do by civilian authorities, which is likely to mean that they will require more resources and have a greater ability to question civilian leaders,” says Mani. “The military will have more influence in the countries where it is being deployed most widely.”

The security forces in Venezuela have arbitrarily detained and prosecuted journalists, health workers, human rights defenders and political opponents since mid-March 2020 as part of a state of “emergency and alarm” declared in response to the pandemic, Human Rights Watch reports.

In Bolivia, the restrictions have been used as a pretext for suppressing political demonstrations against the interim government of Jeanine Áñez, who illegally assumed the presidency in November 2019 and postponed the presidential elections on two occasions. In spite of the political repression, Luis Arce, the socialist candidate running for the party of the ousted president, Evo Morales, won the elections on 18 October.

During Áñez’s government, “the military in Bolivia played a dual role by forcing people to stay at home and silencing them as a result. It was also used to clamp down on protests and demonstrations,” says Mani. “This dual role, which politicians can use to their advantage, is a serious cause for concern.”

 

In the ruins of neoliberalism

Many Latin American countries began their current democratic journey in the 1980s and 1990s, at a time when they were forced to implement so-called structural adjustments– severe cuts in government spending – imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Poverty levels in the region remained largely unchanged, while income inequality rose sharply.

Urban violence linked to organised crime and drug trafficking escalated and the region became one of the most violent in the world. Corruption scandals involving political leaders have been the rule rather than the exception: more than half the countries in the subcontinent are embroiled in a single case, that of the Brazilian industrial conglomerate Odebrecht.

According to Brett Kyle, assistant professor of political science and faculty member in the Office of Latino/Latin American Studies (OLLAS) at the University of Nebraska and author of the soon to be published book Military Courts, Civil-Military Relations, and the Legal Battle for Democracy: The Politics of Military Justice, civilian institutions in Latin America have a long history of failure, especially in relation to public security and the workings of the justice system. Rather than investing resources into institutional structures for security and justice, Kyle explains, Latin American governments have used their militaries to deliver “quick fixes”.

This militarisation was already visible prior to the pandemic.

The last 20 months offer numerous examples: Guatemala’s president, Jimmy Morales, surrounded himself with military personnel on announcing his decision to shut down the UN-sponsored International Commission against Impunity (CICIG); Mexico formed a National Guard largely made up of military personnel; Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, encouraged celebrations of the 1964 military coup; Honduras created a new police force that quashed the protests in December 2019; El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, brought the army into the National Assembly to intimidate parliamentarians; and the presidents of Ecuador, Peru and Chile, accompanied by uniformed generals, announced crackdowns on demonstrations.

Mexico, a country that has never endured a military dictatorship, is a singular case. The party that governed the country for 71 years kept the armed forces out of civilian matters. Since 2006, however, the military has been undertaking public security tasks under the pretext of contributing to the fight against organised crime. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has conferred even wider responsibilities on the military.

Despite his government having cut current public spending by 75 per cent this year, the military is building the next major airport and a tourist train. It has also been placed in charge of customs operations. The Mexican military is taking on an increasing number of tasks, despite being the national institution most widely denounced for its role in extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances.

According to a Latinobarómetro opinion poll, satisfaction with democracy fell from 44 per cent in 2008 to 24 per cent in 2018. There is not a country in the region where the majority of citizens are satisfied with this form of government, and in Brazil the level of satisfaction was as low as nine per cent. Confidence in the military is also falling, though the level is still high compared to other institutions: 44 per cent in 2018. And the pandemic appears to have exacerbated the lack of trust in civilian governments.

“We shouldn’t see these trends as a reason for the military to suddenly try to take over civilian governments in the region,” argues Kyle. “What we may see, however, are scenarios in which military leaders view civilian governments as incompetent and try to assume a more prominent role in decision-making.”

Although the United States has directly or indirectly intervened at least 41 times to change governments in Latin America, often supporting military coups, experts agree that the role of the US in this increased militarisation is minimal.

If anything, the impact of President Donald Trump’s government on this wave of militarisation in Latin America has been by omission: its disinterest in supporting democratic initiatives made it easier, for instance, for Guatemala and Honduras to shut down their anti-corruption commissions.

Alongside the growing militarisation in the region, Latin America is seeing the emergence of vigorous social movements . In 2019, millions of citizens in Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Peru and Venezuela took to the streets to denounce corrupt leaders, to call for an end to austerity measures and to fight for free and truly democratic elections.

“The waves of protest we saw in 2019 are going to return and will be bigger still, especially among populations that will find themselves unemployed or underemployed in the midst of a deep economic recession,” says Isacson, warning that mass demonstrations in an increasingly militarised region are “a recipe for social unrest and conflict”.

This story was originally published by Equal Times

The post On the Back of the Pandemic, the Militarisation of Latin America is Gathering Momentum, Analysts Warn appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Journalists at an event in Kabul, to mark the Afghan National Journalists Day (March 2019), in support of media freedom and solidarity with journalists. Reporters have frequently been targeted during the Afghan conflict. Credit: UNAMA/Fardin Waezi

By External Source
Nov 17 2020 (IPS-Partners)

Reporters and other media workers in warzones across the world, are reliable witnesses who contribute to forging peace, and must be better-protected under international humanitarian law, said the UN chief on Wednesday.

António Guterres said in the statement issued by his Spokesperson that he remains deeply concerned, and condemned attacks against journalists and media workers in general, calling for “concerted efforts to tackle widespread impunity for such crimes.”

In 2018-2019, UNESCO – the UN cultural agency which speaks up for journalist safety and protection – documented 67 killings of journalists in countries experiencing armed conflict, among which, 23 were directly involved in covering battlefield hostilities.

“Apart from fatal attacks, journalists covering conflicts face a range of other threats including violence leading to injuries, arbitrary detention, denial of visas and restrictions to movement in, across or out of conflict zones”, said the Secretary-General’s statement.

Majority of deaths unsolved

Even though 2020 saw a “slight decrease” in the rate of impunity for crimes against journalists overall, 87 per cent of such cases worldwide were still not resolved, UNESCO reported earlier this month.

According to the Safety of Journalists and the Danger of Impunity, a report by UNESCO’s Director-General, only 13 per cent of cases globally involving crimes against journalists were reported “as resolved”, in comparison to 12 per cent in 2019, and 11 per cent in 2018.

The biennial report also said that in 2018-19, a total of 156 killings of journalists were recorded worldwide, and over the past decade, a journalist was killed – on average – every four days.

As of the end of September, 39 journalists had been killed in 2020, the report added.

War reporting essential

The UN chief’s stated that “the fundamental role of journalists in ensuring access to reliable information is essential to achieving durable peace, sustainable development and human rights”, and recalled that all civilians, “including civilian journalists engaged in professional missions in areas of armed conflict, must be respected and protected under international humanitarian law.”

He called on all parties to conflict and combatants – as well as “the international community as a whole, to protect journalists and enable conditions for the exercise of their profession.”

‘A dangerous profession’

“Journalism remains a dangerous profession: the threats faced by journalists are many and wide-ranging”, said UNESCO’s report last week, which coincided with the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists.

“While casualties related to countries experiencing armed conflict have declined, fatal attacks against journalists covering stories related to corruption, human rights violations, environmental crimes, trafficking, and political wrongdoing have risen in other countries.”

The report is submitted every two years to UNESCO’s International Programme for the Development of Communication (IPDC) Intergovernmental Council, and opportunity for States to take stock of global developments and discuss challenges linked to promoting the safety of journalists and combatting impunity.

Palestinian journalist, Mohammad Awad, reporting from the field. Credit: UNESCO

Television journalists constitute the largest group among the victims, according to the report.

Over 2018 and 2019, TV journalists constitute 30 per cent of the journalists killed with 47 fatalities, followed by radio with 24 per cent, and print media with 21 per cent of the killings.

Furthermore, as with previous years, a majority of victims were local journalists covering local stories, with 95 local journalists killed in 2018 and 56 local journalists lost their lives in 2019, representing 96 per cent and 98 per cent of the fatalities for the two years, respectively.

Mexican death toll rises

Only this week, a Mexican reporter who was about to go live on air for a digital news outlet, with a story reportedly involving the grisly discovery of human remains, was shot multiple times and died of his wounds soon after.

Israel Vazquez of the El Salmantino outlet, was in the city of Salamanca, according to news reports, and a special team is said to be investigating the journalist’s death although no arrests have been made so far.

He is the third journalist killed in Mexico within the last month, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, and nine have been killed in the past year, according to Reporters Without Borders.

Many of those killed over many years have been reporting on corruption, or the influential drugs cartels who often act with virtual impunity.

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Director of Meteorology at the Ministry of Tourism and Environmental Affairs (MTEA), Duduzile Nheengethwa-Masina, said while Eswatini was able to implement many projects in the different sectors of the NDCs, some targets were not met. Credit: Mantoe Phakathi/IPS

By Mantoe Phakathi
MBABANE, Nov 17 2020 (IPS)

Barry de Maine, the director of Green Cross Pharmacy, lost about $ 7,675 worth of stock when The Mall, the largest shopping centre in Mbabane, was flooded back in 2003. But when the flash floods hit again this year, he had already installed a flange to stop water from coming in.

“This is the best I could do under the circumstances,” De Maine told IPS, adding: “Otherwise since we started experiencing floods at The Mall (17 years ago) nothing has been done.”

Besides damage to shops at The Mall, customers’ cars had to be towed away because they were floating in water.

While De Maine attributes the floods to climate change, he said no one has engaged him to discuss a long-term solution to what has become a frequent event in the capital city.

“I hear people talking about the floods but no one has ever proposed anything. I’m willing to listen but I’m more interested in action,” said De Maine.

He is likely to see action because the southern African nation is determined to leave no one behind, as it renews its commitment to the Paris Agreement. The country made its first commitment to the Agreement in 2015 when it submitted its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. 

But the first NDCs had no implementation plan, costing or monitoring tool, which presented a challenge, the director of Meteorology at the Ministry of Tourism and Environmental Affairs (MTEA), Duduzile Nhlengethwa-Masina, told IPS.

“We’re trying to build in all these elements as part of the review process to ensure that we know who is supposed to do what and how much is needed,” she said.

Under the Paris Agreement, countries revise their NDCs to cut greenhouse gas emissions to limit global temperature rise and implement solutions to adapt to the effects of climate change, every five years.

Although Eswatini is one of the developing countries whose contribution to greenhouse gases is minimal, at 0.002 percent of global emissions by 2010, it is experiencing severe climate impacts such as droughts, hailstorms and floods. About 26 percent of Eswatini’s population was projected to face acute food insecurity between December 2018 and March 2019. According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, poor rainfall, late onset of the agricultural season and prolonged dry spells are some of the reasons households could not meet their needs over the projected period.

Through support from Climate Action Enhancement Package (CAEP), an initiative of the NDC Partnership, 63 countries are given financial and technical assistance to submit enhanced NDCs and fast-track their implementation. Eswatini is one of them.

According to Dr Deepa Pullanikkatil, the NDCs coordinator for Eswatini, eight partners – NDC Partnership, U.N. Development Programme’s Climate Promise, Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, U.N. Environment, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the U.N., the Commonwealth, International Renewable Energy Agency and the World Resources Institute – are supporting different activities in Eswatini’s NDCs review process.

“The process of NDCs Revision began in May 2020 and the country expects to submit the revised NDC by June 2021,” Pullanikkatil told IPS.

The NDC Partnership has engaged 40 implementing partners as part of its Climate Action Enhancement Package (CAEP) which has provided 63 countries with financial and technical assistance to submit enhanced NDCs and fast-track their implementation. Courtesy: NDC Partnership

MTEA and the Ministry of Economic Planning and Development (MEPD) are spearheading the process.

In its 2015 NDCs, the country had committed to producing the National Adaptation Plan (NAP) by 2020, which will focus on building resilience in different sectors including agriculture, water and, biodiversity and ecosystems, among others.  

For mitigation, the country committed to focusing on the energy sector – by doubling the share of renewable energy in the national energy mix by 2030 relative to 2010 levels. Emphasis was also been placed on the transport sector to introduce commercial use of 10 percent ethanol blend by 2030. The country made bigger strides in its commitment to substitute ozone-depleting substances by phasing out HFCs, PFCs and SF6 gases.

Nhlengethwa-Masina said while the country was able to implement many projects in the different sectors of the NDCs, some targets were not met. For example, the country could not complete the NAP by 2020 but she was hopeful that it will be ready by 2021.

“As we submitted the NDCs, we also had statements of conditionality,” she said, adding: “This was relating to the fact that while we commit but we can only achieve the targets on condition that we’re receiving the financial and technological support we need, including capacity building.”

Among the challenges of implementing the 2015 NDC, she cited inadequate investments, limited awareness about the NDCs, policy incoherence and limited involvement of non-state actors.

Rex Brown, a climate change advocate, noted that the private sector – sugarcane, livestock and timber industries – is not engaged in the NDCs process yet climate change has a huge impact on it. 

“We can’t allow the private sector to fail but if it continues to bury its head in the sand, then it faces a stuck future,” Brown told IPS, adding: “It’s not only NGOs and parastatals who need to engage with this process.”

Nhlengethwa-Masina acknowledged to IPS the poor participation of the private sector, adding that when invited to meetings only a handful attend and it was usually the same business people time and again.

She said the NDCs process will come up with strategies to stimulate interest from the private sector because it is critical as the climate finance component focuses on it.

Speaking at the launch of the first review of the NDCs last month, the Principal Secretary at MTEA, John Hlophe, said it was everyone’s duty to take climate action, regardless of what sector people came from. 

Hlophe, who was addressing experts from the private sector, government and civil society organisations, said the NDCs should be owned by the “whole of government” and the “whole of society”. 

“We have to think deeply on how best to implement the NDCs once it is revised,” said Hlophe

Hlophe reiterated the call for renewed efforts made by Moses Vilakati, the Minister of MTEA, a week earlier to political leaders.

Vilakati said, when addressing complex challenges such as climate change, the country needed to bring together the best minds, technical and financial resources that support pragmatic action.

“We can only do this if we join forces,” said Vilakati.

Vilakati said coming up with viable climate adaptation and mitigation strategies in the NDCs will help Eswatini to achieve its national goals such as Vision 2022, its National Development Strategy and the COVID-19 Economic Recovery Strategy because all these goals were threatened by climate change.

“Enhancing NDCs also signals investment opportunities for public finance institutions and private investors to support,” said Vilakati.

The principal secretary at MEPD, Bheki Bhembe, said the National Development Plan 2019/20 – 2021/22 recognises the climate change challenge and is presented as a crucial focus for development planning.

“It is for this reason that the Ministry requested an economic advisor who will work closely with MTEA to strengthen the capacity of central agencies in integrating climate change into national development processes,” said Bhembe. 

Bhembe thanked the NDC Partnership for the technical and financial support in the NDCs revision adding that, this time around, the process has improved compared to 2015.

 

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Forty-Fourth Annual Meeting of Ministers for Foreign Affairs of the Group of 77 and China*

By Hugh Hilton Todd
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 17 2020 (IPS)

We have come to the point in the agenda where we must take a ‘deep-dive’ in reviewing the lessons learnt so far in our response to the COVID-19 pandemic, in order to chart a way for the future. But the future, by its very definition, must be relative. Flexibility and change will define policy making and the scope of action needed for development.

According to the World Health Organization, confirmed cases of COVID-19 now exceed 44.8 million worldwide, with over 1 million deaths as of October 30th, 2020. The human toll of death and destruction has been staggering.

We commend the speed of global collaboration in the search for vaccines, particularly through the ACT-Accelerator initiative of GAVI – The Vaccine Alliance and the WHO, with the hope that it will benefit all countries.

We also note the good news of support for the building up of manufacturing capabilities, the maintenance of global supply chains, and plans for the distribution of up to 2 billion doses of vaccine by the end of 2021, once initial testing is completed – through the COVAX Facility.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the weaknesses of our public health systems, putting immense strain on healthcare provision, and widening socio-economic divides. In short order, our development priorities shifted to the immediate task of saving lives and livelihoods.

Rapid building up of capacity for the effective distribution of social services became imperative, in the face of deepening inequalities, increased gender-based violence and greater vulnerability among children, youth and marginalized households. But we cannot relent in our primary aim to eradicate poverty and inequality.

Hugh Hilton Todd, Minister for Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of the Co-operative Republic of Guyana. Credit: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Guyana

UNDESA estimates that over 34 million people globally will be pushed into extreme poverty this year alone. Some consider this an optimistic forecast, with the World Bank projecting that between 71 million and 100 million people will be pushed into extreme poverty this year.

One thing is certain, that the gains of development of the past decades, and the progress made in the fight against extreme poverty have been eroded.

The social cost of the COVID-19 pandemic is unfathomable or incomprehensible. Children in poor households suffer disproportionally from the closure of schools, with limited or often no access to digital learning facilities and often missing out on school feeding initiatives.

The World Bank estimates that school closures could cause over 7 million students to discontinue their education, drastically increasing their chances of living in poverty. An additional 10 million children globally could face acute malnutrition, with a doubling of the number of people facing acute food insecurity in 2020 relative to 2019.

Globally, 243 million women and girls aged 15-49 have been subjected to sexual and/or physical violence perpetrated by an intimate partner in the previous 12 months. The number is likely to increase as security, health, and money worries heighten tensions and strains are accentuated by cramped and confined living conditions.

Our policy response has evolved, firstly, around the need to save lives and provide critical household support; secondly, in maintaining financial stability, and; thirdly, in providing liquidity and other support to business, particularly small and medium enterprises.

Estimates of global GDP contraction in 2020 range from 3.2 percent to 5.2 per cent – potentially the largest contraction in economic activity since the Great Depression. For regions like my own, this contraction is estimated to be 8.1%, with our CARICOM Small Island Developing States (SIDS) bearing the brunt of this, given the heavy reliance on tourism and services.

In the informal sector, including the gig economy, up to 1.6 billion people are estimated to be at risk of losing their livelihoods, this is according to the ILO. Many lack access to any form of social protection and youth are more likely to be in informal employment and in most cases are unemployed when compared to adults.

Again, Latin America and the Caribbean experienced a 20 percent contraction in employment in the second quarter of 2020 alone.

Not only are our Governments forced to consider shifts in policy priorities, but there are clear signs of even greater shifts by our development partners. An estimated ten trillion dollars were spent by G20 developed economies in COVID-19 stimulus packages, in the first few months of the pandemic. McKinsey and Company reports that Japan has spent 117.1 trillion Yen, equivalent to 21.0 percent of its gross domestic product.

And Germany reportedly spent 33 percent of its gross domestic product on COVID-19 rescue programmes, compared to 5.5 percent for Brazil, 10 percent for India and 8.6 percent for South Africa. At issue is, of course, the limited policy space available to G-77 countries.

The upshot of this is that the liquidity to weather this storm is severely lacking in many of our countries. With limited scope for raising revenue, coupled with contracting economic activity, we have found ourselves mainly reliant on access to financial flows from IFIs. Sadly, this access is severely restricted for the majority of our members due to outmoded systems of classification.

Official development assistance – ODA – could be the most assured form of financial support in our response to the pandemic and in our efforts to rebuild economic and social structures. We know that Official development assistance volumes declined in 2018 and 2019, and the OECD has recognized that the need for concessional development finance like Official development assistance is unparalleled in 2020, in response to COVID-19.

Now more than ever, we call on our developed partners to honor the commitment to increase Official development assistance flows as a percent of gross national income.

Trade as an engine of growth is especially tenuous, with UNCTAD estimating that COVID-19 could trigger as much as fifty billion dollars in export losses across global value chains.

Many of our countries are heavily reliant on remittance flows, which are expected to decline by 20 percent for this year. UNCTAD also projects a decline in foreign direct investment of between forty and fifty percent in the 2020-2021 period.

These factors put together, make a compelling case for greater international solidarity and cooperation. We must refocus our attention on implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, in this Decade of Action and Delivery of sustainable development.

Collectively, we must redouble our efforts to eradicate poverty and inequality, deal with the impacts and threat of climate change and work towards achieving the seventeen interconnected and indivisible Sustainable Development Goals.

The frameworks exist. But accelerated implementation will require the requisite financing, and, as always, the political will, to give meaningful effect to our aspirations.

*The 134-member Group of 77, and China, is the largest single coalition of developing countries at the United Nations, currently chaired by the Republic of Guyana.

 

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Excerpt:

Hugh Hilton Todd, Minister for Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of the Co-operative Republic of Guyana, in an address to the Forty-Fourth Annual Meeting of Ministers for Foreign Affairs of the Group of 77 and China, on the thematic debate on "Global response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the obstacles it poses to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda and achievement of the SDGs”

The post Our Development Priorities Have Shifted to the Immediate Task of Saving Lives & Livelihoods. appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Anis Chowdhury
KUALA LUMPUR and SYDNEY, Nov 17 2020 (IPS)

The United Nations’ renamed World Social Report 2020 (WSR 2020) argued that income inequality is rising in most developed countries, and some middle-income countries, including China, the world’s fastest growing economy in recent decades.

Inequality dimensions
While overall inter-country inequalities may have declined owing to the rapid growth of economies like China, India and East Asia, national inequalities have been growing for much of the world’s population, generating resentment.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

In 2005, when the focus was on halving poverty, thus ignoring inequality, the UN drew attention to The Inequality Predicament. Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned that growing inequality within and between countries was jeopardizing achievement of the internationally agreed development goals.

“Leave no one behind” has become the rallying cry of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Reducing inequality within and among countries is now the tenth of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted in 2015.
Uneven and unequal economic growth over several decades has deepened the divides within and across countries. Thus, growing inequality and exclusion were highlighted in earlier WSRs on Inequality Matters, The Imperative of Inclusive Development and Promoting Inclusion Through Social Protection.

The UNDP’s Human Development Report 2019 (HDR 2019) drew attention to profound education and health inequalities. While disparities in ‘basic capabilities’ (e.g., primary education and life expectancy) are declining, inequalities in ‘enhanced capabilities’ (e.g., higher education) are growing.

Meanwhile, inequalities associated with social characteristics, e.g., ethnicity and gender, have been widening. The January 2020 Oxfam Davos report, Time to Care, highlighted wealth inequalities as the number of billionaires doubled over the last decade to 2,153 billionaires, owning more than the poorest 60% of 4.6 billion.

Drivers of inequalities
WSR 2020 shows that the wealthiest generally increased their income shares during 1990-2015. With large and growing disparities in public social provisioning, prospects for upward social mobility across generations have been declining.

Anis Chowdhury

HDR 2019 found that growing inequalities in human development “have little to do with rewarding effort, talent or entrepreneurial risk-taking”, but instead are “driven by factors deeply embedded in societies, economies and political structures”. “Far too often gender, ethnicity or parents’ wealth still determines a person’s place in society”.

Capture of the state by rich elites and commensurate declines in the bargaining power of working people have increased inequality. Real wage rises lag behind productivity growth as executive remuneration sky-rockets and regressive tax trends favour the rich and reduce public provisioning, e.g., healthcare.

Polarising megatrends
HDR 2019 identifies climate change and rapid technological innovation as two megatrends worsening inequalities, with the WSR adding urbanisation and international migration. Technical change not only supports progress, creating more meaningful new jobs, but also displaces workers and increases income inequalities.

Meanwhile, global warming is negatively impacting the lives of many, especially in the world’s poorest countries, worsening inequality. While climate action will cause job losses in carbon-intensive activities, energy saving and renewable energy are likely to increase net employment.

International migration benefits migrants, their countries of origin (due to remittances) and their host countries. But immigrant labour may increase host countries’ inequalities by taking ‘dangerous, dirty, depressed’ and low-skilled work, pushing down wages, especially for all unskilled, while professional migrations are ‘brain drains’, creating new inequalities and worsening existing ones.

COVID-19 and divergence
COVID-19 may worsen divergence among countries owing to its uneven economic impacts due to the different costs and efficacy of containment, relief and recovery measures, influenced by prior health and health care inequalities as well as state capabilities.

Low-income countries have poorer health conditions, weaker health care and social protection systems, as well as less administrative and institutional capacities, including pandemic preparedness and response capabilities. Hence, they are more vulnerable to contagion, while lacking the means to respond effectively.

Rising protectionism and escalating US-China trade tensions have aggravated challenges faced by developing countries which also face declining trade, aid, remittances, export prices and investments. ‘Vaccine nationalism’ will worsen their predicament.

COVID-19 and inequality
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted many existing inequalities, and may push 71 million more people into extreme poverty in 2020, the first global rise since 1998, according to the 2020 UN SDGs Report.

As 55% of the world’s population do not have any social protection, lost incomes mean poverty and hunger for many more. Before COVID-19, 690 million were chronically food insecure, or hungry, while 113 million suffered severe acute food insecurity, or near starvation, mainly due to earlier shocks.

While those in the informal sector typically lack decent working conditions and social protection, most of the workforce do not have the means or ability to work from home during ‘stay in shelter lockdowns’ as most work is not readily done remotely, even by those with digital infrastructure.

Most have struggled to survive. Relief measures have not helped many vulnerable households, while recovery policies have not done much for liquidity-constrained small and micro-enterprises facing problems accessing capital, credit and liquidity, even in normal times.

Meanwhile, many of the world’s billionaires have done “extremely well” during the coronavirus pandemic, growing their already huge fortunes to a record US$10.2 trillion, according to a UBS-PwC report.

Widespread school closures are not only disrupting the education of the young, but also school feeding and child nutrition. Poor access to health services is making matters worse, as already weak health systems are further overstretched.

Unexpected crossroads
UN and Oxfam reports show that growing inequality is not inevitable. The world saw sustained growth with declining inequality in the Golden Age of the 1950s and 1960s. With the neoliberal counter-revolution against development and Keynesian economics, government commitments to development and tackling inequalities have waned.

A 2020 Oxfam report notes, “only one in six countries … were spending enough on health, only a third of the global workforce had adequate social protection, and in more than 100 countries at least one in three workers had no labour protection … As a result, many have faced death and destitution, and inequality is increasing dramatically”.

Governments must adopt bold policies to radically reduce the gap between rich and poor and to avoid a K-shaped recovery. Internationally, improved multilateralism can help check vaccine nationalism, rising jingoist protectionism and debilitating neoliberal trade and investment deals.

 

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Female Training at centers. Credit: Bidyanondo Foundation

By Fairuz Ahmed
NEW YORK, Nov 16 2020 (IPS)

“This is a crisis without a quick fix that could take years to resolve unless there are concerted efforts to address its root causes”, says Manuel Fontaine, UNICEF Director of Emergency Programmes.

The Rohingya refugee crisis is among the largest and fastest-growing displacement of people in recent history. Since August 2017, close to a million Rohingya refugees have fled Myanmar and taken refuge in Bangladesh. The Rohingyas are “one of, if not the most discriminated people in the world” said the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

Flooding into Cox’s Bazar district in Bangladesh, the Rohingya refugees joined more than 200,000 of others who had fled years before. Today, about 860,000 stateless Rohingya refugees live in the world’s largest and most densely populated refugee camp, Kutupalong. Of the near one million refugees that Bangladesh is currently hosting, about half of them are children.

A stateless Muslim minority in Myanmar, the Rohingyas represents the largest percentage of Muslims in that country, with the majority living in the Rakhine region.

Shipra Das (40), one of the founding members and General Secretary of Bidyanondo Foundation said to IPS: “The Rohingya camp is the biggest refugee camp in the world. Approximately 1.1 million people live here. Among them, more than 10.000 women are pregnant – the majority of them being rape victims. These women give birth in the poverty-stricken refugee settlements in Bangladesh.” Das informed IPS that they have been working on empowering women with knowledge and expertise and added “we have tried to bridge the gap in gender inequality, lessen gender-based violence, and ease the pre-existing mindset. The journey was not easy and help was not accepted by them easily.”

According to Das, the major challenges they faced while working with the Rohingya women in the camps were trust factors, female work seen as a taboo and heightened religious decrees and backlash.

Children at the centers. Credit: Bidyanondo Foundation

Das and her team predominantly work with women and children. They first started their work in the camps by distributing food. Despite threats from local lords, they continued with food distribution.

“During the time of food distribution, I advised our team to go door to door. We saw that other Foundations were distributing food in the field. The elderly, women, and children were left out and could not fight to receive food. The mothers in households were happy to see their children receive food. Gradually the male household members also started to react in a positive manner” said Das.

The next step after the food distribution project was to launch an educational project. “In 2018, we established a handicraft center in the Jamtoli Rohingya camp-15,” Das remarked.

The women in camp-15 are trained in making handicrafts, clothing, PPE, face masks, and more. The training centers are situated in safe zones and women receiving training belong to a diverse age range. The trainees include rape victims, pregnant women, widows, divorcees, and young ones.

A trainee and now an earning member Fatima (24) said to IPS: “I was beaten and bruised. I used to hide my face and miss training because my husband did not want me to go out of the house. But then he fell ill and we were all going hungry. Now I have completed my training course. The weekly groceries are done with the money that I earn from the Bidyanondo centers. Seeing me, a few other women joined the training, and our children are receiving education now.”

The Secretary-General of the Bidyanondo Foundation commented that being the first woman to volunteer and run a female-led branch, she feels immense pride and a sense of achievement. Seeing other women, including the Rohingya refugee women, breaking the barriers and making a living gives her much needed drive to carry on.

The training centers have helped make hundreds of Rohingya women financially independent. All of the proceeds – 100% – earned from the centers are handed over to them.

The women in these Rohingya camps face harsh environments and relentless pressure due to families being displaced which has led to restlessness and violence. Despite the challenges, still, the women are working as frontline workers to sustain their families and communities. If these women can gradually be trained and learn to earn a living and their children are able to receive basic education, then slowly they can pull themselves out of poverty.

 

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Farmer displays her produce at a market in Nairobi, Kenya. Credit: Suleiman Mbatiah/IPS

By Etta Madete and Carl Manlan
NAIROBI, Nov 16 2020 (IPS)

Across Africa, even in cities with relatively modern infrastructure, many shoppers prefer the informal markets. In our case, both our mothers preferred the fresh produce sold at informal markets by women from the rural areas.

Thus, in cities as far apart as Nairobi and Abidjan, our mothers took us to buy fruits and vegetables sold by women entrepreneurs in the muddy corners of our neighbourhoods or at the vendors along main roads.

Reminiscing about these weekly visits to the local food market reminded us of the importance of informal traders in our food system. Most of these traders are women. In Abidjan, for example, the “Marché Gouro” run by women controls 97.5 percent of the fresh food supply and in Kenya women make up 80% of all farmers.

The merging of formal and informal markets has worked well in places such as the famous street markets of London or the souks of Marrakech. At a policy level, African governments can build a stronger relationship with informal entrepreneurs to learn from their skills, community engagement and spatial need

As adults, we still frequent the market. The modern indoor supermarkets and malls had most of what we were looking for but lack character and the animated bargaining conversations with the women traders we grew up with.

This holds true for most African countries where the vast majority of consumer spending is in the informal sector even where formal retail markets are well developed.

The informal transactions have an important element of trust – traders often give an extra banana to top up the purchase or simply add another fruit to test for taste. Through these market experiences, we were able to reconnect to our mothers upbringing in rural areas.

Traditionally, the market was the heart of the village and was often surrounded by important community buildings such as the chief’s camp, the healer’s hut, places of worship and even schools.

The design of these traditional bazaar-like markets with small moveable stalls; considered the social nature of both the buyer and seller. This enabled informal interactions that created a bond of trust that made our mothers and now us retain our connection to the women in the farms where the food comes from.

In the modern city, the market is still the centre for trade, and social activities. In Kenya, the informal market accounts for 82% of the retail market sector with the formal markets only capturing 18%.

Unfortunately, open-air markets, where most people buy their food, are increasingly being closed by governments to stop the spread of the coronavirus, leaving, millions across the continent jobless.

Yet, the inherent design of the open-air market is actually the safest way to shop. With proper sanitation methods in place, the natural ventilation and a buyers access to a multitude of shops these markets are safer than indoor malls.

Africa’s population is expected to reach 2.5 billion by 2050, including 60% living in cities. Transforming the market is investing in the 85.8 percent of Africans generating their income in the informal economy. Moreover, improving market access for the women growing 70 percent of Africa’s food.

Yet, despite the rapidly urbanising centres, the working conditions of informal vendors have not improved over time. Now, however, rebuilding after the coronavirus pandemic is a catalyst to redesign our markets with women at the centre.

In Africa, this means embracing the “Soko stall” for both informal and formal markets. We can learn from the food courts and hawkers in Singapore as well as the design of the Souk in Abu Dhabi Central Market combining traditional and modern architecture.

The traditional bazaar structures have character and most importantly are simple and portable. This allows users to move around the city for ease of market access. It is also more equitable as rents and permanent stalls require high monthly costs.

The urban market with social distancing restrictions will take up more space, we can use the space no longer being taken up by cars, such as quiet streets and parking lots to make temporary space for informal vendors. Thus offering citizens safer environments to meet, trade and build communities.

Furthermore coronavirus, health and safety requires hand washing stations to become a permanent feature in the markets. Some traders can be seen already attempting this by having a handwashing station by their stalls, wearing gloves, and distancing themselves from their neighbours.

This is not a mall versus market debate.

The merging of formal and informal markets has worked well in places such as the famous street markets of London or the souks of Marrakech. At a policy level, African governments can build a stronger relationship with informal entrepreneurs to learn from their skills, community engagement and spatial needs.

When the market becomes a public good — just like schools and hospitals — we are reminded that taxpayers’ resources must enable prosperity by being a source of skills development and prevention of diseases when adequate sanitary measures are in place.

Across the world, policies have been unable to quarantine inequalities. As African cities rebuild their economy, the urban market, formal or informal, can be the space that brings people together, creates employment and adds life to the city.

 

Etta Madete is an architectural designer at BuildX Studio and lecturer (TF) at the University of Nairobi with a passion for design innovation. She is a 2020 Aspen New Voices Fellow. Follow her on Twitter @ettamadete.

Carl Manlan, a 2016 New Voices Fellow at the Aspen Institute, is Chief Operating Officer at the Ecobank Foundation.

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Yasmine Sherif, Director of Education Cannot Wait

By Yasmine Sherif
NEW YORK, Nov 16 2020 (IPS-Partners)

“I am so happy. This is my success!” says 13-year old Cynthia, beaming proudly as she shows her Primary School Certificate with an average mark of 120 out of 150. Thanks to the Radio Education Programme, she will now graduate on to Grade 6! Cynthia’s sense of pride, joy and achievement can only be fully understood when placed in the context of her circumstances. Cynthia is an internally displaced girl, living in Burkina Faso in Central Sahel.

Yasmine Sherif

According to the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack, insecurity and direct attacks on school infrastructure and staff had already forced some 4,000 schools in the Central Sahel to close in early 2020. The impact of COVID-19 further exacerbated this situation, resulting in an estimated 13 million children now out of school across Burkina-Faso, Mali and Niger. The violence of armed conflict first forced Cynthia and her family to flee for their lives, quickly followed by the pandemic.

The result? Cynthia – a young girl already burdened by extreme poverty and gender-inequality – was forced out of school. Yet, she held onto her dreams, had the opportunity to participate in the Radio Education Programme, and now she looks forward to continuing to learn in Grade 6. Cynthia is an inspiration, and her sense of success is testament to the transformative power of delivering education with speed and quality in emergencies and protracted crises.

Empowering Cynthia to surmount the obstacles placed around her was only made possible because donor funds were readily and rapidly disbursable to UN agencies and civil society organizations working with the Ministry of Education. Through pooled investments from Education Cannot Wait, the Ministry of National Education and UNICEF rolled out continuity of learning of 65,000 children by April 2020, with a focus on girls, affected by both armed conflict and COVID-19. Cynthia was one of them.

Oumar, a 17-year-old refugee boy from Mali, now living in Burkina Faso, also succeeded in overcoming the barriers to his education. Due to violence and insecurity in the region, Oumar has been fleeing from refugee camp to refugee camp for the past eight years, while always yearning for some stability to attend school. And then came COVID-19, shattering his last shred of hope.

But today, Oumar has returned to learning! Since June 2020, Education Cannot Wait has provided investments to UNHCR, who together with the government, implements a Radio Education Programme for primary and secondary refugee students. “I now dare to hope again,” says Oumar, who is benefitting from radio-based education just like Cynthia.

Over the past 18 months, Education Cannot Wait has invested almost $30 million in over 20 partners in the areas hardest-hit by the multiple crises confronting girls and boys in the Sahel. These funds are currently reaching over a quarter of a million children and youth. This is possible thanks to continued, generous support from ECW’s 20 strategic donors (see ECW’s Donor Chart below), including recent, top-up support for the Sahel by the United Kingdom and the United States.

But much more needs to be urgently done. The Central Sahel Ministerial Roundtable convened on 20 October 2020, and Education Cannot Wait was invited to join 23 donor partners, who together pledged over US$1.7 billion to Central Sahel. Education Cannot Wait pledged important seed funding to cover one-third of the total budget of its forthcoming Multi-Year Resilience Education Programmes (MYRPs) in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. Donor support to close the remaining $94 million funding gap is now a priority for children like Cynthia and Oumar.

The ECW-facilitated joint programmes bridge humanitarian and development efforts in the education sector. Governments in Central Sahel, UN agencies and non-governmental organizations on the ground are ready to work together in delivering holistic, crisis-sensitive, protection-oriented and gender-responsive quality education, with a focus on the most disadvantaged children and youth, especially girls.

However, without full funding, millions of crisis-affected children and youth may never experience feelings of pride, joy and achievement and may never dare to hope again. Instead of learning, they will be even more vulnerable to poverty, gender-based violence, sexual exploitation, child labor, recruitment into armed and criminal groups, hunger, trauma and loss of hope. This can all be prevented. These barriers can be surmounted. Cynthia and Oumar have proven this, as have many other resilient girls and boys in the region.

The UN Deputy Secretary-General, Amina J. Mohammed, is currently traveling in the Sahel. She has just visited a girls’ secondary school in Nigeria and met with 300 girls surviving the horrors of Boko Haram. All of them are now learning, achieving and able to fulfill their dreams.

In her opening statement to Education Cannot Wait’s High-Level Steering Committee, in September, UN-DSG Amina Mohammed stated: “Education is foundational to all the Sustainable Development Goals, but to advance on the Decade of Action and to recover better from the COVID-19 pandemic, we must step up our efforts to ensure that all girls and boys, including the poorest and most marginalized, are able to complete their primary and secondary education.”

With the Central Sahel Conference, we stepped up our efforts. Now, pledges have to be delivered and education has to be given priority in the allocations. Education Cannot Wait therefore calls on all our strategic donor partners in government and the private sector to fill the $94 million gap for the ECW-facilitated Multi-Year Resilience Education Programmes in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger.

Cynthia and Oumar not only yearn for hope and education, but they have worked for it and persevered by surmounting high barriers. They show that it is possible to succeed even in the most difficult circumstances. We must rise together to the challenge, too. The 13 million children and youth in Central Sahel deserve no less from us.

 

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Excerpt:

Yasmine Sherif, Director of Education Cannot Wait

The post They Deserve No Less in Central Sahel appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Women in Smara camp – the largest of the five refugee camps – collect their monthly distribution of produce from humanitarian agencies. For many families, these are the only fresh vegetables they have access to, resulting in widespread health conditions related to nutritional deficiencies among the refugee population. Credit: Adad Ammi via Oxfam International

By Enguiya Mohamed Lahu
TINDOUF, Algeria, Nov 16 2020 (IPS)

For my entire life, I have been forgotten. I am a Sahrawi refugee, born and raised in the Algerian desert, where my people have remained displaced for 45 years, awaiting the moment when we can finally return to our homeland, Western Sahara.

As we wait, we endure living conditions unimaginable to most – temperatures here soar above 50 degrees Celsius in summer and drop below zero in winter. Water is scarce, delivered to us irregularly by trucks or through deteriorating hosepipes.

Our families rely on food distributions from humanitarian agencies to survive, and many of us grapple with health conditions related to nutritional deficiencies, such as malnourishment, anemia, and stunting. And yet, much of the world is unaware of our existence – in fact, the European Union considers our plight a “forgotten crisis.”

Western Sahara, the last remaining colony in Africa, has been under Moroccan occupation since the signing of the Madrid Accords on 14 November 1975. In 1991, with the agreement of a ceasefire and the creation of a United Nations peacekeeping force, the UN made a promise to the Saharawi people that a referendum would be organized, enabling us to freely and fairly decide our own fate. Decades later, that promise remains unfulfilled and our trust in the international community is eroding.

During that time, another generation of refugees has been born and raised in displacement, acutely aware that the international community has abandoned us. Faced with the prospect of raising our own children hundreds of miles away from our homeland, the frustration among young people in the refugee camps has become palpable.

Nova, a Sahrawi youth-led civil society organization that I was elected to lead this year, is working in the camps to promote non-violence and channel the frustration of young people in constructive and peaceful ways. But without concrete actions taken by the international community to facilitate the peace process, our hope for a peaceful resolution to the conflict is disappearing.

How many more decades will it take for the eradication of colonialism to be achieved? When will the Sahrawi people finally have an opportunity to determine our futures? Our only dream is that we can return to our homeland freely and in peace.

While we understand the challenges that must be overcome for that dream to become reality are immense, Nova believes there are a number of steps that the UN and the international community can take to inspire confidence in the Sahrawi people, and Sahrawi youth in particular.

For 45 years, Sahrawi refugees have been displaced to five refugee camps in the Algerian Sahara, where temperatures soar to 50 degrees Celsius in summer, water is scarce, and produce is incredibly difficult to grow, leaving refugees dependent on humanitarian aid for survival. Credit: Adad Ammi via Oxfam International

Firstly, the UN Secretary-General must immediately appoint a UN Personal Envoy for Western Sahara. It has been 18 months – an inexcusable amount of time – since the former Personal Envoy resigned in 2019. It is the Envoy’s responsibility to lead the political process, and in the past year and a half we have witnessed political negotiations come to a total halt.

We cannot afford to lose any further momentum towards peace. As soon as the new Envoy is appointed, he or she should meet with youth representatives in both the Sahrawi refugee camps and the Western Sahara territory under Moroccan occupation to get a better understanding of our experiences of this ongoing conflict.

Secondly, the UN and international community must ensure that the peace process, once relaunched, is inclusive and representative. The Personal Envoy and the UN Security Council should support and facilitate the participation of young people and women within the negotiations process. It is our futures that will be most impacted by any decisions made during this process, and so our voices deserve to be represented at the negotiations table.

Finally, the UN and governments across the globe should boldly voice support for a referendum on self-determination for the people of Western Sahara, in accordance with international law. When Morocco agreed the terms of the ceasefire decades ago, they made a commitment to allow the people of Western Sahara to exercise their right to self-determination without constraint. Many of Nova’s members – myself included – were not even born when these terms were agreed, and yet they still have not been fulfilled.

The silence of the international community on Western Sahara and the situation of my people amounts to acceptance of decades of suffering and injustice. Sahrawi refugees will not be able to truly live in dignity until a just and lasting political solution that provides for the self-determination of the people of Western Sahara is achieved. After 45 years, it is time for global action towards peace.

Footnote:
In a statement November 13, UN Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told reporters “in recent days, the United Nations, including the Secretary-General, has been involved in multiple initiatives to avoid an escalation of the situation in the Buffer Strip in the Guerguerat area and to warn against violations of the ceasefire and of the serious consequences of any changes to the status quo. The Secretary-General regrets that these efforts have proved unsuccessful and expresses his grave concern regarding the possible consequences of the latest developments”.

He alsol said the Secretary-General remains committed to doing his utmost to avoid the collapse of the ceasefire that has been in place since 6 September 1991 and he is determined to do everything possible to remove all obstacles to the resumption of the political process.
The UN Mission, MINURSO, is committed to continuing implementing its mandate and the Secretary-General calls on the parties to provide full freedom of movement for MINURSO in accordance with its mandate.

 

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Excerpt:

Enguiya Mohamed Lahu is President of Nova, a Sahrawi youth-led organization for the promotion of non-violence

The post The Silence of the International Community on Western Sahara appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) warned that the world was facing a dual pandemic – COVID-19 and hunger and said the international community must prioritise starvation, conflict and migration to stave off a worldwide food crisis. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

By Alison Kentish
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 16 2020 (IPS)

Food security has become a priority in the Caribbean as COVID-19 pandemic travel restrictions have hit the tourism-dependent region hard.

The International Development Bank predicted in July that for Caribbean destinations most dependent on tourism such as Saint Lucia, 12 to 20 percent of the workforce could be affected by the pandemic. That country’s Red Cross COVID-19 Project Manager Marva Daniel told IPS that the impact of tourism jobs losses on low-income households has been particularly devastating.

“With hotel closures food insecurity has really been drastic. We started since March delivering food parcels,” she said. “We’re now moving into a phase where we are going to be issuing food vouchers. That people can also get fresh food. With packaging we could only deliver items with a long shelf life. The vouchers will allow them to expand their diet buying fresh food, meat and dairy items,” she said.

With some countries in the Caribbean relying on tourism for as much as 90 percent of GDP and employment, hotel closures and empty cruise ports have been devastating for the economy – and for families. Many governments announced relief packages, but those measures were for a few months and set against the backdrop of a protracted pandemic. And while resorts are slowly reopening and inviting tourists to work safely from the Caribbean, across the region, millions of hospitality workers remain on the breadline.

Daniel told IPS that the Red Cross’s target is 2,300 households. She says the agency is providing food relief along with risk communications that includes placing banners on public buses, reminding people to protect themselves and others through the 3W’s – washing hands, wearing masks and watching their distance. The agency has also produced public service announcements promoting psycho-social support for the public and those hit by unemployment.

The challenges being faced in the Caribbean are not unique to the region. COVID-19 restrictions interrupted food supply chains globally. In countries already facing food shortages, millions of mothers, children and the most vulnerable are going hungry.

In April this year, the head of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) warned that the world was facing a dual pandemic – COVID-19 and hunger. Last week, David Beasley told the 3rd Edition of the Paris Peace Forum that the international community must prioritise starvation, conflict and migration to stave off a worldwide food crisis.

“When I arrived at the WFP as Executive Director three years ago, the number of people on the brink of starvation was 80 million. That number spiked up to 135-145 million people in the last few years because of man-made conflict,” he said.  “Now, COVID comes on the scene and with economic deterioration and the ripple effect around the world, we’re moving from 135 million people on the brink of starvation to 270 million.”

The U.N. says the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize-winning agency continues to work on the front lines “providing more aid than ever before”. This includes work in countries like Yemen, which Beasley describes as “undeniably the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe,” reeling from war, extreme weather events, sparse water resources and hunger worsened by the consequences of COVID-19.

The WFP spent over $8 billion in humanitarian assistance in 2020, but Beasley estimates that it will need twice that amount next year. He says the international community must put more resources into combating starvation.

“2021 is going to be a very, very difficult year,” he said. “Let me be clear – if we don’t get the money we need in the strategic locations, you will have famine, destabilisation and mass migration. It’s that simple.”

Madagascar’s President Andy Rajoelina told the Paris Peace Forum, which ended on Friday, Nov. 13, that his country’s COVID-19 containment measures dealt a blow to food production.

“Food scarcity was made worse by the pandemic,” he said. “This was particularly true for the most isolated regions of Madagascar like the south, where the population was already suffering from chronic malnutrition and in some cases were starving.”

Rajoelina said his government is aware that millions of people in Madagascar must leave home every day to find food and for them, the lockdowns meant loss of jobs, food shortages and fear for the future. He said his administration is working with the international community to provide food and medical supplies to the most vulnerable, prioritising malnutrition and starvation in the country’s south – a region he concedes has been neglected for far too long. 

For regions in the Global South, COVID-19 is hampering efforts to achieve the U.N. goal to eradicate hunger by 2030. Food security is a fundamental human right and the humanitarian agencies say with movement, climate change and now the pandemic, help is needed to remain on course.

Meanwhile, Daniel told IPS that volunteers are bringing relief in an environment with a different set of protocols than they are used to, now interacting with the community from a safe distance. A food drive is taking place as officials in Saint Lucia deal with a double public health emergency – curbing the spread of COVID-19 and a Dengue outbreak. Daniel is also working with a looming deadline for this level of humanitarian assistance.

“Sadly, this component of the programme will end in December. We will continue as best as we can after that, but the food vouchers will be done by year-end,” she told IPS.

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By Victor Oladokun
ABIDJAN, Côte d’Ivoire, Nov 16 2020 (IPS)

As a 10 year-old newly arrived in Lagos from England, I recall listening intently to how the Yoruba language – my father’s language – was spoken. I would constantly repeat in my head or verbally repeat what I thought I had heard. I was not always successful. Many times, what would come out of my mouth would throw my friends into fits of laughter.

Victor Oladokun

Yoruba is a tonal language. Some three-letter words pronounced wrongly or with the accent on the wrong syllable, can get you into a whole lot of trouble.

I am indebted to the Canadian Catholic boarding School I attended in Ondo – St. Joseph’s College. At the time, the high school was well known for academic rigor and discipline. But one thing I’ve come to really appreciate over the years, was the mandatory learning of the Yoruba language in the first two years of a five-year study. In addition, while Mass was in Latin and English, the music also had a generous sprinkling of uplifting Yoruba hymns backed by traditional drums.

As I look back, I owe my love of the Yoruba language to this cultural exposure.

Which is one of the reasons why I never cease to be amazed by the linguistic snobbery of many upwardly mobile and not-too-upwardly mobile Nigerian and African elite, when it comes to transferring a knowledge of indigenous languages to their children.

In the case of my fellow Yoruba, it is not unusual to be regaled with pride about how their children only speak English.

With an affected Yoruba-English accent denoting social class, this is how the commentary tends to go – “Ehhh … so mo pe awon omo aiye isiyin, won o gbo Yoruba mo. Oyinbo nikan ni won gbo.” Meaning “You must realise that today’s generation no longer speak or comprehend Yoruba. They only speak English.”

The comment by the way is supposed to be a badge of honor.

Languages become endangered for many reasons. While focusing on Nigeria, the same applies to almost all African countries.

1. Unprecedented urban mobility and migration, in which children grow up in places where the language of their parents is either not generally spoken or where it is no longer taught in the community.

2. Inter-ethnic marriages and relationships and a recourse to the official language of English or the more widely spoken Pigin English.

3. A tech-driven world that is dominated by less than a dozen global languages. Consequently, social media, TV and digital content, children’s programs, computer games, mobile apps and news content, do not favor indigenous African languages.

4. Dislocation of populations due to terrorism and ethnic conflicts.

5. Economic migration that ends up leaving the older and elderly speakers of a language behind in rural communities. Languages cannot live without children speakers. As such, as elderly rural speakers die out, the survival of some languages is simply impossible.

This is the dilemma that has befallen the Yoruba language and countless other indigenous languages.

Language is all-encompassing. It is not just a means of communicating. It is also a repository of values, customs, culture and history. In short, language is the embodiment of who a people are.

Therefore, the loss or extinction of a language is simply not an inability to speak in a way and manner that is generally understood. It is the loss of identity – linguistically, culturally, psychologically, and historically.

I’m delighted to see indigenous Nigerian languages woven into the fabric of many recent Nollywood blockbuster movies. Its a step in the right direction.

According to the ‘Atlas of Languages in Danger of Disappearing,’ published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, and (UNESCO), today, there are an estimated 7,000 languages spoken worldwide. Half of the world’s total population speaks only eight of the most common. Also, more than 3,000 languages are said to be spoken by fewer than 10,000 people each.

So what can we do about lingustiic genocide?

Fold our arms? Bemoan our fate? Accept the seemingly unstoppable collision of languages with the forces of ‘modernisation’ and globalization? Or do we take stock, recognize what is at stake, turn adversity into opportunity, and innovatively add value to the tremendous linguistic resources that we own?

We have no choice.

I offer 7 suggestions for starters.

1. Policy makers should go back to the drawing board and once again make the learning of indigenous languages compulsory from kindergarten through high school.

2. Public advocacy and campaigns should be developed to encouage family members and local communities to pass on the treasure of language to the younger generation. One of the dilemmas however, is that today many young and older adults are themselves linguistically challenged. As such, they are in need of tutoring and learning themselves. This is an entrepreneurial opportunity for developers of language apps or creative radio and TV programs.

3. Debates in indigenous languages: Growing up in Lagos, one of my favorite TV programs was the live broadcast of the National High School Debates. I can still hear the opening music ringing in my ears.

Here lies another opportunity. Policy makers, content producers, advertisers, and the private and public sector, could team up to create regionally televised elementary and high school debates in indigenous languages.

To motivate the younger generation, generous and not token awards could include academic scholarships, regional and national media mentions and opportunities to meet with and be honored by leading public and private sector leaders.

4. Business Incubation Hubs: Tech savvy entrepreneurs have an unprecedented opportunity to create innovative indigenous language content, apps and platforms. Opportunities abound for policy makers and the private sector to support and give out annual awards for the best digital content in indigenous languages including children’s animation programs, computer games, TV programs, vlogs or podcasts.

5. Language Schools: France, the UK, Switzerland and Germany have an abundance of schools that offer short or long term language programs. The French language school Alliance Française for example, has a presence in almost every African country. Some foreign language programs are immersive. Others provide tourists or business folk with a basic working knowledge. Again, this is another entrepreneurial opportunity for Nigerians in the Diaspora and at home.

6. Policy makers must help create an environment that promotes learning and drives demand for content and information in indigenous languages. We certainly can learn from countries such as Ethiopia, Somalia, Tanzania and to some extent Rwanda, that use indigenous languages in their respective parliaments.

Why should proficiency in multiple Nigerian or other African languages not be a desirable employment competency? Why should important national messages not be simulcast in their entirety in key indigenous languages in order to reach the largest possible audience? Why is there a complete reliance on English or French in public communication, as is the case in many African countries?

7. Becoming Linguistic Ambassadors: Finally, each one of us can brush up on our own language skills and do so with exceptional pride. For too long, we have bought into the false narrative that ‘local’ is bad and ‘Western’ is sexy. Instead, learn to speak your language with pride. Listen intently to how it is spoken properly. Each week learn new vocabulary words. Over time, you’ll be amazed at the progress you have made.

Every African language is a repository of history, culture and values. When a language dies, so too does history, culture, values, and the intuitive sense of who a people are, where they are from and where they are going.

There is still time to save our languages and prevent cultural genocide. It starts with each one of us.

Dr Victor Oladokun is a communication consultant and former Director of Communication at the African Development Bank

 

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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.