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President Gotabaya Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka. Credit: Permanent Mission of Sri Lanka to the United Nations

By Asoka Bandarage
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, Aug 31 2020 (IPS)

On August 5, 2020, a new government was elected in Sri Lanka, bringing down the previous regime associated with the Central Bank bond scam, the Easter Sunday bomb attacks and controversial international agreements.

The new government has come into office with a two thirds majority in parliament, promising to bring prosperity, security and communal harmony to the beleaguered country. The achievement of these goals depends to a large extent on how neocolonialism and sovereignty are addressed.

Colonialism involves control of a less powerful country by a powerful country to exploit resources and increase its power and wealth. Essentially, neocolonialism involves the same factors: militarism, external expropriation of natural resources, deception and manipulation, collusion with local elites, incitement of ethnic and religious differences (and other forms of balkanization and destabilization) and consequential local resistance to external aggression.

Neocolonialism and Geopolitical Rivalry

Today, strategically located in the ancient east-west Indian Ocean maritime trade route, Sri Lanka faces a competition for control by China on one side and the U.S.-led Asia-Pacific Quadrilateral Alliance (including India, Japan and Australia) on the other.

The new Sri Lankan government says it will reconcile competing external interests. Speaking on behalf of Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the recently appointed Foreign Secretary, Retired Navy Commander, Prof. Jayanath Colombage states: ‘Sri Lanka should be a neutral country. Sri Lanka does not want to be caught up in the power game. Sri Lanka wants to develop friendly international ties with everybody. Sri Lanka should have Sri Lanka-first policy.’

Is Sri Lanka’s current foreign policy moving in this direction?

Chinese Expansion

Sri Lanka has been a participant in China’s $4 trillion Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) since 2005. In January 2017, the previous Sri Lankan government granted an 85 percent stake of the Hambantota port, in the most strategic central point in the Indian Ocean, to the China Merchant Port Holding Company in a 99-year lease.

China is Sri Lanka’s largest creditor and has provided generous support during the Covid-19 pandemic. Given local concerns over the Hambantota port deal, President Gotabaya has previously stated that, on election, he would revisit the lease agreement and renegotiate it.

More recently, he has stated that his government is not planning to amend the commercial terms of the agreement, but wishes to amend agreements concerning port security.

While Sri Lankan activists have been protesting the environmental and social impact of expanding Chinese projects, the Quadrilateral Alliance is seeking to involve Sri Lanka in countering Chinese expansion in Asia, making Sri Lanka a key battleground of geopolitical rivalry.

Allaying the fears of India and the U.S. that the Hambantota port could become a Chinese military base, the new Sri Lankan government has stated that the port should be ‘…limited to commercial activities only. It is zero for military purposes…Sri Lanka will not afford any particular country to use Sri Lanka as a staging area to do anything against another country- especially so India.’

But how would the Quadrilateral Alliance respond if there is real or perceived military activity? It is not hard to imagine a dangerous military situation escalating far beyond Sri Lanka’s control.

Indian Expansion

The policy of the Sri Lankan President, articulated by Foreign Secretary Colombage is that ‘…as far as strategic security is concerned, Sri Lanka will always have an India-first approach. That means Sri Lanka will not do anything harmful to India’s strategic security interests. As far as economic development is concerned, we cannot depend on one country. We are open to anyone.’

However, India’s political and military involvement during the separatist war, especially its impositions of the 13th Amendment on the Sri Lankan Constitution and the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) on Sri Lankan soil, have left fear and antipathy towards India.

The Indo-Lanka Accord that introduced these developments was hammered out in secrecy and signed without parliamentary consultation on July 29, 1987 during a 24-hour curfew. It faced massive resistance and ushered in one of the most violent and anarchic periods in the island’s modern history.

Despite India’s failure to curb Tamil militancy and the failure of the Provincial Council system, India wants Sri Lanka to maintain the 13th Amendment and the provincial councils that it introduced to appease Tamil separatist sentiments.

However, the new Sri Lankan government is under increasing domestic pressure to abrogate the 13th Amendment and to assert Sri Lanka’s sovereignty and political independence from India.

Concerned at Chinese encroachment at the Hambantota port, India is pursuing control over Sri Lanka’s other strategic seaports and to develop the British colonial era Oil Tank Farm in the eastern seaport town of Trincomalee, through a subsidiary of the Indian Oil Corporation, despite protests by Sri Lanka’s petroleum trade unions.

Port Power

External powers are also keen to gain control over the Colombo port, one of the busiest in South Asia, and an important transit hub in the region. Japan is keen for access given its high dependency on energy supplies via the Indian Ocean. There is now a push by the U.S. and India to privatize the Colombo port’s Eastern Container Terminal (ECT) and hand it over to an Indian company.

The Sri Lankan President remains committed to honor a memorandum of understanding signed in 2019 by Sri Lanka, India and Japan on the ECT. According to Foreign Secretary Colombage, ‘the policy of the President was that no national asset would be given in total control to any country’ and the MOU is being honored because it is ‘an arrangement between the two countries. The only thing is that there is opposition to it from port workers.’

On July 31, 10,000 Colombo port workers resisting the privatization of state assets began a strike blocking all roads into and inside the port, completely paralyzing it. President Rajapaksa refused to talk to the unions. Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, the President’s brother, did meet with union leaders and indicated that their key concern was to not antagonize India. Is this an indication of further Sri Lankan subservience to external power, at the cost of local agency and sovereignty?

U.S. Expansion

Given the history of U.S. hegemony and foreign interventions, there is a justified fear in Sri Lanka of U.S. interference in local governance and control of resources. Unsurprisingly, the country is experiencing intense pressure via multiple U.S. military, and economic development treaties.

On Nov. 6, 2019, ten days before the elections that brought Gotabaya Rajapaksa to power, the Government Medical Officers Association filed a Fundamental Rights Petition seeking to halt progress of three pending treaties with the U.S.: the MCC (Millennium Challenge Corporation) Compact on infrastructure development, and two military treaties; the ongoing ACSA (Acquisition and Cross Service Agreement) and new SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement).

The petitioners stated that the MCC compact would violate fundamental Sri Lankan sovereignty and independence, clearly upheld by the constitution. There is also concern at the irreversible nature of such far-reaching treaties.

Among other objectives, the MCC Compact seeks to privatize and commodify state land for investors, including foreign corporations. Gotabaya Rajapaksa promised to discard the MCC Compact during his election campaign, and since in office his government appointed the Gunaruwan Committee to study the issue. Its final report in June raised serious issues on its implications to social, economic and security interests of the country.

The Sri Lankan government plans to submit the report to the cabinet and then to the parliament for debate on a compromise, i.e., as Foreign Secretary Colombage indicates, the government plans to go ahead with the MCC Compact in some form or other.

There have also been clear reports that, whether or not the compact is signed, certain elements will proceed regardless. For example, ‘the e-land registry, cadastral mapping, parcel fabric map, deed registry scanning and digitizing, state land information & valuation are being outsourced to multiple private parties selected by the U.S. embassy Colombo.’

Are external pressures so great that they will inevitably find a way to mold Sri Lanka’s future?

Military engagement with Sri Lanka is considered vital to U.S. objectives in the region. The Acquisition and Cross Services Agreement (ACSA) signed by the previous Sri Lankan government on Aug. 4, 2017 provides the basis to set up a U.S. ‘logistic hub’ in Sri Lanka to secure support, supplies and services at sea.

Similarly, the proposed Status of forces Agreement (SOFA) would allow U.S. military personnel to operate in any part of Sri Lanka, without restriction. Sri Lankans fear that SOFA would make “the whole island … a US-controlled super state operating above the Sri Lankan laws and state….” A Cabinet spokesman suggested on July 1 that the SOFA has already been signed but the new government has made no denial or retraction. Meanwhile the Sri Lankan public is left completely in the dark.

‘Sri Lanka First’

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa have been voted in with the faith and respect of most Sri Lankans, not least for their roles in ending the thirty-year war with the LTTE. Most do not doubt their devotion to the country. Their exemplary management of the Covid-19 pandemic has reinforced this respect.

However, there is a growing sense in the country that the overt and covert pressures from external powers, exemplified by these impending agreements, are so great that a path of neutrality will require deep resolve and conviction. It is, then, the democratic responsibility of Sri Lankans to stay informed, see through the bias of power, and exercise their freedom of expression non-violently.

Our ancestors sacrificed their blood, sweat and tears to safeguard the sovereignty and independence of our country, and it has no price. A luta continua.

Footnote: A luta continua was the rallying cry of the FRELIMO movement during Mozambique’s war for independence. The phrase is in the Portuguese language a slogan coined by the first president of FRELIMO, Dr. Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane, which he used to rally the population in the liberated zones of Mozambique during the armed struggle against Portuguese colonial rule. Following his assassination in 1969, his successor, Samora Machel, continued to use the slogan to cultivate popular support during …

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

 

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The post Neo Colonialism vs. Sovereignty in Sri Lanka appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

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

The post Neo Colonialism vs. Sovereignty in Sri Lanka appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Greta Thunberg (right), Climate Activist, speaks at the opening of the UN Climate Action Summit 2019. Credit: UN Photo/Cia Pak

By External Source
Aug 31 2020 (IPS)

At the end of her first week on strike in August 2018, Greta Thunberg handed out flyers that said: “You grownups don’t give a shit about my future.” Her appearance at the 2019 UN Climate Summit capped a year in the spotlight for the teenage climate activist. Delegates at the summit gave her a standing ovation, but the sound of their applause couldn’t mask Greta Thunberg’s deep frustration.

“This is all wrong,” she said. “I shouldn’t be up here … yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!”

Everything from posters to children’s picture books have captured the inspiring example of Thunberg’s bravery and determination. But adults, even supportive ones, still shirk the opportunity to really pay attention to the remarkable movement she is a part of – its history, its present and its visions for the future.

Young climate activists today tend to perceive climate change as the symptom of a broader systemic problem, connected to the same economic and political roots that produce other forms of violence, injustice and inequality, including racism. They do not advocate making these systems sustainable. Their demand is climate justice, and a new, more just, global system.

In doing so, they miss the significance of the last two years. The climate strike movement has grown into a network of global campaigns focused on systemic change to tackle the climate crisis. In the process, young people have outgrown the mainstream environmental movement. They don’t want recognition in the world of today. They want a new world, and they are building it.

 

System change not climate change

Why is Thunberg frustrated? For one thing, adult leaders have applauded young activists before. In 2014, the then 25-year-old Marshallese poet and climate campaigner Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner addressed the opening of the UN Climate Summit, and delegates were in tears. In 2018, she published a poem with another young indigenous activist, Aka Niviana, which captured their disillusionment with the failing international leadership on climate change.

We demand that the world see beyond

SUVs, ACs, their pre-package convenience

Their oil-slicked dreams, beyond the belief

That tomorrow will never happen

The celebration of Thunberg’s speech by adults in power overlooks the oratory of Jetñil-Kijiner and others who came before. It’s an open wound for young climate activists who hear adults applaud them for having a voice, but continue to act as if the catastrophe scientists warn is already here will never come.

Certainly since 2018, the youth climate movement has outgrown the search for applause. The environmentalist Bill McKibben famously said that environmentalists won the argument on climate change long ago, but need to win the fight.

The youth climate movement that continues to build on Thunberg’s strike doesn’t aim to give adults hope that the world can be saved. They say the world that adults knew is gone. In its place, young people are determined to build a better one.

 

A movement of movements

This movement is run by young people, learning from young people, and for young people. Thunberg explained that her climate strikes were inspired by student walkouts for gun control in Parkland, Florida.

Those school strikes, in turn, learned from young people who had gone before, not least the activism of young people of colour in the US civil rights movement in the 1960s and 70s. This included the 1966 Seattle School Boycott and the work of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), founded by Ella Baker in 1960.

The young climate movement’s links to the fight against systemic racism aren’t just tactical. Mainstream environmental movements led by adults tend to focus on changing policies so that the world as it currently exists can be made sustainable.

A good example is the slogan “listen to the science”, popularised by Extinction Rebellion. It imagines change as a process of pressuring politicians to improve existing economic, social and political systems.

Young climate activists today tend to perceive climate change as the symptom of a broader systemic problem, connected to the same economic and political roots that produce other forms of violence, injustice and inequality, including racism. They do not advocate making these systems sustainable. Their demand is climate justice, and a new, more just, global system.

For instance, Extinction Rebellion activist Daze Aghaji explained in 2019 that young people are in their own, distinct branch of Extinction Rebellion that’s distinct because young people focus on “talking about indigenous communities… the global south… and climate justice”.

Another young activist called Aneesa Khan said at a demonstration ahead of the 2018 UN climate summit that this new wave of climate activism is being led by the people who bear the brunt of climate change – or will in the future. These are young people, women, indigenous people, people who suffer under racist oppression or who live in places that were conquered and colonised by European empires. Essentially, those who bear historical traumas and continue to be impoverished by an unfair global economy.

Khan said:

From environment defenders in Latin America to the Standing Rock Sioux in the US to the anti-coal activists in the Philippines and right here in Poland, we’re here, we’re rising, we’re resisting, we’re fighting, but where are you?

In research with young climate activists, we have found that many young people are inspired by Greta Thunberg, and by other icons of the movement. But they also tend to share her sense of the problem – that “our biosphere is being sacrificed so that rich people in countries like mine can live in luxury.”

On the second anniversary of Thunberg’s first strike, young climate activists were probably not looking at 2018 as the start of their movement. They will have placed her strike in broad sweep of other movements for justice, past and present, and they will be planning for the future. Most of all, they will be sharing with other young people their visions of a new world.

Benjamin Bowman, Lecturer in Politics, Manchester Metropolitan University

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

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An independent UN human rights expert is calling for greater scrutiny of emerging digital technologies which she said are being used to uphold racial inequality, discrimination and intolerance. So, why skip scrutiny of the United Nations?. Credit: ITU/D. Procofieff

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 31 2020 (IPS)

When two recent staff surveys, one in Geneva and the other in New York, revealed widespread racism at the United Nations, it triggered the obvious question: why shouldn’t the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) probe these charges?

http://www.ipsnews.net/2020/08/staff-surveys-reveal-widespread-racism-united-nations/

Currently, the UN has a veritable army of over 80 independent experts, described as “Special Rapporteurs” appointed by the HRC and mandated to undertake “fact-finding missions” to investigate human rights abuses worldwide.

The litany of abuses include torture, arbitrary detentions, involuntary disappearances, contemporary forms of slavery, and most importantly, “racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.”

Do revelations at the UN, warrant a Special Rapporteur to probe racism in international organizations? Or shouldn’t the Human Rights Council widen the mandate of the existing Special Rapporteur to include the UN?

Louis Charbonneau, United Nations Director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), told IPS the results of the UN staff survey are extremely worrying.

“The UN leadership should practice what it preaches and work to end racism across the UN system,” he said.

He pointed out that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has spoken out against racism in the U.S. and around the world.

“He should continue to work on ensuring that the UN itself is a solution to — not part of– the problem.”

As for the idea of a new special rapporteur, Charbonneau argued, there’s a special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism– and looking at racism in the UN system is certainly something that could fall within that mandate.

“If member states feel a new position would be useful to investigate racism in international organizations and come up with recommendations to deal with the problem, we would certainly not object. Anything that helps combat racism is a good thing,” he declared.

Citing his personal experiences in overseas peacekeeping operations, Roderic Grigson, a former Peace Keeping Officer and a twelve-year veteran of the UN, told IPS: “When I arrived in Ismailia, which was where the UN Emergency Force (UNEF II HQ) was located, the UN compound was a mixture of both civilian and military staff. The international civilians, like me who came from overseas, were treated very differently to the local Egyptian staff in many ways”.

For example, he said, the locals who were disparagingly called ‘gyppos’ were not allowed into the international mess (club) in the compound unless they were cooks, waiters or barmen.

“If I wanted to bring a local into the bar for a meal– even if it was someone who worked right next to me during the day– I would be refused entry”, said Grigson, author of the ‘Sacred Tears’ trilogy: a historical fiction set during the civil war in Sri Lanka.

This attitude towards the locals, he noted, “extended across all the UN peacekeeping operations I visited during my time in the Middle East– whether in Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, or Cyprus, it did not matter.”

“The International UN staff in all the UN missions treated the locals like lackeys. And they hated us for it. And I felt very uncomfortable working in this environment,” he said.

“Even though I was considered an ‘international’ having been recruited in New York, I was from Sri Lanka and felt I was a ‘second class’ international given the European clique that was predominant at the time”.

Having grown up in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), which was once a British colony, “I had experienced first-hand what it felt like to be treated as one of the colonial masters on the island”.

“My grandfather who was Scottish, lived with us. He worked in a senior management position in the British colonial administration of the island. He had a position of privilege given his race and colour which extended down to his family. Working for the UN felt exactly like that,” Grigson declared.

Somar Wijayadasa who worked in multiple UN agencies, including the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told IPS the UN is awakening to the issue of “racism” after 75 long years.

Racial discrimination (so discreet & subtle) was always there – especially in UN’s Human Resources Departments, headed mostly by white folks, who were also heads of departments and organizations.

This was on top of the rampant nepotism where unqualified and incompetent relatives of world politicians of all colors were appointed to professional P-level positions.

“That is worse than racial discrimination,” said Wijayadasa who also served with the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and was Representative of UNAIDS from 1995 to 2000.

Wijayadasa also said: “it’s high time the UN Human Rights Council appointed a Special Rapporteur to investigate charges of racism at the UN, and more importantly, for the UN to provide iron-clad protection to whistle blowers who complain about racial discrimination in their offices– and not be punished for speaking out. ”

Asked about the UN’s role in probing racial discrimination, Grigson said: “Yes, I think the UN should investigate these charges, but I also think that the UN is just a microcosm of what takes place in individual countries around the world.”

He said racism begins at home, and by calling out those who indulge in it, however famous or well-connected they might be, is the place to start.

The history of racist ideas can be traced back to those European societies that wanted to rule the world and used slaves to grow their wealth and influence, he noted.

“Slavery was only abolished in the world between 150-200 years ago which means that we are only three or four generations away from the time when people were used as chattels.”

“We saw that happen in Ceylon, and here in Australia, where I live. But what I don’t want to see is an international organization like the UN, which does so much good around the world, become elitist and superior as they have already become to some extent, in the execution of their mandate,” he declared.

Meanwhile, in a message to UN staff on August 27, the Office of Human Resources and the Office of the UN Ombudsman and Mediation Service, said a “United Nations Survey on Racism” was sent on August 19 to all staff members, as part of the Organization’s campaign of dialogue and action to eradicate racism and promote dignity within the United Nations.

“The survey has been taken offline following a number of legitimate concerns raised by staff on some of the content of the survey and we regret any pain and distress it has caused. We fully understand their frustration and acknowledge the need to further approach the issue of race and ethnic identity with greater sensitivity and awareness.”

In its original survey, the UN asked staffers to identify themselves either as “black, brown, white, mixed/multi-racial, and any other”. But the most offensive of the categories listed in the survey was “yellow” – a longstanding Western racist description of Asians, including Japanese, Chinese and Koreans.

The new message said: “Taking into account the genuine concerns expressed by staff, we are reviewing the content of the survey and will communicate when the survey will be relaunched.”

“We take this opportunity to thank staff for their frank feedback as part of a deep and open discussion on the issue of racism and racial discrimination in the United Nations.”

Responding to a question, UN Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told reporters August 27: “Racism is something that needs to be addressed in every society, whether in the United States, whether… in any country, anywhere around the world, it is an issue, and within organizations, including our own.”

What is important, he said, “is that racism be fully investigated and that people need to also be able to express themselves peacefully, and whether that is through collective action, as we’ve seen through sports figures, or other ways, that is their right.”

People have a right to express themselves when they feel strongly about injustice, he declared.

But we’re seeing the issue of racism come up again and again in many, many countries, and this is something that… needs to be an open and frank dialogue on addressing, not only the issue of racism but all the inequalities and injustices that flow from that everywhere, Dujarric declared.

The post Racism at the UN: Practice What You Preach appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The UN’s Security Council, in particular, is suffering from a dysfunctional decision-making method that grants the five victors of the Second World War and official nuclear powers not only a permanent seat but also a veto right. Credit: United Nations

By Daniel Jositch and Andreas Bummel
BERLIN / BERNE, Aug 28 2020 (IPS)

The people of the world need to seize the moment and bring about a democratic global revolution. It is time for a global parliament and real representation.

More than 21 million people got infected with the novel coronavirus and over 770,000 have died. Never before did the world witness similar collective lockdowns of social and economic activity that had to be enforced to contain the pandemic.

For many, the corona-related global crisis exacerbates a situation that was already critical before the outbreak of the virus.

The climate crisis is unfolding with record temperatures in Siberia, Greenland, the Antarctic and other places like the Middle East. The new climate apartheid is characterized by whether you can afford to shield yourself from such heat or not. Most cannot.

135 million people are facing crisis levels of hunger. There are currently more than 70 million displaced people who have fled war, persecution and conflict. It’s the worst humanitarian and refugee crisis in seventy years.

There is a global inequality crisis. Productivity gains and globalization disproportionately benefit the affluent. Financial assets in the trillions are hidden in offshore accounts from tax authorities. The world’s 26 richest billionaires own as much as the poorest 3.8 billion people on the planet.

While global surveys confirm that people across all world regions strongly believe in democracy, there is in fact a democratic retreat. Confidence in the actual performance of democratic governments is waning. Populist nationalism and authoritarianism has been advancing, aided and abetted by social media platforms and the internet. Major arms control treaties are crumbling, geopolitical tensions are rising and multilateralism is under attack.

Civil society and citizens across the world are fighting back, though. Pro-democracy movements are at an all-time high as widespread protests in dozens of countries now and in recent times demonstrate. Freedom and justice have lost no appeal. At the same time, millions of citizens joined climate protests around the world and called for quick and effective action in this critical field.

The present issues are symptoms of a crisis of global governance. There is a scale mismatch between a political world order that is based on 200 states and territories and issues that demand decisive global action.

As the UN celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, the organization continues to lose significance and impact. The UN is only as strong and effective as its member states allow it to be. The same applies to all intergovernmental organizations and forums, including the World Health Organization that had to launch an investigation into its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The UN’s Security Council, in particular, is suffering from a dysfunctional decision-making method that grants the five victors of the Second World War and official nuclear powers not only a permanent seat but also a veto right.

If long-lasting solutions are to be achieved, this scale mismatch must be tackled. It is not enough to call on individual governments to change their policies. The way how the world is governed must be changed. What is needed is a new vision of a democratic world order that is based on shared sovereignty on global issues, a clear commitment to human rights, the principle of subsidiarity and complete disarmament.

When the UN was founded it was recognized that this should only be a beginning and that changes would be required. Article 109 of the Charter provides that a conference to review the Charter should be held by 1955. The UN’s member states did not deliver on that promise. Now is the time to hold them to account.

The world’s people need an actual say in global affairs that is not intermediated by national governments and their diplomats. The key ingredient of a new UN should be a democratically elected world parliament that complements intergovernmental bodies such as the UN General Assembly.

The creation of a new democratic world organization that has actual powers seems to be a gigantic project that raises numerous questions. How is a global democracy to be created while major states themselves are not democratically organised? Can decisions of a world parliament be enforced against the will of individual states? How is it possible that states will agree to the creation of a superior political unit?

These questions show the way forward: The people of the world themselves need to embrace and call for global democracy. Eventually, they are the sovereigns not only in their individual states but on the planet as a whole, too.

A global democratic revolution needs to push for a legitimate, inclusive and representative global body that will deal with these questions in a serious way. The creation of a UN Parliamentary Assembly could be an important stepping stone to launch a global constitutional process and a transformation of global governance.

This global democratic revolution will be peaceful because it is not about destroying structures or conquering territories, but about opening up a political level that is lying idle. Supranational integration cannot be imposed by force. It will happen because the people want it.

If existing movements in the fields of climate, environment, peace, disarmament, democracy, social justice and others join forces, the global democratic revolution will become very real.

This may sound visionary. But the big issues troubling this planet and its people will remain, and worsen, unless the root cause is addressed. A democratic global government is not a mind game in some ivory tower. It is the most important question on the agenda of humanity today.

 

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The post It is Time for a Democratic Global Revolution appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Daniel Jositsch is a Member of the Swiss Senate and President, Democracy Without Borders-Switzerland, and Andreas Bummel is Executive Director, Democracy Without Borders. Twitter: @democracywb

The post It is Time for a Democratic Global Revolution appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Amnesty International says that magistrates in Madagascar have failed to effectively play their role in limiting the length of pre-trial detention and preventing or ending arbitrary detentions. Courtesy: CC by 2.0/Jared Rodriguez / Truthout

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 28 2020 (IPS)

The recent killing of 22 prisoners in Madagascar during a prison escape on Sunday, Aug. 23 has brought the extraordinary situation of the country’s prisons under a spotlight. Human rights watchdog Amnesty International has condemned the killings, criticising the current judicial system that has led to Madagascar’s prisons holding more people awaiting trial than convicted criminals.

News sources have reported the death of 20 inmates in a shootout by police and the army during the prison break on Sunday, during which 88 prisoners attempted to escape Farafangana prison. Thirty seven were eventually captured, with the remaining 31 inmates still at large, according to the reports.

Tamara Leger, Amnesty International Madagascar programme advisor, told IPS that the current judicial process requires anyone, even those accused of a crime, to be put behind bars until trial.

This means, many of them “can be waiting for a trial for years, with little or no information on their cases,” she said. “This has led to the extraordinary situation where Madagascar’s prisons hold more people who have not been convicted than those found guilty.”

Amnesty International’s report on the issue claims that the escape was in protest of the “squalid” living conditions, prolonged pre-trial detention, or getting pre-trial for minor offences such as “theft of a toothbrush”, among other issues.

Mass prison breakouts are not uncommon in Madagascar, and human rights experts say the squalid living conditions in the prisons don’t make it easy on those being detained.

Leger said that 75 percent of the children who are currently being detained in prisons across Madagascar are in the pre-trial phase. She added that the authorities’ use of “unjustified, excessive and prolonged arbitrary pre-trial detention” leads to a range of human rights abuse: right to liberty, presumption of innocence, and to be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person.

Excerpt of the full interview below. Some parts have been edited for clarity purposes.

Inter Press Service (IPS): How does Madagascar’s criminal justice system affect its vulnerable communities?
Tamara Leger (TL): The majority of pre-trial detainees were men (89 percent), who are affected more directly by the lengthy and inhumane conditions of detention and the severe overcrowding. Even though women constitute about six percent of the prison population, and children make up five percent, they are disproportionately affected by some of the system’s consequences through gender-based and aged-based violations.

For example, pregnant women and women with babies do not have access to appropriate healthcare. Children often do not have access to any educational or vocational activities, in violation of Madagascar’s own laws.

The government has failed to prioritise much-needed support for the criminal justice system, which has resulted in poor allocation of human and material resources. Most prisons visited lacked basic resources, critical to the functioning of the prisons, including transport, furniture, sufficient food for detainees and even sheets of paper.

In addition to the severe lack of resources, the lack of training of staff, the poor coordination among the judiciary and the prison institutions, the slow pace of police investigation, and delayed judicial disposal of cases has meant that thousands of people continue to remain detained in prisons for months and years without a trial. Magistrates have failed to effectively play their role in limiting the length of pre-trial detention and preventing or ending arbitrary detentions. Instead, they have adopted a punitive approach — deliberately sending people to pre-trial detention, on a weak and twisted defence of “being seen to be doing justice”, and a conservative approach to using alternatives to detention.

It is mostly economically and otherwise disadvantaged people – the uneducated and underprivileged from rural areas – who are subjected to unjustified, excessive and lengthy pre-trial detentions. The majority of them spend long months or years in prison for non-violent, often petty offences like simple theft, fraud and forgery. With little knowledge or awareness of their rights and even less means to defend themselves, the poor and the marginalised are also the most likely to suffer the most from their detention.

IPS: How have prisoners been affected during the pandemic and what kind of services were provided to them?

TL: According to our research, the pandemic has made the conditions of detention, which were already extremely difficult, even more unbearable. Our sources on the ground report that detainees can no longer receive visits from their relatives and lawyers, which constituted for many their lifeline. Indeed, most detainees relied on their families to receive adequate food during their imprisonment, as the food provided by the prison administration is often extremely poor in quality and quantity.

In addition, detainees fear becoming infected with COVID-19. The overcrowding is such that it is very difficult for the government to implement the necessary measures to prevent the spread of coronavirus within the prisons. Pre-trial detainees and sentenced detainees are held all together in big, cramped rooms by lack of space (international law provides that these two categories must be separated), so it is hardly possible for detainees to practice social distancing. Furthermore, detainees fear that if they do fall sick, they will not have access to appropriate healthcare. 

IPS: The report also claims “We have warned the authorities time and again that the squalid detention conditions in Madagascar, compounded by overcrowding and a lack of resources, would lead to tragedy.” Were these conditions squalid even before the pandemic?

TL: Yes, absolutely. Amnesty International has documented the conditions of detention in our report published in 2018, which you can find here. Amnesty International’s visits to the nine prisons revealed the appalling conditions in which pre-trial detainees are held. Dark and with little ventilation, most cells are extremely overcrowded, posing serious risks to the detainees’ physical and mental well-being.

In 2017, 129 detainees died in Madagascar’s prisons, 52 of them pre-trial detainees. According to prison authorities, the main causes of death are respiratory problems, cardiovascular diseases, and what they describe as a general bad state [of health]. Prisons are dilapidated, ill-equipped, with lack of financial, material and general support. Prison staff complained about the lack of resources, ranging from sheets of paper, to computer equipment, furniture and transportation.

None of the prisons visited provide any separation between pre-trial and sentenced prisoners, as provided in international human rights law and standards, with three not even appropriately separating boys from men. The prison administration reported that only 24 out of 42 central prisons have a separate section for minors, and that more than a hundred minors were held with adults, in violation of international and national laws. Girls were not separated from adult women, and even in new prisons being built, the separation between girls and women is not being planned. Across all the prisons visited, researchers observed poor sanitation, absence of healthcare, lack of adequate food, educational or vocational opportunities and limited access to families.

IPS: It appears that prison breaks are not uncommon in the country. Has it always been met with this level of violence from the state?

TL: Unfortunately, prison breaks aren’t uncommon because of the lack of resources and overall, the lack of prioritisation of the prison system in the country. There is an acute shortage of key staff within the criminal justice system, ranging from the number of judiciary police officers, to magistrates, lawyers and prison staff. The budget allocated to the prison administration and the judiciary is insufficient to enable effective functioning of the criminal justice system. While this has been a particularly violent response from the state, security forces in Madagascar unfortunately often resort to excessive and disproportionate use of force, including lethal force, particularly in their fight against alleged ‘dahalos’ (cattle thieves).

 

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Without the daily commute it is not hard to see both productivity and financial benefits. Expect a reduced need for big, expensive, downtown offices. Credit: Universidad de Chile

By Gary Rynhart
PRETORIA, Aug 28 2020 (IPS)

In the last 100 years there have been seven crises that have had a truly global impact. Two global wars (1914-18 & 1939-1945); two global health pandemics, the Spanish Flu (1918) and HIV/AIDS (1980s onwards); one major political crisis (1989 – the end of the cold war); and two financial crises (1929 and 2008).

All these crises emerged in unique circumstances, with multiple causes. Yet we can draw some tentative conclusions that are relevant to our situation today.

First – hardly a news flash – is that health crises lead to innovation in health care. Penicillin was discovered in 1926 in a decade that was marked by medical advances. The groundwork for the modern pharmaceutical industry was laid in this decade. The focus on hygiene led to the emergence of new companies, like Unilever and Procter&Gamble.

Gary Rynhart, Specialist, Employers’ Activities, DWT/CO-Pretoria

In general, innovation follows health, political and (especially) military crises. The periods after both world wars were filled with innovations based on wartime technology. However, innovation does stall after an economic crisis.

If we take patents in the US as a proxy, we can trace significant slowdowns after the 1929 and 2008 crisis. And, these two financial crises were also followed by periods of political disruption, the 1930s especially, which saw violent nationalism leading to global war.

Social progress usually follows a crisis. Any crisis. The 1920s and ’30s saw vast amounts of international labour law created (28 ILO Conventions adopted in the 1920s and 39 in the 1930s). Women’s voting rights increased post World War I.

The UN system and the Declaration of Human Rights emerged after World War II. HIV/AIDS forced conversations about sexuality, and many believe it laid the groundwork for the marriage equality that followed in the 2000s.

So, based on the experience of previous crises, what can we expect for the 2020s?

A crisis and the reaction to it are times of great ideas – political, economic, social, and scientific. Some of these led to innovations that made life better for millions of people, others to conflict and war. Whatever we can expect in the coming decade, we can with certainty expect one thing. Change

Let us start with the obvious; because of the nature of this crisis, we can probably expect innovation in the pharmaceutical and health sectors.

More broadly, economies will change. New sectors and companies emerge or expand and older ones will go under. In the 1920s, aviation took off and management consultancy emerged as a mainstream business (McKinsey was formed in 1926); in the 1930s it was health and the modern pharmaceutical sector; modern tourism in the 1950s (Best Western Hotels was founded in 1946 and Holiday Inn followed in 1952).

At the time of the 2008 global financial crisis, the top five companies were Exxon, General Electric, Microsoft, AT&T and P&G. Only two of them are in the top 10 today. The five largest companies today are Apple, Google, FB, Microsoft and Amazon.

What else? People like to let their hair down after a crisis. Jazz and rock and roll emerged after the world wars. New art movements emerged (Bauhaus and Art Deco) in the 1920s. So, expect bursts of creativity to flow into expanded arts and entertainment sectors.

The global disruption to supply chains caused by the pandemic seems likely to encourage firms to limit their risk exposure. This will probably result in much more use of automation and artificial intelligence, not least because these technologies can make it easier to produce goods closer to the buyers that want them. This has major implications for employment.

We have also seen that major policy decisions have been made quickly and have been successful.

Take for example working from home (WFH). Without the daily commute it is not hard to see both productivity and financial benefits. Expect a reduced need for big, expensive, downtown offices. It may not be the end of the office, but it is the end of the old way of viewing the office.

This has wider implications. If white collar workers (perhaps up to half of them) do not need to sit in the office every day then they do not need to live in expensive cities. So while cities may not totally empty of prime office real estate, they will need less of it. That opens the way for cities to reimagine their business model. They could become creative centres, living spaces and entertainment hubs.

But, one thing that makes great cities great might be missing. Migrants.

COVID-19 brought almost all migration to a halt. Some political leaders will see current migration restrictions as an opportunity to reinforce broader, longer-term agendas, riding a public mood that was already going in that direction. This could mean cities may lose this key, yet often underappreciated, ingredient that makes them great.

A crisis and the reaction to it are times of great ideas – political, economic, social, and scientific. Some of these led to innovations that made life better for millions of people, others to conflict and war.

Whatever we can expect in the coming decade, we can with certainty expect one thing. Change.

This article was originally published by Work in Progress

The post Looking Back to Look Forward: What Does the Next Normal Look Like? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Gary Rynhart, Specialist, Employers’ Activities, DWT/CO-Pretoria, International Labour Organization (ILO)

The post Looking Back to Look Forward: What Does the Next Normal Look Like? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

A rural settlement in the state of Pernambuco, in Brazil's semiarid ecoregion. Tanks that collect rainwater from rooftops for drinking water and household usage have changed life in this parched land, where 1.1 million 16,000-litre tanks have been installed so far. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 27 2020 (IPS)

After centuries of poverty, marginalisation from national development policies and a lack of support for positive local practices and projects, the semiarid regions of Latin America are preparing to forge their own agricultural paths by sharing knowledge, in a new and unprecedented initiative.

In Brazil’s semiarid Northeast, the Gran Chaco Americano, which is shared by Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay, and the Central American Dry Corridor (CADC), successful local practices will be identified, evaluated and documented to support the design of policies that promote climate change-resilient agriculture in the three ecoregions.

This is the objective of DAKI-Semiárido Vivo, an initiative financed by the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and implemented by the Brazilian Semiarid Articulation (ASA), the Argentinean Foundation for Development in Justice and Peace (Fundapaz) and the National Development Foundation (Funde) of El Salvador.

DAKI stands for Dryland Adaptation Knowledge Initiative.

The project, launched on Aug. 18 in a special webinar where some of its creators were speakers, will last four years and involve 2,000 people, including public officials, rural extension agents, researchers and small farmers. Indirectly, 6,000 people will benefit from the training.

“The aim is to incorporate public officials from this field with the intention to influence the government’s actions,” said Antonio Barbosa, coordinator of DAKI-Semiárido Vivo and one of the leaders of the Brazilian organisation ASA.

The idea is to promote programmes that could benefit the three semiarid regions, which are home to at least 37 million people – more than the total populations of Chile, Ecuador and Peru combined.

The residents of semiarid regions, especially those who live in rural areas, face water scarcity aggravated by climate change, which affects their food security and quality of life.

Zulema Burneo, International Land Coalition coordinator for Latin America and the Caribbean and moderator of the webinar that launched the project, stressed that the initiative was aimed at “amplifying and strengthening” isolated efforts and a few longstanding collectives working on practices to improve life in semiarid areas.

Abel Manto, an inventor of technologies that he uses on his small farm in the state of Bahia, in Brazil’s semiarid ecoregion, holds up a watermelon while standing among the bean crop he is growing on top of an underground dam. The soil is on a waterproof plastic tarp that keeps near the surface the water that is retained by an underground dam. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The practices that represent the best knowledge of living in the drylands will be selected not so much for their technical aspects, but for the results achieved in terms of economic, ecological and social development, Barbosa explained to IPS in a telephone interview from the northeastern Brazilian city of Recife, where the headquarters of ASA are located.

After the process of systematisation of the best practices in each region is completed, harnessing traditional knowledge through exchanges between technicians and farmers, the next step will be “to build a methodology and the pedagogical content to be used in the training,” he said.

One result will be a platform for distance learning. The Federal Rural University of Pernambuco, also in Recife, will help with this.

Decentralised family or community water supply infrastructure, developed and disseminated by ASA, a network of 3,000 social organisations scattered throughout the Brazilian Northeast, is a key experience in this process.

In the 1.03 million square kilometres of drylands where 22 million Brazilians live, 38 percent in rural areas according to the 2010 census, 1.1 million rainwater harvesting tanks have been built so far for human consumption.

An estimated 350,000 more are needed to bring water to the entire rural population in the semiarid Northeast, said Barbosa.

But the most important aspect for agricultural development involves eight “technologies” for obtaining and storing water for crops and livestock. ASA, created in 1999, has helped install this infrastructure on 205,000 farms for this purpose and estimates that another 800 peasant families still need it.

There are farms that are too small to install the infrastructure, or that have other limitations, said Barbosa, who coordinates ASA’s One Land and Two Waters and native seed programmes.

The “calçadão” technique, where water runs down a sloping concrete terrace or even a road into a tank that has a capacity to hold 52,000 litres, is the most widely used system for irrigating vegetables.

A group of peasant farmers from El Salvador stand in front of one of the two rainwater tanks built in their village, La Colmena, in the municipality of Candelaria de la Frontera. The pond is part of a climate change adaptation project in the Central American Dry Corridor. Central American farmers like these and others from Brazil’s semiarid Northeast have exchanged experiences on solutions for living with lengthy droughts. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

And in Argentina’s Chaco region, 16,000-litre drinking water tanks are mushrooming.

But tanks for intensive and small farming irrigation are not suitable for the dry Chaco, where livestock is raised on large estates of hundreds of hectares, said Gabriel Seghezzo, executive director of Fundapaz, in an interview by phone with IPS from the city of Salta, capital of the province of the same name, one of those that make up Argentina’s Gran Chaco region.

“Here we need dams in the natural shallows and very deep wells; we have a serious water problem,” he said. “The groundwater is generally of poor quality, very salty or very deep.”

First, peasants and indigenous people face the problem of formalising ownership of their land, due to the lack of land titles. Then comes the challenge of access to water, both for household consumption and agricultural production.

“In some cases there is the possibility of diverting rivers. The Bermejo River overflows up to 60 km from its bed,” he said.

Currently there is an intense local drought, which seems to indicate a deterioration of the climate, urgently requiring adaptation and mitigation responses.

Reforestation and silvopastoral systems are good alternatives, in an area where deforestation is “the main conflict, due to the pressure of the advance of soy and corn monoculture and corporate cattle farming,” he said.

Mariano Barraza of the Wichí indigenous community (L) and Enzo Romero, a technician from the Fundapaz organisation, stand next to the tank built to store rainwater in an indigenous community in the province of Salta, in the Chaco ecoregion of northern Argentina, where there are six months of drought every year. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

More forests would be beneficial for the water, reducing evaporation that is intense due to the heat and hot wind, he added.

Of the “technologies” developed in Brazil, one of the most useful for other semiarid regions is the “underground dam,” Claus Reiner, manager of IFAD programmes in Brazil, told IPS by phone from Brasilia.

The underground dam keeps the surrounding soil moist. It requires a certain amount of work to dig a long, deep trench along the drainage route of rainwater, where a plastic tarp is placed vertically, causing the water to pool during rainy periods. A location is chosen where the natural layer makes the dam impermeable from below.

This principle is important for the Central American Dry Corridor, where “the great challenge is how to infiltrate rainwater into the soil, in addition to collecting it for irrigation and human consumption,” said Ismael Merlos of El Salvador, founder of Funde and director of its Territorial Development Area.

The CADC, which cuts north to south through Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, is defined not as semiarid, but as a sub-humid region, because it rains slightly more there, although in an increasingly irregular manner.

Some solutions are not viable because “75 percent of the farming areas in the Corridor are sloping land, unprotected by organic material, which makes the water run off more quickly into the rivers,” Merlos told IPS by phone from San Salvador.

“In addition, the large irrigation systems that we’re familiar with are not accessible for the poor because of their high cost and the expensive energy for the extraction and pumping of water, from declining sources,” he said.

The most viable alternative, he added, is making better use of rainwater, by building tanks, or through techniques to retain moisture in the soil, such as reforestation and leaving straw and other harvest waste on the ground rather than burning it as peasant farmers continue to do.

“Harmful weather events, which four decades ago occurred one to three times a year, now happen 10 or more times a year, and their effects are more severe in the Dry Zone,” Merlos pointed out.

Funde is a Salvadoran centre for development research and policy formulation that together with Fundapaz, four Brazilian organisations forming part of the ASA network and seven other Latin American groups had been cooperating since 2013, when they created the Latin American Semiarid Platform.

The Platform paved the way for the DAKI-Semiárido Vivo which, using 78 percent of its two million dollar budget, opened up new horizons for synergy among Latin America’s semiarid ecoregions. To this end, said Burneo, it should create a virtuous alliance of “good practices and public policies.”

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• Brazil's Semiarid Northeast – More Coverage

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By External Source
Aug 27 2020 (IPS-Partners)

The Pacific Partnership to End Violence Against Women and Girls (Pacific Partnership) programme has launched a poetry anthology publication comprising a collection of Pacific poems and artworks about human rights and social justice suitable for students in Years 7-13.

The publication titled Rising Tide has been produced as part of the Pacific Partnership’s Social Citizenship Education (SCE) Programme led by the Pacific Community’s (SPC) Regional Rights Resource Team (RRRT).

Working towards implementing human rights work in schools and communities, SPC RRRT, with the support of The University of the South Pacific’s (USP) Oceania Centre for Arts, Culture, and Pacific Studies (OCACPS), embarked on this project with editor, Dr Francis Mangubhai, a notable Fiji-born educator and researcher in applied linguistics to collate this poetry anthology which will be used as a teaching and learning resource for schools students and young people in the Pacific.

Acknowledging how changes occur in our Pacific communities like everywhere else in the world, the anthology is titled Rising Tide, due to climate change which is a social justice issue and a topic in which Pacific communities lead the world. It is also an expression that is used metaphorically – there is a rising tide of change occurring in our societies, including changes related to equality, inclusion, and ending violence against women. Young people who will be the next generation of adults, can, through their attitudes, values and voices, contribute to this rising tide of change.

Speaking at the launch of the anthology, the Head of Political, Trade and Information at the Delegation of the European Union for the Pacific, Galia Agisheva said, ‘Human rights and social justice are the core values of the European Union, which is founded on engagement to promote and protect human rights, democracy and rule of law. The EU views all human rights as universal, indivisible and interdependent.

As such, we are delighted to be able to collaborate with SPC RRRT, UN Women and the Pacific Islands Forum (PIFS) to support the anthology Rising Tide. This collection of the Pacific poems, will undoubtedly generate inspiration for the young generation for which it is aimed. This young generation is the rising tide of the Pacific, can become the true fundamental agents of change of attitudes – in their lives, in their families, in their communities, in their countries, and also globally’’.

According to RRRT Director, Miles Young, the ‘Rising Tide’ is an essential, evocative and unique anthology featuring Pacific poets and artists expressing their voice on social justice issues that exist in our Pacific societies.

“The poems in this book challenge us to think and take action on issues pertinent to the Pacific and globally such as inequalities, discrimination, injustices and violence against women, girls and children,” Young said.

He added that through this creative interplay of art, words and rhythm, it is hoped that Pacific children, who are the present and future of the region will be inspired to rise like the tide and create and model change that will make Pacific communities, just, safer and more peaceful.

USP’s Vice Chancellor and President, Professor Pal Ahluwalia said the University was proud to have partnered with SPC RRRT in the publishing of this anthology of Pacific Poetry on human rights and social justice through engagement of the Oceania Centre.

“This collaboration is significant not just as an example of CROP collaboration but also given the long history of Pacific Publications through the Institute of Pacific Studies, now Oceania Centre for Arts, Culture and Pacific Studies,” Professor Pal said.

He added that the collaboration is a reminder of the importance of arts and culture, and pacific-led and home grown arts and recognition of artists. This is something that the University has committed to, not just through the Oceania Centre but also through the School of Languages, Arts and Media’s Pacific Writing Forum which has encouraged emerging Pacific island writers through publication, readings and SLAMS.

“I believe that there are discussions for the collection to be made available through the USP Book Centre and I am very pleased to hear that an exhibition of the same title “Rising Tides” will continue over the next week at the Oceania Centre, featuring the artworks in the collection and select poems,” Professor Pal stated.

The poetry anthology is available on the SPC RRRT website here.

Source: Pacific Community (SPC)

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Maisa Guajajara, march of indigenous women, Brasilia, 2019. Image courtesy Marquinho Mota/FAOR.

By Rosamaria Loures and Sarah Sax
NEW YORK, Aug 27 2020 (IPS)

On an early December morning last year in the state of Maranhão, Brazil, half a dozen members of the Indigenous Guajajara people packed their bags with food, maps and drone equipment to get ready for a patrol. They said goodbye to their children, uncertain when, or whether, they would see them again. Then, they hoisted their bags over their shoulders and set out to patrol a section of the 173,000 hectares (428,000 acres) of the primary rainforest they call home.

This is the Caru Indigenous Territory, where the Amazon peters out toward the northeastern coast of Brazil, and it contains some of the last stretches of intact, contiguous forest in Maranhão. It is also under increasing threat: this part of Brazil has been ravaged by some of the country’s highest rates of deforestation and land conflicts over the past decade.

Patrols led by Indigenous groups like theirs, known often by the moniker of “Forest Guardians,” have been instrumental in enforcing protections and preventing loggers from entering Indigenous territories.

Patrols and their enforcement tactics, which have been ramping up over the past decade, have also resulted in community members being threatened, attacked, and killed — as in the case of Paulo Paulino Guajajara last year, who was murdered in a neighboring Indigenous territory.

Called guerreiras da floresta in Portuguese, this is the name these women have given themselves. They are in many ways an embodiment of what policymakers, politicians and scholars around the world say is a necessary shift toward gender equality in environmental movements

But members of the patrol that set out through the forest last December don’t call themselves guardians; they prefer warriors. And they differ in one other notable aspect: they are all women.

“Why did we take the initiative? Because we are mothers. If we don’t act, there would be no forest standing,” said Paula Guajajara, one of the “women warriors of the forest,” in a public event last year.

Called guerreiras da floresta in Portuguese, this is the name these women have given themselves. They are in many ways an embodiment of what policymakers, politicians and scholars around the world say is a necessary shift toward gender equality in environmental movements.

And they are contributing not just womanpower to the patrols — they are also helping to diversify the tactics and forge new partnerships.

In Brazil in particular, where protecting intact forests is one of the cheapest, easiest and most effective solutions for combating climate change, the work they are doing is literally saving the world.

 

Creating a space and finding their voice

Actively patrolling their land for invaders is nothing new to the Guajajara; Indigenous people have more than 500 years of experience in this. Today, they use satellite technology and coordinate efforts with outside law enforcement to achieve their goals. This approach is relatively new, but its use has been on the rise in recent years.

“Across the country more of these groups are forming because of government inaction — or worse, because the government is actively trying to exploit their lands,” Sarah Shenker, campaign coordinator for Survival International’s Uncontacted Tribes team, said in an interview.

These groups are primarily men, although women are sometimes included in the patrols. But according to Shenker, as well as other experts interviewed for this article, to have “forest guardian” groups made up solely of women is unique.

The women warriors were formed six years ago, an offshoot of a program developed by Indigenous organizations and the Brazilian government and implemented by the Ministry of the Environment to enhance the territorial and cultural protection of Indigenous people, called Projeto Demonstrativo de Povos Indígenas (PDPI) in Portuguese.

At the time, the predominantly male forest guardians were attempting to end illegal logging and the sale of wood from their territory — a task that was proving extremely difficult. Seeing this, the women stepped in and formed their own group consisting originally of 32 women.

“In order not to let the project end, we, the Guajajara women, entered and took over the project,” Cícera Guajajara da Silva, one of the women warriors, said in an interview.

But the path to being taken seriously and treated as equals has been long.

“To seek partnership, we walked, talked, slept on the floor — all in order to seek improvement for our community,” Paula Guajajara said, recalling the initial difficulty in being heard and taken seriously inside and outside of the communities.

Their patience has paid off, and the women are quick to point out the support and close collaboration of the male forest guardians that has allowed them to combat the greater goal of stopping illegal logging. “Today we have the women warriors who work together with the forest guardians,” Paula Guajajara said. “We’ve already evicted a lot of loggers. If we hadn’t acted, there would be no forest standing.”

Many of the married women had already been acting independently, accompanying their husbands in some activities, according to Gilderlan Rodrigues da Silva, the Maranhão coordinator of the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI), a Catholic Church-affiliated organization, who has worked with the women warriors. “But, from the moment they created the women’s group, they gained strength and visibility,” he said in an interview. “Once they were formed, there was this very strong change. Both in the context of decreasing the invasions and waking up to the collective awareness to protect the territory.”

 

The direct and indirect impacts of greater inclusion

The results are clearly visible. In 2018, there was only 63 hectares (156 acres) of deforestation in the reserve, compared to 2016, when deforestation reached a high of 2,000 hectares (4,940 acres), according to Global Forest Watch. “The biggest achievement I see today in my village is because of the territorial protection, there are no loggers within our territory, and we managed to combat the sale of wood,” Cícera Guajajara da Silva said.

The women’s association has also been instrumental in connecting with other Indigenous groups similarly seeking to protect their territories, such as the Ka’apor, Awa-Guaja, and other Guajajara communities.

“There are 16 Indigenous territories in Maranhão — we have to seek unity to move forward in our struggle,” said Maísa Guajajara, one of the original women warriors. Through coordination with other women’s groups, like the Articulation of Indigenous Women of Maranhão (AMIMA), they were able to bring 200 Indigenous women from around the state together for the first time in 2017 to talk about various issues, including territorial protection, reforestation, and environmental education.

“This whole movement is extremely important because it shows this strength, and that women have a lot to contribute to the movement because they are part of the territory and are concerned with it, and with future generations,” Rodrigues da Silva told Mongabay.

They don’t just coordinate with other Indigenous groups; they also conduct training with neighboring communities about the importance of environmental conservation. “Not all women do surveillance work because we know it is dangerous work, but there are always some who do,” Maísa Guajajara said.

“The warriors generally do more surveillance activities outside the territory, we give lectures around our territory to talk about the invasions within our territory, and we raise awareness in the villages by talking about the importance of keeping nature standing.”

For example, the women warriors are partners in the Mãe D’água (Mother of Water) project that, together with the Brazilian NGO Fórum da Amazônia Oriental (FAOR), provides support for Indigenous women to strengthen their collective actions against ongoing deforestation and water pollution.

These actions include visits to nearby riverine communities in which the women warriors explain their ways of living, such as hunting and rituals, to their neighbors. For the women warriors, the more that their neighbors know about Guajajara culture, the more they will respect their actions to defend their territory.

 

Why women are key to forest conservation

In Brazil, and around the world, Indigenous women are increasingly at the forefront of environmental movements.

“The struggle of Indigenous women happens in different ways, day by day. If I am here today, I am the fruit of the women who came in front of me,” Taynara Caragiu Guajajara, a member of the Indigenous women’s collective AMIMA, said during a live online event in April. “In the context of the world we live in today, we have been conquering space inside and outside the community.

We Indigenous women have not always had that voice … but today the struggle is driven by Indigenous women, we are the ones who are in charge of the struggle.”

Women are increasingly leading the struggle on issues like climate change, but their voices are heard much less often then men’s — to the detriment of everyone. This is partially a byproduct of gender bias in journalism itself.

In 2015, of every four people interviewed, mentioned or seen in the news worldwide, only one was a woman, according to a report by the Global Media Monitoring Project, which releases its findings every five years. A closer look at the data shows that even when women are interviewed, it is for personal quotes, rather than for their expertise. It’s a figure that seems to have barely budged over the past few years, although some newsrooms are starting to actively change that.

Studies show that, in general, women receive greater exposure in newspaper sections led by female editors, as well as in newspapers whose editorial boards have higher female representation. But men are disproportionately represented from editors through to reporters, meaning that critical issues for women often go unreported. One of these areas is precisely the connection between conservation solutions and gender equality.

Women are disproportionately affected by climate change and environmental degradation. Mounting evidence shows that gender gaps and inequalities, such as inequitable land tenure and women’s reduced access to energy, water and sanitation facilities, negatively impact human and environmental well-being. The climate crisis will only make gender disparities worse.

Gender-based violence against women environmental human rights defenders in particular is on the rise, and increasingly normalized in both public and private spheres, making it more difficult for women to get justice. As Indigenous communities are often on the front lines of defending their territories, resources and rights from extractive projects and corporate interests, Indigenous women in particular face a two-headed beast of gender-based violence and racism.

“We fought to defend our territory against invasions and we sought this autonomy to fight for rights,” Taynara Caragiu Guajajara said in an interview. “Being a woman is difficult within the macho society, but being an Indigenous or black woman becomes even more difficult, because the prejudice is so great.”

Having more women involved in everything from environmental decision-making to climate politics benefits society at large. Higher female participation in policymaking increases the equality and effectiveness of climate policy interventions; evidence shows that high gender inequality is correlated with higher rates of deforestation, air pollution and other measures of environmental degradation.

Yet less than 1% of international philanthropy goes to women’s environmental initiatives, and women are continuously left out of decisions about land and environmental resources.

“The global community cannot afford to treat nature conservation and the fight for women’s equality as separate issues — they must be addressed together,” said Grethel Aguilar, the acting director-general of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), on international women’s day this year.

 

Why the fight for Indigenous territorial rights in Brazil matters to conservation

Tracking tree cover loss in Maranhão over the past two decades shows the crucial importance of Indigenous territories in protecting intact forest. Viewed from space, as the forest cover rapidly disappears, the outlines of Indigenous territories become more and more distinct.

“These Indigenous territories are islands of green in a sea of deforestation in one of the worst deforested places in Brazil,” Shenker said.

The Caru Indigenous Territory, for example, has seen 4% forest loss in comparison to the state of Maranhão, which has lost almost a quarter of its tree cover since 2000, according to Global Forest Watch data. Alongside the various other benefits that come with forest preservation, the forests in the Caru Indigenous Territory are also home to some of the last uncontacted Awá people; video of of two Awá men taken in the neighboring Araribóia Indigenous Territory made international headlines last year.

These patches of intact, tropical forests are also the crux of “natural climate solutions” protection. These solutions essentially entail stopping deforestation, improving management of forests, and restoring ecosystems, and could provide more than one-third of the cost-effective climate mitigation needed between now and 2030 to stabilize warming to below 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit).

According to one of the seminal papers on natural climate solutions, the single most effective approach in the tropics has proven to be actively protecting intact forests. Protecting intact forests offers twice as much of the cost-effective climate mitigation potential as the second best pathway, reforestation.

The Amazon as a whole plays a vital role in mitigating climate change by absorbing and storing carbon dioxide in its forests. When cut down, burned, or degraded through logging, the forest not only ceases to fulfill this function, but can become a source of carbon emissions.

“Protecting and or conserving intact ecosystems is the number-one priority,” said Kate Dooley, a research fellow at the Australian-German Climate & Energy College at the University of Melbourne, who has authored several papers on the potential of forests as a natural climate solution. “Way-way-way down the line is planting trees. And even then, it needs to be the right kind of trees.”

Of all the countries in the world with some kind of tropical rainforest, Brazil holds more mitigation potential than 71 of the 79 countries combined, according to a recent paper on this topic. It isn’t too hyperbolic, then, to say that groups like the women warriors are protecting humanity’s last best hope for a livable future.

“Plenty of research showing that forests are more intact in collectively held lands,” Dooley said. “With or without secure land tenure those lands are more intact and less degraded.” According to a report in 2018 by the Rights and Resources Initiative, almost 300 billion metric tons of carbon are stored in collectively managed lands across all forest biomes, and numerous studies have found that the best way to protect forests is to empower the people who live in them, granting them land rights and legal standing.

This is especially true for Indigenous-held lands in places like Brazil. Between 2000 and 2015, legally designated Indigenous territories in Brazil saw a tenth the amount of forest loss than non-Indigenous territories. Brazil is home to approximately 900,000 Indigenous citizens from 305 peoples, most of who live in Indigenous territories. Even so, more than half of the locations claimed by Indigenous groups have not yet received formal government recognition.

“Surveillance and inspection by Indigenous peoples is extremely important, as they are the ones who know the territory and the region best,” Rodrigues da Silva said. “On the other hand, unfortunately they are left alone, the Indigenous body responsible for inspection ends up not fulfilling the role and leaving only the Indigenous people.”

 

Prevailing amid growing threats

Despite an increasingly hostile government, the women warriors say they are committed to continuing their monitoring, surveillance and educational activities, and are hoping to inspire other groups to do the same.

“Today women act 100% in defense of the territory,” Paula Guajajara said. “Today we are serving as an example.“

But the work is daunting.

Brazil has the rights of Indigenous people written into its constitution of 1988, and is a signatory to the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention. Yet, the current administration of President Jair Bolsonaro has made it clear that Indigenous peoples won’t be allowed to comment on infrastructure projects affecting Indigenous territories in the Amazon. Bolsonaro’s administration has also proposed opening up Indigenous territories to extractive activities — something the constitution specifically prohibits.

Hundreds of people have been killed during the past decade in the context of conflicts over the use of land and resources in the Amazon — many by people involved in illegal logging — according to the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), a Catholic Church-affiliated nonprofit that follows land conflicts.

But perpetrators of violence in the Brazilian Amazon are rarely brought to justice.

Of the more than 300 killings that the CPT has registered since 2009, only 14 ultimately went to trial. Maranhão, where the Guajajara live, is among the most dangerous states for Indigenous people in Brazil: more attacks on Indigenous groups were reported here than anywhere else in 2016, according to data from the CPT.

The coronavirus poses an additional threat to Indigenous peoples throughout the Amazon and especially in Brazil, where the death rate from COVID-19 is much higher than the national rate.

“The surveillance expeditions are stopped by the pandemic, we are not doing surveillance, to care for everyone in the village,” Cícera Guajajara da Silva said. “Especially in order to protect our health, because nobody knows who the types of people [invaders] are inside the forest, they may even be infected with the virus, the invader himself can bring the virus to our territory, and that’s why we stopped [the expeditions], we are now only sheltering in the village.”

But despite the mounting difficulties, the women warriors are committed to continuing their work.

“We have the courage to defend our territory,” Maisa Guajajara said. “I am a woman and I will fight against all the threats that are in our territory.”

This article was first published on Mongabay. Read the original here.

 

The post Amazon ‘Women Warriors’ Show Gender Equality, Forest Conservation Go Hand in Hand appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Women and children are the primary victims of indoor air pollution in poor, rural areas of India. Credit: Athar Parvaiz/IPS

By Neha Jain
HONG KONG, Aug 27 2020 (IPS)

Usage of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) in rural Indian households has surged, partly due to India’s flagship clean cooking programme, but beneficiaries of the scheme consume less LPG than general customers per year, reports a new study.

Household air pollution from burning solid fuels such as coal, charcoal, wood, dung and agricultural waste poses a major environmental health risk. This is especially true for women and children in India, who have a disproportionately high mortality and disease burden due to air pollution, which is second only to malnutrition as a risk factor for disease, according to a Lancet Planetary Health report.

The Indian government’s clean cooking policy launched in 2016, the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY), provides subsidised LPG for the world’s largest clean cooking energy programme of its kind

The Indian government’s clean cooking policy launched in 2016, the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY), provides subsidised LPG for the world’s largest clean cooking energy programme of its kind — more than 80 million poor households had benefited by September 2019.

The study, published this month in the journal Environmental Research Communications, found that beneficiaries of the PMUY scheme consume on average almost two large LPG cylinders (14.2 kilograms each) less annually than their general customer counterparts, even after controlling for baseline socioeconomic and demographic differences.

“Wealth, education, caste, household size, and experience with LPG have been commonly suggested as reasons for the consumption gap between PMUY beneficiaries and general customers,” Carlos Gould, a doctoral candidate at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and lead author of the study, tells SciDev.Net. “But our findings suggest that there are other important factors driving the consumption disparity.”

Gould and his colleagues analysed two waves of a survey of over 8,500 households across six of India’s energy-poor states — Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal — to evaluate the drivers of LPG adoption and its use. The first wave was conducted prior to the scheme in 2015 while the second took place in 2018.

Laudable strides in the ownership of LPG connections from 2015 to 2018 were documented, partly owing to the PMUY scheme. In 2015, 75 per cent of households lacked LPG; this figure dropped to 45 per cent in 2018. Around 40 per cent of new LPG owners in 2018 were enrolled through PMUY.

 

The blue lines indicate LPG use as a cooking fuel in rural households states covered by the study, while grey lines show the rest of states in India over the same time period.
Image credit: Carlos F Gould, Xiaoxue Hou, Jennifer Richmond, Anjali Sharma, Johannes Urpelainen/Environmental Research Communications.

 

But in 2018, 83 per cent of the 9,072 survey participants continued to burn solid fuels, mainly firewood, for at least some of their cooking. This practice of using multiple fuel types, termed fuel stacking, has been noted in other studies.

One potential barrier to LPG consumption is the distance travelled to obtain cylinder refills. Fewer PMUY beneficiaries have refills delivered to their doorstep than general customers. An exploratory analysis showed that PMUY beneficiaries tended to live in remote villages.

“Increased travel distance may discourage individuals from obtaining LPG and encourage them to ration their existing LPG resources,” explains Gould. Consequently, polluting solid fuels that are easier to collect are likely used to fill the gaps.

“Efforts to reduce the distances required to get an LPG cylinder refill could increase LPG consumption among households that use both LPG and solid fuels,” Gould says, adding that a customer-centred policy design process focusing on improving usability could be considered.

Gould says that greater support should be given to households that do not use LPG often and continue to use solid fuels. Among other measures, the authors suggest increasing the number of local distributors to shorten the travel distance to acquire refills in remote rural areas.

Ajay Pillarisetti, assistant professor of environmental health at Emory University in the US, says that the results are “reassuring” as numerous studies have reported that the consumption levels of PMUY customers are lower than those of general customers.

He stresses that barriers to the exclusive usage of LPG must be identified and overcome to achieve and maintain healthy behaviours.

Future work, says Pillarisetti, should target supply constraints such as by “provision of a low-cost second cylinder connections of either five or 13 kilograms, more broad networks of LPG providers including potential ‘mini’ distributors”. Linkages with other social welfare schemes could target additional subsidies to the rural poor, he adds.

This story was originally published by SciDev.Net

The post Firing Up India’s Clean Cooking Fuel Plan appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Picture courtesy: Fridays for Future.

By Moutushi Sengupta
NEW DELHI, Aug 26 2020 (IPS)

India ranks third in terms of absolute levels of carbon emissions after China and the United States. In a business as usual scenario, by 2030, emission levels are predicted to reach more than 4.4 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (GTCO2) equivalent of greenhouse gas—up from 3 GTCO2 today—overtaking the United States as the second-largest emitting country.

At the same time, India’s per capita energy consumption levels are about one-third of the world average and in 2018, central government data indicated that 17 percent of households did not have access to electricity.

To meet the dual objectives of environmental sustainability and economic growth, the path of development must focus on being clean and green. This is more of a necessity than a matter of choice for the country.

We, at the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation, have been working on climate change in India for the last five years and we have seen this space evolve considerably. Several international development agencies have come forward to support policymaking and action aimed at enabling India to achieve its climate goals.

There has also been a substantial increase in the number of research institutions working on issues related to climate change mitigation. Moreover, the role of market-linked interventions has expanded considerably, as evidenced from the rapid spread of distributed renewable energy networks, addressing issues around access and efficiency.

“…people need to understand climate change as a narrative, containing their own language and shaped by their own values and experience. Most climate change language, however, is dry, technical or too based in the campaign culture…”

We are also seeing citizens becoming more concerned about climate change and wanting to do more. All this represents significant positive developments, but the sheer magnitude of the challenge requires us to do much more.

Before we analyse what can be done, it’s important to call out for whom this can (and needs to) be done. All the measures we take in our work on climate change need to first be rooted and built within the values of equity and social justice.

Our efforts to create a clean and green future can be fully endorsed only if and when they become a reality for everyone in India, including those households and marginalised communities that currently exist on the fringes, or below the boundaries set by official poverty lines. This will require special attention at the stages of design and execution of climate change policies and practices.

As we move forward to strengthen action on climate change mitigation, here are four critical areas—each worth a separate study, in my opinion—that philanthropies, nonprofits, policymakers, and corporates need to consider.

 

1. Engage new champions for climate change

It is critical to bring in new actors to expand and deepen the climate movement in India. So far, research and knowledge generation on ways to mitigate the adverse impact of climate change has remained largely limited to a small group of think tanks located in and around Delhi—the policymaking centre for India.

These think tanks have closely engaged with policymakers at the centre to establish a framework of policies that have pushed India to invest in renewable sources of energy.

Going forward, the country needs sub-national level actors, beyond the public infrastructure, to effectively execute the centre’s renewable energy policies, and where necessary, refine them to make these policies more contextual.

State-based think tanks, progressive corporate houses, social opinion-makers including youth leaders, activists, environmental and social scientists, and research institutions must feature prominently among potential partners to take this discourse forward. Identifying and engaging champions in these institutions and in communities, will provide the much-needed tailwind to India’s mitigation movement.

In the recent past, we have seen a set of new champions adding their heft to the movement. Notable examples include Extinction Rebellion, the Fridays for Future movement, and the People’s Climate Movement where youth leaders are taking to the streets to shine a light on the issue.

 

2. Support technology innovations for clean energy adoption

The BP Energy Outlook 2019 mentions, “India’s share of total global primary energy demand is set to roughly double to 11% by 2040 [from 2017 as a base], underpinned by strong population growth and economic development.”

To fulfil its growing requirement for energy while meeting its climate mitigation goals, the country will need to identify and adopt technology innovations that address both these objectives.

Work is underway in research and development centres that the government has established, including in national institutions such as the Indian Institute of Technologies, the National Institute of Solar Energy, the National Institute of Wind Energy, and the National Institute of Renewable Energy, to test and develop technologies that will enable faster adoption of clean energy and/or reduce energy consumption through higher levels of efficiency.

As a key member of the global Mission Innovation (MI), India has several successful innovations to showcase. For example, with support from the MI secretariat, in 2018, Swedish company, Aili Innovation, collaborated with Tata Trusts to develop efficient solar-driven water pumps for small-scale farmers in India. Replacing diesel pumps, the solar pump system provides water for irrigation, and power for lighting and charging of smaller devices such as cell phones or fans.

Recognising the importance of technological innovations in the clean energy space, several private incubators have also come forward to nurture ideas and interventions that rely on state-of-the-art technologies. Incubators such as Social Alpha, Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship, and Villgro have supported early-stage ideas and interventions that use technology as the key tool for disruption.

However, while there are many promising clean energy technology options available today, most are too expensive to access, lack the technical reliability needed for widespread deployment, or both.

Currently, comparatively high costs, inadequate supply chain support, and insufficient operating experience constrain the deployment of these technology options at the scale needed for climate change mitigation. Future funding strategies should focus on resolving these constraints to enable these technologies to reach the right audiences.

 

3. Strengthen support from domestic funders to step in and expand this movement

Action on climate mitigation by nonprofits in India is currently largely supported by the international philanthropic community. To sustain the movement, it is essential that domestic funders come forward and strengthen the mitigation efforts that are so acutely required.

They can help by designing and executing interventions—at an ecosystem-and institution-level—that aim to expand the funding pool for nonprofit players. Establishment of the India Climate Collaborative is an exciting development in this respect.

Over the last few months, the collaborative has managed to leverage commitment and support from a diverse group of domestic philanthropists in providing a strong push for action against climate change.

While philanthropic support has helped support a range of research organisations, most climate think tanks are still in the early stages of evolution. If the discourse on climate change mitigation has to sustain beyond the life of individual projects, building capacity is critical.

This requires continued support to these institutions to define their purpose; running audits of existing technical, analytical, and behavioural skills; identifying gaps; and finding creative solutions.

 

4. Build, share, and promote local narratives

To quote a 2017 study jointly conducted by Climate Outreach, Climate Action Network- International, and Climate Action Network-South Asia, “…people need to understand climate change as a narrative, containing their own language and shaped by their own values and experience. Most climate change language, however, is dry, technical or too based in the campaign culture…”

There is available evidence to indicate growing levels of awareness and concern around climate change in India. For instance, results from a recent 12-country-based survey by IPSOS indicate that there is, “widespread support for government actions to prioritise climate change in the economic recovery after COVID-19 with 65 percent globally agreeing that this is important.”

In India, 81 percent of participants from the same study said that they would support a ‘green’ recovery package, much higher than the global average of 65 percent. The survey provides interesting insights on behavioural choices that individuals have either made or are willing to make, in support of their conviction that a lot more needs to be done to reduce the adverse impact of climate change in the future.

Going forward, helping create narratives based on local values, norms, and customs and where possible, local languages, will prompt many more to take personal responsibility for change.

 

We need to act now

The good news is that most likely, the tipping point is yet to be reached, affording us a tiny window of opportunity to take decisive action. The not so good news is that the window seems to be rapidly disappearing. It is no longer a matter of choice on whether we should attend to global warming or not. The question forward is how hard and how persistently can we push on the pedal to achieve our objectives?

 

Moutushi Sengupta heads the India office of the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation

 

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

The post What Will It Take to Prioritise Climate Change? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Credit: Barinedum AGARA/IOM Lagos

By Chylian Azuh
LAGOS, Aug 26 2020 (IPS)

‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away’ is a common and seemingly harmless saying. But what happens when commonly eaten foods like pepper, garlic and ginger are wrongfully said to prevent COVID-19? What can we do to fight harmful misinformation?

During the first two weeks of the lockdown in Lagos, Nigeria, a lot of people were afraid of contracting the virus. They wore gloves, face masks and practised physical distancing as instructed by the World Health Organization (WHO).

For some, the conspiracy theories being peddled on social media and among neighbourhood discussions are the reasons for the disbelief in the virus’s existence

By the third week of the outbreak, people seemed to fall into two categories; those who believed in the existence of the virus and followed all instructions to combat its spread, and those who didn’t believe the virus exists or believed that it exists in some parts of the world but not in Nigeria. This second category was mostly responsible for the spread of myths and misinformation about the pandemic.

Tosin Wurola, a foodstuff trader in her early fifties at Ojodu Berger, Lagos, explained to me that if she does not see a COVID-19 positive case in her circle, then the virus does not exist. Sadly, she has probably succeeded in convincing most of her customers to think the same. This type of misinformation is common and could explain why there is little to no physical distancing observed in the markets.

For some, the conspiracy theories being peddled on social media and among neighbourhood discussions are the reasons for the disbelief in the virus’s existence. Peace Ejechi, one of my neighbours, who runs a provision shop at Ojodu Berger, in Lagos, said the lockdown was for the government to successfully install the 5G network and not to flatten the curve.

Another myth is that the virus cannot survive in Nigeria due to the nature of the Nigerian weather. Nigeria is a tropical climate and has its annual average temperature at 25.7 degrees Celsius. A returned migrant, Teniola Olatunji, who lives in Ogba, Lagos told me:

“It’s possible that the virus reached Nigeria, but I am sure it is gone for good. If it is in the country, there’s no need to worry or fret, because our weather is too hot for the symptoms to manifest.”

This cannot be further from the truth. According to WHO, COVID-19 spreads irrespective of the temperatures in the region. By mid-June, there were over 15,000 confirmed cases of the virus in Nigeria with about 4,800 recoveries. Several survivors have shared accounts of their experiences at treatment centres and isolation wards in the country.

There remains a belief that certain concoctions prevent and cure COVID-19. During my last awareness raising campaign at the General Market, Ipodo, Ikeja, some women shared home-made remedies, such as drinking alcohol or blended ginger and garlic, which they believe has kept them safe during the pandemic.

Bola Ibiyemi, a trader at Ipodo Market Ikeja said, “I’ve been cooking my food with ginger and garlic, using face mask and maintaining physical distance.”

While these foods have tremendous nutritional and health benefits, there is no proven research to show that they can cure or prevent COVID-19. Self-medication is a real problem practised by many. Some families used herbs and unprescribed malaria drugs to keep the infection at bay. This was not part of WHO’s instructions. Sadly, they didn’t stop at using these substances but shared false information with everyone who wanted to know more.

Unverified information continues to spread quickly in Nigeria as with most countries because of fear and reluctance to fact check information. The United Nations recently set up ‘Verified’, its fact checking initiative to tackle the spread of misinformation and fake news on COVID-19, increasing access and dissemination of trusted and accurate information. The Verified campaign provides reliable information about COVID-19.

However, there is still misinformation lingering in many communities. This is why offline and online campaigns work effectively hand-in-hand. Initiatives such as Migrants as Messengers (MaM), a regional peer-to-peer programme is carrying out activities through radio, television, in markets and other public spaces to raise awareness of COVID-19 among communities.

As a MaM volunteer, I recently participated in a campaign in Ipodo market, Ikeja Lagos to inform women market traders about the prevention of COVID-19. I had the privilege to speak with women in my neighbourhood on the importance of following WHO’s instructions on preventive measures.

As a whole, these initiatives can help tackle misinformation in Nigeria. It is crucial that those spreading these myths and misinformation desist from doing so to avoid putting the lives of those they love in great danger; the first recipients of this information are usually family and friends. People need to check any information about COVID-19 before believing it or passing it on.

For reliable information about the virus, visit the regional West Africa website on coronavirus

 

Chylian Azuh is a writer and public speaker from Nigeria who trained as a MaM volunteer in 2018. She is the founder of ‘Female Returnee Forum,’ an organisation for female returnees which supports a large network of female returnees involved in awareness raising about unsafe migration and challenging the stigma often faced by migrants who have not reached their intended destination and return to their place or origin. She informs young people about safe migration and volunteers with the ‘Stop Trata’ project to produce awareness campaign videos highlighting the dangers of irregular migration and human trafficking.

Chylian is an entrepreneur with a background in architecture. Upon her return, she was reintegrated into the soft drink business under the EU-IOM Joint Initiative, and now works in the fashion industry, selling hair and bags.

The post Standing Up to Myths and Misinformation in Nigeria During the Pandemic appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Credit: William Oeri / NATION MEDIA GROUP

By External Source
NAIROBI, Kenya, Aug 26 2020 (IPS)

On 27 August 2020, we mark the tenth anniversary of the New Constitution of Kenya – a landmark social contract inspired by citizens’ desire for a country characterised by participatory governance, inclusive development, human rights and the rule of law.

The Katiba is ground-breaking in many ways. First and foremost, it was borne out of extensive consultation by a wide cross-section of Kenyans who debated intensely and passionately to ensure a real people’s constitution.

As recognised in Article 1, sovereign power is now vested in the people of Kenya. Further, it gives prominence to national values and principles of governance, including the rule of law, democracy, public participation, human rights, equality, social justice, accountability and sustainable development. Giving life to these principles, the Bill of Rights recognises and protects a spectrum of human rights and fundamental freedoms, and serves as the framework for social, economic and cultural policies.

The Bill of Rights guarantees economic, social and cultural rights – such as the rights to health, housing, water, education, freedom from hunger and a clean environment. The Constitution also provides for specific protections and affirmative action for children, youth, persons with disabilities, minorities and marginalised groups, to promote their participation, representation and equal enjoyment of rights. The authority of courts to uphold the Bill of Rights, and apply international law as part of the law of Kenya, is a critical feature to enable the people to claim and seek enforcement of their constitutional rights.

The guarantees in the Bill of Rights bear an unmistakable closeness to most of the issues identified in the global sustainable development goals, while the Constitution itself also reflects the United Nations principles and the human-rights based approach and commitment to equality and non-discrimination which underpin delivery of the United Nations mandate. It is an affirmation that good governance is both an enabler and a powerful impetus for sustainable development.

It is in this spirit of shared convictions that, over the past decade, the United Nations country team in Kenya has partnered with the Government and the people of Kenya to support implementation of the Constitution and to advance transformative governance, sustainable development and human rights for all. Adopting a whole of society approach, the United Nations has worked with national and county governments, independent institutions, civil society, community-based organisations, communities, private sector and humanitarian and development partners in pursuit of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in Kenya.

Devolved government – a key innovation of the Constitution – has been an important aspect of cooperation. The devolved system of governance brings the exercise of Government functions closer to the people, to improve delivery of services and enhance public participation. By establishing 47 county governments and devolving functions such as pre-primary education, health, water and sanitation, agriculture, cultural activities and environment protection, the Constitution underlines counties’ responsibility to lead on social and economic development processes for their populations. County governments spend 41 per cent of their resources on social services. This has contributed to the improvement in the following indicators over the first five years of devolution (2013-2018): the percentage of births attended by skilled health personnel increased from 62% to 70%; the proportion of children engaged in child labour dropped from 34% to 13%; and the net enrolment for early childhood development and education increased by over 10%. 1 The prevalence of chronic malnutrition in children reduced to 26% in 2014, from 35% in 2008.

To continue these development gains, it is essential to ensure adequate allocation of resources to social sectors, and for counties to have increased capacity for evidence-based planning, budgeting and efficient public spending in social sectors most relevant to populations in need. The United Nations is supporting the devolution process by helping counties to build institutional, policy and legislative frameworks for development, including gender-responsive budgeting and gender mainstreaming, improved service delivery based on results-based management principles, inclusive participation and human rights-based approaches.

The country has weathered various storms in implementing the New Constitution, but a number of successes have been recorded. A case in point is the constitutional remedy for the low participation of women in politics and decision-making, with the ‘two thirds gender rule’ brought in to ensure that no more than two thirds of the members of elective public bodies shall be of the same gender. There have been some notable improvements over the past ten years, but heightened efforts will be needed to fully realise the rule.

During the 2017 elections, there was a 7.7% increase in the number of women elected, but they still comprised only 9.2% of those elected to County Assemblies, the Senate and Parliament. Women currently account for 23% of Members of Parliament, including women representatives. 2

Gender equality needs to be driven at national and county levels, through the implementation of laws and policies guaranteeing women’s political rights, and facilitating their effective participation and representation in development planning. County Integrated Development Plans provide an opportunity to put in place a framework for equality and inclusion, to effectively address inequalities and close the gender gap.

As we enter a new decade of constitutional implementation, the United Nations family in Kenya remains committed to continuing efforts in partnership with the Government and the people of Kenya. The next decade coincides with the timeframe for the Sustainable Development Goals and the Kenya Vision 2030. To realise these goals, it is imperative to harness the potential of all – in particular, women, youth, persons with disabilities, minorities and marginalised groups – as envisaged by the Constitution.

Public participation and inclusion will strengthen the central role of the people in the implementation of the Constitution and driving forward sustainable development, transformative governance and the promotion and protection of human rights in Kenya.

In turn, this will accelerate efforts to address inequalities and ensure that the development agenda leaves no one behind.

1 Kenya Voluntary National Report 2020 on progress against Sustainable Development Goals.
2 NDI, A Gender Analysis of the 2017 Kenya General Elections.

The leadership of the United Nations Country Team in Kenya

 

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The post Katiba at 10: A Landmark Constitution and a Blueprint for Deepening Democracy appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Porimol Palma
Aug 26 2020 (IPS-Partners)

When Bangladesh continues to bear the brunt of sheltering more than a million Rohingyas, Myanmar is doing little for their repatriation amid the silence of global powers though the Southeast Asian country faces a genocide case, experts and officials said.

About 750,000 Rohingyas — injured and starved — fled a brutal military crackdown since August 25, 2017, leaving their homes burnt and relatives killed. Bangladesh generously opened the border and sheltered them, but is now facing tremendous financial, ecological, and security challenges.

Even before 2017, some 300,000 other Rohingyas, who fled earlier waves of violence in Myanmar since 1978, were sheltered here.

Bangladesh hastily signed a repatriation deal with Myanmar in November 2017. The next year, UNHCR and UNDP signed a tripartite deal with Myanmar on creating conducive conditions for Rohingya return.

However, none of the demands of the refugees — guarantee of their safety, basic rights and citizenship — has been met Myanmar. As a result, two repatriation attempts — one on November 15 in 2018 and the second on August 22 last year — fell flat.

Even the provisional order issued by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in January this year has failed to help make any headway. Dozens of Rohingyas, along with hundreds of Rakhines, were killed and thousands were displaced as fighting between Myanmar military and Arakan Army raged in the recent months.

REPATRIATION EFFORTS SLOW

The meeting of Joint Working Group — comprised of officials from Myanmar and Bangladesh — was not held since May last year though two meetings are scheduled a year, officials concerned said.

“The second meeting was due in the last quarter of 2019. Myanmar pushed it forward to February this year but that also did not happen. Now Myanmar is using coronavirus as a pretext for not holding the meeting,” an official told The Daily Star.

In the last three years, Bangladesh sent the information of 6,00,000 Rohingyas to Myanmar, but the latter has provided Bangladesh with verified information of only 30,000.

Again, 30 to 40 percent of the 30,000 names were rejected.

There are cases that one was rejected and others were selected from a family for repatriation, but this proposition is not helpful in any way for the Rohingyas to return to Myanmar, the official said.

Dhaka had proposed Naypyidaw for a bilateral technical committee meeting to sort out these issues, but was responded with indifference, which is indicative of delaying Rohingya repatriation, he said.

Through informal discussion in January this year, the two sides agreed for a targeted approach. The idea is that Myanmar will find out the Rohingya villages least affected and then have a comprehensive plan for repatriation.

Accordingly, all the families of the villages concerned will be repatriated. A meeting was scheduled in February, but Myanmar did not show interest.

“Now Myanmar’s attitude is that you return our people, we will do what’s needed. Myanmar now seems more emboldened. This is because the global powers don’t have any coordinated approach to address the Rohingya issue. So, Myanmar can get away by doing anything,” the official said.

Nay San Lwin, a co-founder of Free Rohingya Coalition, said Myanmar also has made no attempt to amend discriminatory laws, including the citizenship, freedom of movement and education, which is very basic reforms required.

MYANMAR BENEFITS

Foreign policy experts say though there were sanctions from western countries on some military officials, the global powers are still largely divided over the Rohingya issue because of their geopolitical and business interests.

For example, the UN Security Council has failed to adopt any resolution yet in the last three years because of opposition from China and Russia, two veto powers.

Regional powers China, India, and Japan — all good friends of Bangladesh and Myanmar — want a bilateral solution to the Rohingya issue without putting pressure on Myanmar. The approach has not worked until now, analysts said.

Meanwhile, US imports from Myanmar have increased from $366 million in 2017 to $821 million in 2019. US exports also went up from $211 million in 2017 to $347 million in 2019, according to US Census Bureau.

Myanmar benefits from the European Union’s Generalised Scheme of Preferences (GSP), namely the “Everything But Arms” scheme that grants duty-free and quota-free access to the EU market.

According to the European Commission, Myanmar’s exports increased from €573 million in 2015 to an estimated €2.8 billion in 2019. Also, according to UN Comtrade data, Myanmar’s exports to UK went up from less than $300 million in 2017 to $536 million in 2019.

The businesses between Myanmar and other countries flourish though a UN fact-finding mission last year appealed for targeted sanctions, as well as an embargo on weapons sales to Myanmar, warning that a web of businesses run by Myanmar’s army is financing military operations on the Rohingyas.

The mission’s report identified at least 59 foreign companies — including firms from France, Belgium, Switzerland, Hong Kong, and China — that have dealings with army-linked ventures. It also named at least 14 companies that have sold arms to the Myanmar military, including state-owned entities in Israel, India, South Korea, and China.

BANGLADESH LOSES

With no repatriation in sight, Bangladesh is counting losses. A study by the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) showed, the estimated cost of hosting the Rohingyas $1.2 billion a year in the first five years if there is no repatriation for sheltering and providing them humanitarian assistance.

“Gradually, the cost will increase given the decline in foreign funding, population growth and inflation,” CDP Executive Director Dr Fahmida Khatun told this correspondent on August 21.

The study also said around 7,000 acres were deforested due to the Rohingya settlement — having long term ecological implications in the region, a tourist district of the country.

A study by COAST Trust, an NGO working in the country’s coastal belt, says transport cost went up by 35 percent and house rent by 60 percent since the Rohingya influx, while wages for laborers went down because of more labour supply from the Rohingya community.

“These issues have given rise to Rohingya-local tension,” said COAST Trust Executive Director Rezaul Karim Chowdhury. Also, lack of any income-generating activities and education facilities gave rise to crimes like drug trafficking, human trafficking, and prostitution, he said.

“It is very likely that militant elements will grow in the camps if the provisions of education, income, and better housing are not created.”

Prof Imtiaz Ahmed, director of the Centre for Genocide Studies at Dhaka University, said lingering of repatriation means the rise of human trafficking through the sea and extremist ideologies — that will ultimately affect the entire region’s development.

China, Japan and India — all have their large investments both in Bangladesh and Myanmar — and they should come forward to creating conditions conducive for Rohingya return at the earliest, he said.

“Myanmar may use fighting between Arakan Army and its military as a pretext. In that case, a combined force of China, Japan, India, and ASEAN can help create a safe zone as sought by the Rohingya,” said Prof Imtiaz, who teaches international relations.

LIGHT OF HOPE?

Prof Imtiaz said the good thing is that the ICJ in its verdict acknowledged the ethnic identity of the Rohingya. Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi also used the word “Arakanese Muslims” in the ICJ hearing in December last year — it’s a step towards Rohingya’s recognition.

“Justice at the ICJ may take time, but must happen. Germany paid reparations for genocide against the Jews. Eventually, Bangladesh also should claim reparations from Myanmar for the enormous cost it’s bearing for Rohingya influx,” Prof Imtiaz said.

Rezaul Karim Chowdhury said Dhaka must go for creative diplomacy, involving the regional civil societies, academia and media, apart from state actors, to create a broader consensus on the Rohingya repatriation and justice.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

The post Rohingya repatriation: Myanmar doing little while Bangladesh facing challenges appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Raghbendra Jha is Professor of Economics and Executive Director Australia South Asia Research Centre, Australian National University

By Raghbendra Jha
CANBERRA, Australia, Aug 26 2020 (IPS)

On July 25 2020 the Japanese bulk carrier MV Wakashio with 3,894 tonnes of fuel aboard ran aground off the cost of Mauritius. By 9 August over 1000 tonnes of oil had seeped into the pristine waters off the coast of this beautiful island haven. This spill was so large that it was even visible from space https://www.livescience.com/mauritius-oil-spill-from-space.html

Raghbendra Jha

Naturally, this accident led to a state of panic in the country. Not only would the pollution emanating from the oil spill lead to a strong hit to the economic mainstay of the country (fishing, tourism etc.) and ruin the environment around it, but also efforts to control the spill would be very expensive, subject to considerable uncertainty, and fraught with risk during the corona pandemic. Mauritius and its 1.3 million inhabitants depend crucially on the sea for food and eco-tourism, having fostered a reputation as a conservation success story and a world-class destination for nature lovers. However, the clean-up after the spill posed formidable challenges. As noted by commentators it is not even clear who would be liable to pay for the clean-up of the environment.

http://www.ipsnews.net/2020/08/mauritius-oil-spill-puts-spotlight-ship-pollution/ There is the additional complication that Mauritius lies on a very busy shipping lane – particularly for fuel. Although cleaning up of waters is part of the Sustainable Development Goals (Goal 14) there is little clarity on the institutional and legal mechanism to support a clean-up after an oil spill, particularly near small island nations. In this particular case, some help has been forthcoming from the Japanese but the clean-up is far from complete and there is the risk that the ship may break up.

In a historical context two facts about oil spills stand out https://www.itopf.org/knowledge-resources/data-statistics/statistics/ First, reflecting better technology and improvement in practices, over the period 1970-2019 the number of large oil spills (>700 tonnes) has come down quite significantly. The decline in medium term spills (7-700 tonnes) has also been quite spectacular. The number of medium (large) spills was 543 (245) in the 1970s, 360 (94) in the 1980s, 281 (77) in the 1990s, 149 (32) in the 2000s, and 44(18) in the 2010s, even though the volume of fuel transported has increased very sharply over this period. Second, at the individual times of occurrence spectacular large spills near major ports have received more policy and media attention. By way of comparison with the spill near Mauritius the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil tanker accident in Alaska spilled 37,000 tons of crude and, of course, garnered considerably more media and policy attention. Although the Mauritius oil spill counts as a large oil spill the fact that it has not occurred near a major port and has occurred against the backdrop of the corona pandemic makes it less likely that it will stimulate long-term policy action.

Since international waters, including the waters off the coast of Mauritius, are a public good, it is ordinarily difficult to price the consequence of a mishap occurring in such waters. In the case of the Mauritius oil spill the Japan P&I which provided insurance cover to the ship’s owner, Nagasaki Shipping Company, has attested that it will carry out all its insurance obligations to the ship’s owner. This would include removal of the broken ship and the clean-up. However, the Mauritius government would need to depend on the local courts to recoup the environmental losses. Whether these courts have the wherewithal and the resources to adjudicate such cases involving large and powerful shipping companies and insurers is another matter.

It is at this point that the importance of the development of international norms for deciding on the environmental costs becomes evident. It is clear that when the damage is caused by multinational shipping companies backed by large insurers the adjudicating authority should have the backing of some sort of international law for fixing liabilities. Local courts in Mauritius cannot be expected to seek adequate compensation from powerful international actors. A clear set of guidelines on fixing damages should be agreed on by all nations. Although this will require an enormous amount of goodwill and effort from various nations it has the potential of generating other beneficial spinoffs, e.g., the scope of fixing liabilities for oil spills could be expanded to include other environmental damages inflicted on international waters including the dumping of waste into the seas and the consequences of ship breakups in the high seas. Currently, as reported by UNCTAD not all countries agree on norms for fixing such damages. This needs to be sorted out at the earliest. In the absence of such agreement future oil spills, especially those near the coast line of small island states, will continue to wreck considerable economic and environmental damage.

 

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Excerpt:

Raghbendra Jha is Professor of Economics and Executive Director Australia South Asia Research Centre, Australian National University

The post The Recent Mauritius Oil Spill in Policy and Historical Context appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Women in Nigeria collect food vouchers as part of a programme to support families struggling under the COVID-19 lockdown. Credit: WFP/Damilola Onafuwa

By Ben Phillips
ROME, Aug 26 2020 (IPS)

Any of the first names that the media reported as having Covid were those of the rich and powerful, from movie stars to political leaders. Be ye ever so high, the virus is above thee – or so it seemed.

Now we understand that this perception, that came in part because at first only the wealthy and well-connected were getting tested, was misleading. The data is now crystal clear: Covid risk maps on to inequality, and Covid is a great unequaliser – in health, and in wealth.

But just as the initial “optimistic” take about Covid – that it would equalize us – got it wrong, so too the now pervasive “pessimistic” take – that the huge costs of the crisis leave us simply unable to act boldly – also gets it wrong.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, when we look at when it was that countries have embarked on the boldest steps to tackle inequality, it has not been when their coffers were most full, but when they were in the midst of, or emerging from, crises. As Covid has worsened inequality, it has also helped to expose it and to demonstrate its harm.

We have witnessed, in ever starker view, the inverse relationship between the concentration of wealth and social contribution. We have watched key workers without proper protections hold our society together, while elites looked after themselves, increasing their wealth by hundreds of billions. We have seen the immorality and unsustainability of systems in which our right to life is shaped by our bank balance.

The acute crisis of the present moment has revealed the deeper crisis of our age. Public opinion surveys, and media coverage have shown that many inequality-reducing policies previously deemed “radical” are now garnering widespread support. The opportunity to properly address inequality is now.

The point is not that the crisis “will” lead to action to tackle inequality, only that it helps generate a “could”. If social structures are like hard metal, crises are like heat that makes them molten: longstanding rules and norms can be reshaped, but in which ways they are reshaped depends on how hard they refashioned and from what direction.

If you’re stirred by the idea of emerging from this crisis into a more equal world, and you’re wondering who it is who can ensure that we do, history provides a very clear answer: you.

For my forthcoming book, How to Fight Inequality, I reviewed when progress had been made in tackling inequality. What I found was that if there is one generalizable lesson of social change it seems to be this: no one saves others, people standing together is how they liberate themselves.

It can be slow and it’s always complicated and it sometimes fails – but it’s the only way it works. The structure will not change from the top. As young activists expressed it to me: ‘There is no justice, just us.’ That can sound quite down, but it turns out that ‘just us’ – organized – is powerful.

Looking at history can help guide us. Crises are important, but what matters most is how we seize them. Three vital elements for stand out for success in the fight against inequality: we need to overcome deference; build power together, and create a new story.

All successful movements against inequality have faced hostility from the powerful, and therefore have depended on people’s willingness to get into trouble. The landless workers who successfully demanded access to land in Latin America, the Civil Rights movement in the US, and the trade unionists who won the welfare state in Europe, were all treated as threats to be squashed before they were recognized for prompting needed change.

Governments have not acted with the determination needed to tackle inequality without a push from the rest of us, and have consistently resisted that push at first. Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, who worked with movements for women’s rights, civil rights, migrant rights and the environment across the twentieth century, summed up her key lesson as ‘be a nuisance where it counts’.

Today’s heroes are yesterday’s troublemakers, and those who will define tomorrow will not be those whom the establishment embraces today.

Victories against inequality were rooted too in mass organizing – the change in each case was collective, never individual – because winning the battle against inequality has required power, which for ordinary people is only ever collective. The Montgomery bus boycott is sometimes told as if it was only a story of Rosa Parks sitting down and Martin Luther King speaking. But it was planned, and trained for. Rosa Parks wasn’t just tired!

And as Dr King himself pointed out, ‘I neither started the protest nor suggested it.’ Two years before Rosa Parks was arrested, the Women’s Political Leadership Council, a group of African-American activists, had been preparing for a bus boycott. The Montgomery Improvement Association, set up after the arrest, had to maintain the boycott for 381 days. And they had to resource it from the community.

Activists printed thousands of flyers to get the message out and got hundreds of volunteers to help organize. Black churches across the city served as centres of organizing. People who didn’t even use the bus helped by providing people lifts in their cars. Postal service workers helped work out the routes that the carpools should take. Taxi operators agreed to reduce rates.

The organizers of the boycott had to hold huge numbers of meetings. They had to fend off legal challenges – and violent attacks. But, because of the joined-up organization uniting faith groups, women’s groups, labour unions and others, holding together even under strain, they won. As civil rights leader Diane Nash noted, ‘It took many thousands of people to make the changes that we made, people whose names we’ll never know.’

Victories against inequality have also depended on the stories that people have developed, the pictures they painted of a more equal world. In Britain in the early twentieth century, suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst’s water colours of women cotton mill and pottery workers highlighted their struggle for dignified working conditions.

In the 1940s, the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, coined the phrase ‘welfare state’. Progress in tackling inequality in African and Asian countries after independence was also rooted in a narrative of the meaning of independence and of national destiny. Political independence was not seen as the end but as the first stage: achieving greater equality was core to honouring those who had made a sacrifice for freedom, and core to fulfilling the national destiny.

Citizens in newly independent countries were clear that the role of the new governments was to reshape society by tackling inequality. When later the era of adjustment came, tackling inequality was excised from many countries’ mainstream narratives of nationhood, where once it had been inseparable. Activist musicians and writers are organising now to ensure that the story is retold.

Looking back, we can observe how victories against inequality did not just ‘happen’, and were not just ‘given’, but were won, by ordinary people who were challenging, organized, and painted a picture of the world that could be. We have won before, we can win again.

Covid has exacerbated that feeling that we are not in control of events, that things are all just going on around us, that we are always and only objects, never subjects. But the Covid crisis has also meant that changes that had once seemed impossible have now been shown to be plausible.

The hardened structures are molten again. We can shape what happens – not alone, but with each other. Now, too, we must make our own history.

 

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The post Covid is a Great Unequaliser, But the Crisis Could Enable us to Build a More Equal Future appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Ben Phillips is the author of ‘How to Fight Inequality’, due to be released in September. He is also an advisor to the United Nations, governments and civil society organisations, and was Campaigns Director for Oxfam and for ActionAid, and co-founded the Fight Inequality Alliance.

The post Covid is a Great Unequaliser, But the Crisis Could Enable us to Build a More Equal Future appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Credit: Pattabi Raman.

By Upasana Khadka
KATHMANDU, Aug 25 2020 (IPS)

Despite dire predictions about a drastic drop in remittances that Nepal gets from its workers abroad due to the Covid-19 induced economic downturn, money transfers have hit Rs875 billion which is only 0.5% less than the preceding year.

This is in stark contrast to the World Bank’s prediction of a 14% decline, a worst-case scenario of a 28.7% drop by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), and the forecast of an 18% reduction by Nepal’s Central Bureau of Statistics.

During the initial months of the crisis in March/April remittances did take a sharp dip, declining from Rs79.2 billion the preceding month to Rs34.5 billion. But it has since picked up, rising steadily to Rs94 billion in May/June and Rs101 billion in June/July. Far from declining, the figures for the past two months are record high monthly inflows to date. (See graphs)

The annual growth rate of remittances till this year, which declined by only 0.5%, had been on a positive trajectory, with year-on-year increase of 7.9% in 2017/18 and 14.1% in 2018/19.

 

Source: Nepal Rastra Bank

 

Source: Nepal Rastra Bank

 

“In many essential sectors including manufacturing, Nepali migrant workers overseas have continued to work throughout the pandemic,” explains Gunakar Bhatta, spokesperson at Nepal Rastra Bank. With news of the virus spreading in Nepal and complications with repatriation, many workers may now be weighing their options and deciding to stay back abroad.

Ramesh, a Nepali worker at WRP Asia, a company making latex gloves in Malaysia, says that after the initial slump at the factory, there is now lots of work because of the heightened global demand for gloves.

“We are now all working overtime. I just finished an 11 hour shift, 8 hours of my regular hours with 3 hours overtime,” he told us over the phone from Kuala Lumpur. Other Nepalis employed overseas in storekeeping, domestic work, cleaning and security, considered essential services, have continued to work right through the pandemic.

Also, the volume of workers who have registered to return home pales in comparison those who have decided to stay back, either because they are continuing to work or they are in a wait-and-watch mode as their decision depends on the situation of their employers. Many are also waiting for normal flights to resume on 1 September.

Ram, a Nepali worker in Qatar, says he holds his transfers when the banks are closed back home, but the pandemic has not stopped the monthly remittances to family in Nepal. “I send money home very month, just like I did before Covid-19, things have not changed much for me or my family. I use my bank phone app to transfer the money,” he says.

At the central bank, Gunakar Bhatta notes that contrary to initial fears, China’s demand for oil has recovered to over 90% of pre-pandemic levels, which bodes well for Gulf economies and subsequent demand for migrant workers.

This trend is mixed in other labour-sending countries in the region. Both Pakistan and Bangladesh have seen a surge in remittances, whereas the Phillipines has seen a decline. Some experts say the increase in the past two months in Nepal may be due to workers sending more money home to their families because their incomes have been affected by the lockdowns. The higher June-July figures could also be because of the backlog from earlier months of the lockdown.

“Migrants may have sent what is remaining of their savings from their bank accounts and their gratuity if any. It is uncertain what the numbers will look like next fiscal year, remittance data for August will be a helpful indication,” says Suman Pokharel, CEO of International Money Express (IME).

He adds that the decrease in economic activity and the disruptions in travel have led to a drop in informal hundi transfers, and an increase in transactions through banks and registered money transfer agencies.

The Nepali rupee-US dollar exchange rate is at an all-time low of about Rs120, and in dollar terms total remittances this year have decreased by 3.3%, and in 2018/19 it had actually increased by 7.8%.

The outflow of overseas migrant workers decreased in 2019/20 compared to the previous year after the government stopped issuing labour approvals from the third week of March. In 2018/19, 236,208 new workers had left for foreign employment, and 272,616 migrants renewed their permits. This year, that number has decreased to 190,453 and 177,980 respectively (See graph).

 

Source: MINISTRY OF LABOUR

 

Remittances in 2019/20 could therefore take a hit due to the reduction in both the flow and stock of workers due to shrinking demand and job displacements, or contract completion.

While the remittances this year have defied predictions, it masks individual stories of many migrant workers who have not only been unable to send remittances home, but are living in charity and desperate to return. Many are stranded due to uncertain and inadequate repatriation flights, the government’s constant flip-flopping in decisions, and lack of communication.

The Rs875 billion that was remitted this year will cushion to Nepal’s economy, and also includes contributions from undocumented workers who send home money regularly.

However, these workers are not eligible for the government’s repatriation support scheme for  tickets and quarantine back home which is funded by the Foreign Employment Welfare Fund (FEWF). Nor has an alternate mechanism mobilising the government’s Covid-19 fund been set up to support them.

 

This story was originally published by The Nepali Times

The post Defying Predictions, Nepal’s Remittances Still High appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels.

By External Source
Aug 25 2020 (IPS)

The race for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine is well underway. It’s tempting to assume that once the first vaccine is approved for human use, all the problems of this pandemic will be immediately solved. Unfortunately, that is not exactly the case.

Developing a new vaccine is only the first part of the complex journey that’s supposed to end with a return to some sort of normal life. Producing hundreds of millions of vaccines for the U.S. – and billions for the world as a whole – will be no small feat. There are many technical and economic challenges that will need to be overcome somehow to produce millions of vaccines as fast as possible.

I am a professor of health policy and management at the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Public Health and have been working in and studying the worlds of vaccine development, production and distribution for over two decades. The issues the world is facing today regarding the coronavirus vaccine are not new, but the stakes are perhaps higher than ever before.

There are four main challenges that must be addressed as soon as possible if a vaccine is to be produced quickly and at a large scale.

 

Existing manufacturing capacity is limited

The shrinking and outsourcing of U.S. manufacturing capacity has reached into all sectors. Vaccines are no exception.

The number of U.S. biotech and pharmaceutical companies involved in vaccines development and production has fallen from 26 in 1967 to just five in 2004. There are many causes – relatively low profit margins, smaller markets compared to those of other medications, corporate mergers, liability risks and the anti-vaccination movement – but the result is that in some years, companies have struggled to meet need even for existing vaccines. Just take a look at the flu vaccine shortages of 2003-2005 and the childhood vaccine shortages of the early 2000s.

When a coronavirus vaccine is approved, production of other vaccines will need to continue as well. With the flu season each year and children being born every day, you can’t simply reallocate all existing vaccine manufacturing capacity to COVID-19 vaccine production. New additional capacity will be needed.

 

The type of vaccine is still unknown

While there are a few frontrunners at the moment, it is still unknown which of the more than 160 vaccines in development will get approval first, and therefore, what kind of manufacturing needs to be put in place. Producing a COVID-19 vaccine will not be the same as adding a new strain to an existing flu vaccines or simply tweaking how other existing vaccine are made.

Most existing vaccines, like those for flu and measles, use either inactivated or weakened forms of those specific viruses to generate immunity, but researchers can’t simply swap the flu virus for SARS-CoV-2. Additionally, a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine may not even use inactivated or weakened virus, but instead could incorporate a protein or genetic material from the coronavirus. Manufacturing such pieces of the virus in large amounts may require new processes that have never been tried before, since the Food and Drug Administration hasn’t ever approved any DNA vaccines for human use.

Some companies are developing mRNA or DNA vaccines. Others are working with inactivated SARS-CoV-2 or even other types of viruses like the chimp adenovirus. Then there are those targeting different protein subunits of the virus. Each vaccine may have very different manufacturing requirements and it is impossible to know which of these candidates will reach the market and when.

Governments and other funders face a difficult choice. If they gamble and provide funding to scale up manufacturing for a particular vaccine now, they could save time and thus lives. Picking wrong, though, could end up costing much more in money, suffering and lives. Ultimately, manufacturers will seek financial assurances – like upfront payments or commitments to buy the vaccine when it is available – from governments and funders to make sure that the time, effort and resources dedicated to vaccine development and manufacturing will not be wasted. For example, the U.S. government’s $2.1 billion deal with Sanofi and GSK will include scaling up of manufacturing capacity and the purchase of 100 million doses of the vaccine.

 

The size of the problem is unprecedented

As the saying goes, knowing is not the same as doing. Producing a completely new vaccine at such a large scale so quickly is unprecedented.

Numerous delays occurred in the production of the H1N1 flu vaccine in 2009. Consider what may happen with a novel vaccine that could require new reagents, production processes, equipment and containers, among other things. Rollouts of the smallpox and polio vaccines occurred decades ago with less urgency and when populations were significantly smaller. Today, assuming that the herd immunity threshold is at least 70%, manufacturers would need to produce at least 230 million doses to cover the U.S. population and over 5.25 billion doses to cover world’s population. And that’s if only one dose is required. Requiring two doses per person would double the doses needed.

Never before has humanity tried to produce something for every person on Earth as quickly as possible. There are going to be problems.

 

Economic poker game

Ultimately, most potential vaccine manufacturers are businesses, seeking to minimize costs and maximize revenue where possible. They will want incentives to forego other more lucrative opportunities, such as continuing to develop or produce medications that have higher profit margins.

For example, companies may not readily reveal current and potential manufacturing capacity. After all, these can be major bargaining chips in negotiating contracts with governments and other possible funders. Revealing that you have too little capacity right now may jeopardize confidence in your ability to make the vaccine. Revealing that you already have enough capacity can hinder your bargaining for more funding and resources.

During the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic while I was working within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, we had to continuously deal with changing vaccine production schedules as manufacturers continued to renegotiate the terms with the government.

Moreover, the extent of the pandemic brings this poker game to the world stage. Different countries may be negotiating with or even against each other and manufacturers. For example, high-income countries may be angling to get ahead of other countries seeking to receive vaccines.

 

A plan and a systems approach

Ultimately, vaccine production is only one part of a complex, interconnected system whose ultimate goal is to prevent people from getting a disease.

The type of vaccine developed, size and location of the initial target populations, the way the vaccine is administered, the number of doses and the storage requirements for the vaccine are all interconnected and just some of the factors that affect the production requirements. For example, work done by my team at the City University of New York has shown that that the number of vaccine doses that you put in a single vial can have a variety of cascading effects on vaccination and disease control programs.

People’s lives, and life as we know it, are on the line. All of the complexities of producing a vaccine need to be addressed through open worldwide discussions and extensive mapping and modeling of these scenarios. Without proper planning and preparation, society may be left in a situation where production cannot meet demand or vaccines are shoddily produced.

And even when enough vaccines are manufactured, there’s still the challenge of actually getting them into hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. and billions around the world. There are worries that there won’t be enough glass vials to store the vaccines or syringes to administer them, as well as concerns about the temperature controlled supply chain.

These challenges of production and distribution, though large, are not insurmountable. The more planning governments and businesses do now, the better they will be able to deliver the vaccines the world so desperately needs.

Bruce Y. Lee, Professor of Health Policy and Management, City University of New York

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

The post Approval of a Coronavirus Vaccine Would Be Just the Beginning – Huge Production Challenges Could Cause Long Delays appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By External Source
Aug 25 2020 (IPS-Partners)

Over 200,000 migrant laborers, mostly from Africa, work in Italy’s fields. After being exploited for years, the coronavirus global pandemic made these workers “essential” overnight — but without labor rights or even access to basic sanitation, these farmworkers are living and working in conditions that have been described as modern slavery. Union leader Aboubakar Soumahoro has been documenting these inhumane conditions and is now helping the workers organize to demand real and lasting change.

Source: Doha Debates

 

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The post The Invisibles: Inhumane Conditions of Italy’s Migrant Farmworkers appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By External Source
Aug 25 2020 (IPS-Partners)

According to a 2016 Guttmacher Institute study, 60% of girls ages 15-19 in developing countries who want to avoid pregnancy do not have access to modern contraceptive methods. Women Deliver Young Leaders Kizanne James and Khadija Sinanan dive deeper into stigma around contraceptive use in their home country of Trinidad and Tobago as part of their projects as World Contraception Day Ambassadors.

Not your typical MD

Kizanne James is not your typical medical doctor. Based in Trinidad and Tobago, she has over 15 years of experience in youth leadership and works daily to educate her young patients on family planning. Through her World Contraception Day Ambassador project, she created a mobile app and website that helps people access contraception. The website and app provide accurate and timely information about types of contraceptives available, as well as where to access them, including the exact location of 16 health centers that provide them for free.

“Contraception is free in Trinidad at most health centers so you just have to go and tell them you want this and they’ll book you an appointment. So you don’t need to go to a gynecologist, you can just go to a health center.”
— Kizanne James

As part of her project, Kizanne also set out to collect information about young people’s understanding of contraceptives. She interviewed, photographed, and filmed 73 young people from different areas of the country about their attitudes, perceptions, and experiences with contraception.

“That experience was so eye-opening for us because we had so many misconceptions out there and people were uncomfortable to discuss something that is just part of us. Sexual health is part of us.”
— Kizanne James

Elevating underrepresented voices

Trained as an attorney, Khadija Sinanan is dedicated to working with young people in Trinidad and Tobago. She is the Co-Director of WOMANTRA, a youth-led organization dedicated to feminist activism and scholarship to improve the lives of women and girls in the Caribbean.

Her project as a World Contraception Day Ambassador focused on highlighting the intersectionality of race, gender, and social inequalities affecting young people. Through in-depth interviews and storytelling, Khadija sought to amplify the voices of young people in rural communities as well as LGBTQIA communities, both of which have historically been underrepresented in Trinidad and Tobago.

“I wanted to see what have been the lived experiences of young people. Sometimes there’s a lot of pushback in communities so some people aren’t comfortable coming out or speaking openly about their experiences.”
— Kizanne James

Source: Women Deliver

 

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