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Credit: Sarawak Biodiversity Centre

By Angel Mendoza
PARIS, Aug 25 2020 (IPS)

The voices of indigenous people worldwide are being silenced and their lives made invisible. Stewards of the earth, they are left at the fringes of public discourse in countries around the globe. Indigenous people are not “extinct”, they exist, and they are building innovative networks and solutions, that could be the key to many of our world’s problems.

From the Chepang indigenous peoples in Nepal being evicted from their ancestral lands, to the killing of indigenous leaders in Colombia, native communities continue to be victims of attacks, yet they are also building powerful movements, fighting for access to land, education and autonomy.

“There’s no democracy in the world without the respect and defence of indigenous people. The diversity of human beings and nature is our wealth,” says Iara Pietricovsky, Chair of Forus International, a global network of civil society organisations.

According to the World Bank, there are approximately 476 million Indigenous Peoples worldwide, in over 90 countries. They represent over 6% of the global population, yet their voices in state’s decision making and the media remain silenced. The Covid-19 pandemic has become a further threat that indigenous communities are facing as it spreads in their vulnerable regions, infecting thousands.

New challenges in times of pandemic

British writer Damian Barr explained it clearly: “We are not all in the same boat. We are all in the same storm. Some are on super-yachts. Some have just the one oar.”

The death on August 5 from Covid-19 of the Brazilian Chief Aritana Yawalapiti, confirms the vulnerability of the indigenous peoples in the face of the pandemic. He was one of the most influential leaders who helped create the Xingu indigenous park, located in the southern Amazon. Nearly 6,000 indigenous people from 16 different ethnic groups live in this protected area in the state of Mato Grosso.

“In Brazil, right now, there is a deliberated policy of destruction of the lives and culture of indigenous communities, using the old genocidal strategy: invading their lands and providing no support in terms of the Covid-19 pandemic,” Pietricovsky explained.

According to the Brazil’s Indigenous People Articulation (APIB) there are now 23,000 indigenous people infected with Covid-19 and 639 have already died across the country. In particular, the indigenous communities of the Amazon have already seen their homelands devastated by illegal deforestation, industrial farming, mining and oil exploration.

Now, the coronavirus pandemic has magnified their struggle, just as the forest fires are rampant once more, affecting the livelihood of around three million indigenous people – members of 400 tribes.

Indigenous communities: valuing their diverse identities

We must make sure indigenous peoples are visible, by valuing their identities, knowledge and community-building approach – ending centuries of exploitation and oppression.

Peruvian sociologist, Anibal Quijano, explains how the ideas of “race” and “naturalization” are linked to colonial relations of domination that are still affecting indigenous communities today. The conquered and dominated, were placed in a natural position of inferiority.

This social structure located indigenous communities at the bottom of the social ladder. The colonial era might seem over, but indigenous communities continue to seek recognition in a “horizontal society”, in which one can form relationships on a plane of equality.

In the Covid-19 context, indigenous communities find themselves with little access to health care and prevention. José Luis Caal, project coordinator of CONGCOOP, a platform of civil society organisations in Guatemala, explains how the Covid-19 pandemic has generated a health, economic and cultural crisis, where indigenous peoples are one of the most affected groups, due to the historical structural inequalities in which they live.

“The crisis has only highlighted the violation of rights they suffer, especially women, who have had to face an enormous workload as they are the main caregivers in the family and community,” Caal says.

The absence of adequate health services, economic subsidies and food support, as well as the continuation of extractive activities and the expansion of the agricultural frontier in many places, have had a great impact on indigenous people. They are vulnerable to the risk of contagion, Caal says, without their demands and complaints being heard.

In response to the health crisis in Guatemala and worldwide, a series of policies, projects, and subsidies are being implemented to alleviate the economic crisis caused by the pandemic. Government support, however, has not reached rural and indigenous communities. As a result, several communities have taken this issue and many more, in their own hands.

Indigenous Communities and Innovation – the Way Forward

In Peru, a complex country with different social realities, local non-government organizations such as ANC, a national platform of civil society organisations, are listening and understanding the innovative knowledge inherent in indigenous communities.

They constantly organise on-site studies and use an inclusive, ethnological and participatory approach. They don’t teach or import an idea of development; they exchange and learn from indigenous communities. In this way, for over 50 years, civil society organisations in Peru have contributed to the development of social sciences and influenced government policies, by bring indigenous voices forward.

“The first thing that must be understood and valued are indigenous communities’ concepts around nature and their environment. This is essential in order to respect their rights and above all, to ensure that policies do not disrupt their livelihoods. We sometimes think that the western vision is “natural”, and therefore their ideas of family, property, land, and their relationship with nature is trivialised,” says Pina Huamán of the Peruvian platform ANC.

Education, the type of knowledge one absorbs, is a priority for indigenous communities across Latin America. Guatemala for instance, has 22 Mayan languages, yet indigenous young people cannot find educational resources in their native language.

The Guatemalan platform, CONGCOOP, with support from Forus International, has launched a Virtual Training Centre this year, to offer its members, notably young indigenous people, “localised” expertise that will support new leadership in the country.

For indigenous people around the globe, the way forward is to guarantee that their existence, language and culture is respected. We must ensure a meaningful exchange and build bridges of solidarity instead of walls of ignorance.

 

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Excerpt:

Angel Mendoza is a Communication Assistant at FORUS, a global network of civil society organisations, previously known as the International Forum of National NGO Platforms (IFP/FIP).

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By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 25 2020 (IPS)

The World Bank leadership must urgently abandon its ‘Maximizing Finance for Development’ (MFD) hoax. Instead, it should resume its traditional multilateral development bank role of mobilizing funds at minimal cost to finance developing countries.

Funding is urgently needed for Covid-19 containment, relief and recovery efforts, to prevent recessions becoming protracted depressions and to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Anis Chowdhury

Mobilizing funds, maximizing finance
The World Bank’s MFD – a reheated version of its 2015 Billions to Trillions: Transforming Development Finance (B2T) campaign – promised to leverage billions of ODA into trillions of development finance. However, MFD has failed to achieve its purported objective to fill the estimated US$4~5 trillion annual SDGs funding gap.

Blended finance and public private partnerships (PPPs) are its two main instruments for such leveraging without offering evidence that either can and will deliver development projects much better than traditional public procurement.

Both benefit private finance at the expense of the public interest, particularly by increasing the risks of government contingent liabilities. Increasing such exposure is presented as an unavoidable cost of raising additional finance.

The Bank has long claimed that private finance offers the best solution to pressing development and welfare concerns. Its MFD strategy urges using public money to leverage private finance, and capital markets to transform bankable projects into liquid securities.

It presumes that most developing countries cannot achieve the SDGs’ Agenda 2030 with their own limited fiscal resources, especially as overseas development assistance (ODA) becomes increasingly scarce.

The strategy envisages multilateral development banks (MDBs) and development finance institutions increasing financial leverage through securitization to attract private investment, particularly by institutions.

It would deploy scarce public resources to ‘de-risk’ such financing arrangements by transforming ‘bankable’ development projects into tradable assets. Thus, governments bear more of the risks and costs of greater financial fragility.

The MFD approach had mobilized only US$0.37 of additional private capital for every US$1 of public money invested in low-income countries (LICs), according to an April 2019 study. Leverage ratios were generally low across sectors, and lowest for LIC and middle-income country (MIC) infrastructure.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Blended finance no magic bullet
The study also revealed that blended finance has effectively transferred risk from the private to the public sector. The public sector had borne 57% of the cost of blended finance investments on average, but 73% in LICs. Despite ever more public subsidies to incentivize private investment in LICs, leverage ratios may have declined.

Thus, “the big push for blended finance risks skewing ODA away from its core agenda of helping eradicate poverty in the poorest countries”. Others fear that blended finance “will crowd out ODA rather than crowd in private finance”.

Blended finance – “a heady cocktail of public, private and charitable money”, according to The Economist – came into vogue following the 2015 UN Conference on Financing for Development in Addis Ababa.

The Economist called it a “honey trap”, noting that blended finance was “floated at all manner of gatherings, from the recent meetings of the IMF and the World Bank to the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos”. The WEF claimed that every dollar of public money invested typically attracted US$1~20 in private investment.

However, as The Economist recently found, “blended finance has struggled to grow. Since 2014 the flow of public and private capital into blended projects and funds has stayed flat at about US$20bn a year…far off the goal of US$100bn set by the UN in 2015” for climate investments by 2020. On average, MDBs mobilize less than US$1 of private capital for every public dollar.

The Economist concluded, “merging public and private money will always be hard, and early hopes may simply have been too starry-eyed. A trillion-dollar market seems well out of reach. Even making it to the hundreds of billions a year
may be a stretch”.

Public finance, private profits
An early 2018 World Bank review of regulatory frameworks for procuring PPP infrastructure projects came up with a long list of shortcomings in both developed and developing countries.

It found poor “government capabilities to prepare, procure, and manage such projects constitutes an important barrier to attracting private sector investments”. Thus, authorities often failed to consider PPPs’ fiscal implications, risks of opportunistic renegotiations and lack of transparency.

A 2018 European Court of Auditors report recommended that the EU and member states “should not promote a more intensive and widespread use of PPPs until the issues identified in this report are addressed”.

It had found “widespread shortcomings and limited benefits, resulting in €1.5 billion of inefficient and ineffective spending. In addition, value for money and transparency were widely undermined, particularly by unclear policy and strategy, inadequate analysis, off-balance-sheet recording of PPPs and unbalanced risk-sharing arrangements.”

Likewise, a 2018 UK National Audit Office report noted that it has “been unable to identify a robust evaluation of the actual performance of private finance at a project or programme level.” It also found the costs of one group of PPP projects in education around 40% higher than for a project financed by government borrowing.

Similarly, the Australian Auditor-General’s report on private health sector involvements concluded, “It appears governments have embarked on the path of increased privatisation without the benefit of rigorous analysis of the benefits and costs. Individual examples of privatisation have highlighted many problems which have resulted in costs rather than savings to the public purse”.

A more recent study concluded, “The mixed public-private funding and provision has had a deleterious effect on the Australian hospital system”. Clearly, PPPs have been much abused, even in developed countries with presumably better regulatory, governance and oversight capacities and capabilities than in most developing countries.

Mobilizing finance for private partners
In October 2017, ahead of the World Bank Group annual meeting, 152 organizations from 45 countries issued a manifesto opposing “the dangerous rush to promote expensive and high-risk public-private partnerships (PPPs)”. It pointed out that the “experience of PPPs has been overwhelmingly negative and very few PPPs have delivered results in the public interest”.

The World Bank’s Public Private Partnership in Infrastructure Resource Center (PPPIRC) has identified ten important risks of PPPs, such as “development, bidding and ongoing costs in PPP projects are likely to be greater than for traditional government procurement processes”.

The PPPIRC warned that “the cost has to be borne either by the customers or the government through subsidies”, and that the “private sector will do what it is paid to do and no more than that”.

Thus, there are serious doubts about the extent to which governments can count on the private sector to support sustainable development. Yet, the Bank claims unambiguously, “PPPs are increasingly recognized as a valuable development tool by governments, firms, donors, civil society, and the public”.

With the current World Bank leadership trying to reduce developing countries’ debt, it may well abandon the former Obama-appointed World Bank President’s MFD. But it also seems to be eschewing banks’ financial intermediation role of raising and lending funds at low cost to developing countries.

 

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The Mayan Train, the flagship megaproject of leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico, seeks to promote the socioeconomic development of the south and southeast of the country, with an emphasis on tourism and with the goal of transporting 50,000 passengers per day by 2023. The fear is that the mass influx of tourists will damage preserved coastal areas, such as Tulum beach in the state of Quintana Roo on the Yucatan Peninsula. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy

By Emilio Godoy
Mexico City, Aug 25 2020 (IPS)

Mayan anthropologist Ezer May fears that the tourism development and real estate construction boom that will be unleashed by the Mayan Train, the main infrastructure project of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, will disrupt his community.

“What we think is that the east of the town could be affected,” May told IPS by phone from his hometown of Kimbilá.

“The most negative impact will come when they start building the development hub around the train station,” he said. “We know that the tourism industry and other businesses will receive a boost. There is uncertainty about what is to come; many ejidatarios [members of an ejido, public land held in common by the inhabitants of a village and farmed cooperatively or individually] don’t know what’s happening.”

This town of 4,000 people, whose name means “water by the tree”, is in the municipality of Izamal in the northern part of the state of Yucatan, about 1,350 km southeast of Mexico City. The district will have a Mayan Train station, although its size is not yet known, and the prospect awakens fears as well as hope among the communities involved.

In Kimbilá, 10 km from the city of Izamal, there are 560 ejidatarios who own some 5,000 hectares of land where they grow corn and vegetables, raise small livestock and produce honey.

“These ejido lands are going to be in the sights of tourism and real estate companies, real estate speculation and everything else that urban development implies. We will see the same old dispossession and asymmetrical agreements and contracts for buying up land at extremely low prices; we’ll see unequal treatment,” said May.

The government’s National Tourism Fund (Fonatur) is promoting the project, which is to cost between 6.2 and 7.8 billion dollars. Construction began in May.

The plan is for the Mayan Train to begin operating in 2022, with 19 stations and 12 other stops along some 1,400 km of track, which will be added to the nearly 27,000 km of railways in Mexico, Latin America’s second largest economy, population 129 million.

It will run through 78 municipalities in the southern and southeastern states of the country: Campeche, Quintana Roo, Yucatan, Chiapas and Tabasco, the first three of which are in the Yucatan Peninsula, which has one of the most important and fragile ecosystems in Mexico and is home to 11.1 million people.

Its locomotives will run on diesel and the trains are projected to carry about 50,000 passengers daily by 2023, reaching 221,000 by 2053, in addition to cargo such as transgenic soybeans, palm oil and pork, which are major agricultural products in the region.

A map of the Mayan Train’s route through the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. Construction began in May and it is expected to begin operating in 2023. CREDIT: Fonatur

Pros and cons

The Mexican government is promoting the megaproject as an engine for social development that will create jobs, boost tourism beyond the traditional attractions and energise the regional economy.

But it has unleashed controversy between those who back the administration’s propaganda and those who question the railway because of its potential environmental, social and cultural impacts, as well as the risk of fuelling illegal activities, such as human trafficking and drug smuggling.

The megaproject involves the construction of development hubs in the stations, which include businesses, drinking water, drainage, electricity and urban infrastructure, and which, according to the ministry of the environment itself, represent the greatest environmental threat posed by the railway.

U.N. Habitat, which offers technical advice on the project’s land-use planning aspects, estimates that the Mayan Train will create one million jobs by 2030 and lift 1.1 million people out of poverty, in an area that includes 42 municipalities with high poverty rates.

The region has become the country’s new energy frontier, with the construction of wind and solar parks, and agribusiness production such as transgenic soy and large pig farms. At the same time, it suffers from high levels of deforestation, fuelled by lumber extraction and agro-industry.

The environmental impact assessment itself and several independent scientific studies warn of the ecological damage that would be caused by the railway, which experts say the Mexican government does not seem willing to address.

The crux: the development model

Violeta Núñez, an academic at the public Autonomous Metropolitan University, told IPS that there is an internal contradiction within the government between those seeking a change in the socioeconomic conditions in the region and supporters of the real estate business.

“You have to ask yourself what kind of development you are pursuing and whether it is the best option,” she said. “The Mayan Train is aimed at profits and these stakeholders are not interested in people’s well-being, but in making money. What some indigenous organisations have said is that they never asked for a railway, and they feel that the project has been imposed on them.”

The railroad will cross ejido lands in five states where there are 5,386 ejidos totalling 12.5 million hectares. The ejidos would contribute the land and would be the main investors. To finance the stations, Fonatur has proposed three types of trusts that can be quoted on the Mexican stock market and that entail financial risks, such as the loss of the investment.

The undertaking was not suspended by the appearance of the COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico, as the government classified its construction as an “essential activity”.

In Calakmul, in the southeastern state of Campeche, the Mayan Train will make use of the right-of-way that the Federal Electricity Commission has for its power lines. But on other stretches construction of the new 1,400-km railway will lead to the eviction of families. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

To legitimise its construction, the leftwing López Obrador administration organised a consultation with indigenous communities through 30 regional assemblies, 15 informative and 15 consultative, held Nov. 29-30 and Dec. 14-15, 2019, respectively.

These assemblies were attended by 10,305 people from 1,078 indigenous communities in the five states, out of a potentially affected population of 1.5 million people, 150,000 of whom are indigenous.

But the consultation was carried out before the environmental impact assessment of the megaproject was even completed.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Mexico questioned whether this process met international standards, such as the provisions of International Labour Organisation Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, to which the country is a party.

The railway will also displace an undetermined number of people, to make room for the tracks and stations, although U.N. Habitat insists that this will be “consensual”.

Fears of a new Cancún

The government argues that the project will not repeat the mistakes of mass tourism destinations, symbolised by Cancún, which wrought environmental havoc in that former Caribbean paradise in Quintana Roo. But its critics argue that the major beneficiaries appear to be the same big tourism, real estate and hotel chains, and that it will cause the same problems as a result of the heavy influx of visitors.

In Kimbilá, the local population already has firsthand experience of confrontations over megaprojects, such as a Spanish company’s attempt to build a wind farm, cancelled in 2016. But the difference is that now the opponent is much more powerful.

May said the railway “is an attempt to transform indigenous peoples and integrate them into the tourism-based economic model. They want us to imagine development from a global perspective, because it is a sign of socioeconomic progress. They believe that tourism is the source of progress, that cities bring development and that this is the best way to go.”

In Izamal, home to more than 26,800 people, construction of the development hub would require 853 hectares, 376 of which belong to ejidos.

Núñez warned of the disappearance of the campesino (peasant farmer) and indigenous way of life. “People have survived because of their relationship with the land and now this survival is being thrown into question and they are to become workers in the development hubs. This is not an option, if we are to defend the rural indigenous way of life,” she said.

The researcher suggested that an alternative would be the appropriation of the megaproject by the communities, in which “the ejidatarios themselves, in a joint association, present an alternative proposal other than the trusts on the stock market.”

The Mayan Train is a link in a plan that seeks to integrate the south and southeast of Mexico with Central America, starting with the government’s “Project for the territorial reordering of the south-southeast” and linked to the “Project for the integration and development of Mesoamerica”, which has been modified in appearance but not in substance since the beginning of the 21st century.

Its aim is to link that region to global markets and curb internal and external migration through the construction of megaprojects, the promotion of tourism and the services entailed.

In the 2000s, the government of the southern state of Chiapas fomented “Sustainable Rural Cities”, with aims similar to those of the Mayan Train, and experts argue that the failure of that project should be remembered.

Related Articles

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Aerial view of Georgetown, Guyana. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Jeremy M. Martin and Kathryn Hillis
LA JOLLA, California, Aug 24 2020 (IPS)

Just over five years ago, a major oil discovery occurred on the northeastern coast of South America. There have been a series of additional discoveries ever since. But this time it was not Venezuela. It was Guyana.

Fast forward to August 6 when Irfaan Ali assumed the presidency. The country had been plunged into a political crisis since its March election and allegations of fraud.

The situation had become dire and sanctions were levied against the former government of David Granger. As the new government reviews its policy and regulatory frameworks, there is, in our estimation, what could be called a not-to-do list when it comes to oil governance.

The well-known and hugely studied resource curse has confronted countries such as Venezuela for decades. In many cases, significant natural resources correlated with depressed development as other sectors are neglected and currency appreciates causing uncompetitive exports

Given the major oil discoveries, political instability was problematic for the economic outlook and development of the nation. It was particularly acute for managing the oil resource and income on the horizon.

Earlier this year, oil was commercialized from the Liza field. With that milestone, solving the political crisis was essential in order to allow the new administration to grapple with the key oil governance challenge and the what, where and how they should focus when it comes to the emerging oil sector.

Guyana need only look to its neighbor Venezuela to see the perils of abundant oil resources. The well-known and hugely studied resource curse has confronted countries such as Venezuela for decades. In many cases, significant natural resources correlated with depressed development as other sectors are neglected and currency appreciates causing uncompetitive exports.

It bears noting that even before the political crisis, Guyana received a host of international experts, institutions and donors eager to dispense advice as to how to avoid the grim fate of the resource curse. But as much of the literature illuminates, many of the recommendations are easier said than done.

For example, economic diversification and rooting out corruption are excellent and obvious ideas that many larger and more prosperous countries have failed to achieve.

So, back to our not-to-do list that we feel contains five feasible, actionable ideas for the Ali administration.

 

First, avoid overinvestment in the oil and gas industry. While there should be adequate infrastructure for drilling and shipping the oil, the country should resist the urge to move downstream of the wellhead. Any refineries built would likely be deeply unprofitable.

For context, the last new refinery in the United States was built in 1977, as refining is a high cost venture that can take many years to turn a profit. Additionally, most energy economists point to an oversaturation of global refining capacity, especially as many people are looking to decrease their use of fossil fuels. This truism has been deepened by the impact of COVID-19 on the global fuels market.

The previous administration in Guyana hired a consultant who determined building a refinery would cost around $5 billion and not generate significant revenue to outweigh expenses. In addition to the cost issue, a refinery built before the state has enacted proper oversight and regulatory agencies could become a vehicle for corruption and crony capitalism. Look no farther than another neighbor, Brazil, as to the pratfalls of this issue.

Second, do not subsidize gasoline. In Latin America, an abundance of oil has led to a sense of resource nationalism, causing citizens to view gasoline as a public good rendered nearly free by government subsidies.

There are many cautionary tales that demonstrate the folly of this logic, with the most drastic in Venezuela, but also the recent example of Ecuador. These extreme subsidies are not sustainable and are nearly politically impossible to remove once they become expected by the people. Moreover, as economists around the world intone: they can be quite regressive.

While a gasoline subsidy can, in the short term, provide a quick jolt of economic growth to a developing country, it is not worth the long-term debt. To avoid the future need for the IMF and possible citizen uprisings, Guyana should keep gasoline at market value.

Thirdly, and perhaps not a typical theme to consider: Do not turn away dual citizens. Transitioning a largely agricultural country into the world’s newest oil nation requires significant technical expertise and talent.

Given Guyana’s small population, this can be hard to find. Fortunately, Guyana has a large diaspora across the globe comprised of individuals with experience and ability.

The government should appeal to its far-flung citizens to return home and share in the newfound opportunities. While this seems obvious, there is a pervasive nationalistic pride that makes accepting dual citizenship difficult.

For instance, it is illegal to be a member of the Guyanese parliament while holding dual citizenship. Several Guyanese politicians recently had to make the choice to either step down or renounce their foreign citizenship after the High Court of Guyana reaffirmed the restrictive law.

This type of nationalism cultivates the exact nature of policy that could hinder the success of Guyana. In order to benefit from its rich oil resources, the country needs individuals with the best education and diverse experiences working not just as engineers in oil companies, but also serving in the government.

Insulating industry and governance from foreign influence is a path to incompetent organizations and increased risk of corruption.

Fourth, do not disregard the potential to monetize associated natural gas resources. The noted offshore oil discoveries have also proven a considerable amount of what is referred to as associated natural gas, that is a byproduct of the oil being extracted.

Historically, the associated gas in offshore oil projects was not necessarily a valued commodity and other than some uses for reinjection was more often than not flared, or burned off, given that the real value was in the oil being produced.

Major developments around the use of natural gas as a cleaner burning power generation source, as well as the importance of avoiding flaring for emission and environmental reasons point to an obvious win-win for Guyana to monetize the associated natural gas primarily for use in power generation.

Moreover, the newfound power generation source would greatly complement a largely hydroelectric power system and one that is currently expensive and in need of enhanced reliability.

Lastly, do not encourage delusions of grandeur. After ExxonMobil discovered the first massive oil field, an expectation developed of great, and fairly immediate, wealth derived from the offshore discoveries.

While there will be significant economic development and by extension the opportunity to attain greater wealth derived from the oil resource, the average citizen will most likely not see an immediate large-scale change in their circumstances. The government needs to convey this reality to the people in order to keep expectations accurate and of a realistic timeline.

When the population is anticipating wealth that may not occur on the level or timetable perceived, the simmering displeasure with government could lead to unrest and destabilizing protests.

The reality check and need to manage expectations, while politically unpopular, will also help to ensure for the population that governance of the oil wealth is wise, long-term and not one of associated with the expectation of a rapid, endless financial windfall and deluge of funds.

Hopefully, Guyana will be able to use the bevy of outside advice it is receiving to turn its resource curse into a resource blessing. At least with these ideas there are a few items to cross off its to-do list.

 

Jeremy M. Martin is Vice President, Energy and Sustainability at the Institute of the Americas at the University of California San Diego.

Kathryn Hillis is a second year graduate student at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California San Diego and an intern at the Institute of the Americas.

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A small but growing number of women are heading up agribusinesses in Africa, some of which are producing innovative products to combat malnutrition. Credit: Jeff Haskins/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Aug 24 2020 (IPS)

Oluwaseun Sangoleye’s son developed rickets after rejecting baby formula. So she started a business to make natural baby cereal from locally-sourced ingredients in Nigeria.

“My personal experience opened me up to the dearth of nutrient dense, affordable meal solutions for infants and young children,” Sangoleye told IPS. Baby Grubz products are targeted at low and middle-income women with children aged six months to three years.

Sangoleye is one of a small but growing number of women who are heading up agribusinesses in Africa, some of which are producing innovative products to combat malnutrition.

While there are no conclusive figures on the number of women participating in agribusinesses across the continent, the African Women in Agribusiness Network (AWAN) states it works in 42 African countries, linking 1,600 women’s networks in different sectors.

• In the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) says healthy diets, including fruits; vegetables and protein-rich foods cost more than $1.90 a day — the global poverty threshold.  Estimates show than more than three billion people cannot afford a healthy diet and in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, 57 percent of the population is affected.

Since opening Shais Foods in 2014, Mirriam Nalomba has sought to transform grain-based mono-diets in Zambia by offering baby cereals from millet, sorghum, cassava, soya bean and Vitamin A orange maize.

“We cannot use imported foods to combat malnutrition; locally-grown crops will produce nutritious foods,” Nalomba told IPS.

• The Food Sustainability Index (FSI) developed by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Barilla Centre for Food and Nutrition (BCFN), shows that Zambia has high prevalence of malnutrition and stunting for children under five years of age as scored under nutritional challenges, one of the three pillars of the FSI.  
• Chronic malnutrition affects 39 percent of children under five years in Zambia, according to the FAO.

Nalomba’s business model of using locally-grown crops has proved foresightful as COVID-19 lockdowns have disrupted markets across the continent. But she lamented that COVID-19 restrictions have affected her plans of expanding her market. Nalomba has started selling her products online.

Sangoleye told IPS that while the COVID-19 pandemic has made it difficult to access quality raw materials, she had gained more customers during the lockdown. It’s also led her to start innovating in other areas of packaging.

“One of our distributors shared an emotional story of how three women bought a jar of Grubz and shared it into three equal parts for their babies to augment their breast milk,” Sangoleye said.

“This has challenged us to start looking into the production of smaller packs that are more affordable and guarantees food safety for the children with compliance to physical distancing.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a 10 percent decrease in sales for Sanavita, a Tanzanian social enterprise, which supports more than 1,000 smallholder farmers growing Orange Fleshed Sweetpotato (OFSP), pro vitamin A maize, and iron and zinc-fortified beans, which are processed into nutritious flours. 

Sanavita sells about 1,000 kg of flour each month and estimates that it has about 10,000 customers.

“We are aiming to end hidden hunger in Tanzania and this means growth for us,” Sanavita founder Jolenta Joseph told IPS. In October, the FAO listed Tanzania as one of the African countries to be hardest-hit by adverse weather in the coming years. The low-income country is currently listed by the U.N. agency as not having achieved its hunger target of halving the proportion of the chronically undernourished with “lack of progress of deterioration”. 

Vitamin A orange maize provides highly-nutritious food that combats malnutrition. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

Malnutrition on the rise but COVID-19 will make it worse

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the fragility of current food systems and has amplified poverty, inequalities and food insecurity, according to the BCFN, which has outlined 10 bold interdisciplinary actions for the transformation of food systems.

In an earlier interview with IPS, Dr. Marta Antonelli, head of research at BCFN, and Katarzyna Dembska, a researcher at BCFN, said the COVID-19 pandemic has reduced the ability of those who are food insecure to buy food. As a result there is a risk in the decline of dietary quality as a result of compromise employment and the revocation of schemes such as school deeding programmes and shock as a result of the breakdown of food markets.

COVID-19 has impacted on food systems, increased food prices have a direct impact on the quality of diets, preventing access to fresh fruits and vegetables as well as dairy, meat and fish as a result of people failing to reach wholesale and retail markets, the researchers said.

Debisi Araba, a public policy and strategy specialist and managing director at the Alliance for a Green Revolution Forum (AGRF), told IPS humanity has been innovating for a long time to ensure people are nourished. It is important to promote agriculture innovation in technologies, processes, programmes and systems in private enterprise and public policy.

With the current COVID-19 crisis, health and nutrition is suffering from multiple shocks, Lawrence Haddad, executive director of Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), told IPS.

“SMEs across Africa and Asia are vital in the pandemic response but their ability to operate is being put under increasing strain,” Haddad said, adding that SMEs need continued support and investment to adapt and innovate.

Investing in agriculture innovation

But COVID-19 has not been the only obstacle to the growth of these women-led agribusinesses.

Amandla Ooko-Ombaka, economist and associate partner at global management firm McKinsey, told IPS that women face a combination of challenges in starting and running an agribusiness because of their disproportionate access to information and technology to access agronomic advice and payments. She added that women consistently have less access to capital to increase their productivity and are 50 percent less likely than men to own their land.

In sub-Saharan Africa, women constitute the highest average agriculture labour force participation rate in the world of more than 50 percent in many countries, especially in West Africa, according to the FAO.

“Food systems worldwide are decades behind other sectors in adopting digital technology and innovation,” Ooko-Ombaka added.

“The growth of mobile access has been an important unlock for innovation in African agriculture for most of our countries 70-90 percent of land is held by smallholder farmers. If we cannot reach them, the impact in the sector is muted,” Ooko-Ombaka told IPS via e-mail.

Ooko-Ombaka said in sub-Saharan Africa about 400 digital agriculture solutions have come to market — 60 percent of which came to market only in the last two years — serving user needs, including financial services, market linkages, supply chain management, advisory and information and business intelligence.

An analysis by McKinsey notes that the COVID-19 crisis has disrupted food systems in Africa but continues to open the gap for innovation.

Ooko-Ombaka says the agriculture value chain can benefit from innovation, particularly in the COVID-19 era where profound shifts are projected around marketplaces, making it critical for farmers to have access to markets.

“With restrictions on movement, interacting with farmers and value-chain partners digitally may become more important,” Ooko-Ombaka said, predicting that food-distribution chains, particularly in urban areas, are very likely to become more digitised.

Farmers may increasingly seek e-advice, digital savings products, or access to government subsidies that might be offered through digital wallets, she said adding that agricultural players can explore digital services, including marketing, extension to farmers, financial products and supply chain tracking.

Determination and perseverance needed

Despite the obstacles the women are positive and committed to their work.

“It is not easy running a woman-led business, but hard work, passion, commitment and the ability to plan and set priorities are keys for success,” Sanavita founder Joseph said.

Maame Akua Manful, founder of a Ghanaian social enterprise Fieldswhite Co. Ltd, which makes OFSP yoghurt, concurs that running a woman-led agribusiness comes with a lot of sacrifice and spontaneous decision-making.  

“It is not easy learning how to manage a team of men and communicate in a way that they would understand, but I feel that with determination and perseverance every woman can bring out that entrepreneurial ability in her to make things work,” she told IPS.

 

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By Stuart Minchin
Aug 24 2020 (IPS-Partners)

Throughout my career, I have always championed the value of open data, especially geospatial and earth observation data for the social, environmental and economic growth that it brings. Access to timely and accurate data is critical to maximizing the efficiency of development programmes and is a critical economic as well as scientific imperative for our region.

When I took office as Director-General of the Pacific Community (SPC), one of the projects that immediately grabbed my attention was the Pacific Data Hub (PDH). The PDH is an ambitious catalyst for change in how we manage and extract value from open data in and for the Pacific region. It aims to consolidate the incredible volume of scientific data generated by the nine thematic divisions of SPC, as well as datasets from across the Pacific (SPC member states, development organizations, research institutes). The database already hosts almost 12,000 datasets and counting!

The PDH also delivers a sustainable and secure data infrastructure that will allow countries to protect their datasets, ensures that the data legacy of development and aid projects are stored securely, and most of all, provides data access to the region’s decision-makers and their key partners.

It is no secret that good public policies can improve the lives of millions, and that these policies must be fueled by solid evidence. In establishing PDH as the go-to hub for all data from and around the Pacific, it will be well-placed to support Pacific countries, and the international community, in making the right decisions, and effecting positive impact on development pathways in the region.

The Pacific Data Hub will be a game-changer for development programmes in the Pacific. Whether talking about climate change, geosciences, health, fisheries of aquaculture – we cannot afford to make bad policy decisions or to waste resources through using incomplete, outdated or inaccurate data.

The COVID-19 crisis has made the importance of the PDH greater than ever. We know that the travel and social restrictions that have been put in place will have an impact on our collective economic outlooks, and that the development sector, as we know it, will be deeply transformed. Pacific countries are currently preparing to respond to this challenge, and the sharing of open data will need to be a key component of that regional response. Robust data sharing systems will be instrumental in helping countries better collaborate with one another; regional organizations reshape and adapt the support they provide to their member states; and global organizations “hit the target” more precisely with funding development programmes in the region. We can not afford to be constantly reinventing the wheel in our region, and opening and sharing our data helps us to avoid this fate.

It is the right time for the Pacific to embrace the tremendous potential offered by open data. We want to support our members and partners to benefit from this initiative and to take advantage of its resources to anticipate, address and overcome upcoming economic, environmental and social challenges. Are you ready to be part of this collective effort? Our team at the Pacific Data Hub looks forward to hearing from you!

Stuart Minchin

Stuart Minchin
Director-General
Before he joined the Pacific Community (SPC) on 23 January 2020, Dr Minchin previously served as Chief of the Environmental Geoscience Division of Geoscience Australia, a centre of expertise in the Australian Government for environmental earth science issues and the custodian of national environmental geoscience data, information and knowledge. He has represented Australia in key international forums and has been the Principal Delegate to both the UN Global Geospatial Information Management Group of Experts (UNGGIM) and the Intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations (GEO).

 

 

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Stuart Minchin, is Director-General Pacific Community (SPC)

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By Dr. Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury
SINGAPORE, Aug 24 2020 (IPS)

There is not much good news for President Donald Trump of the United States these days. If electoral polls have any credibility, he is staring at the face of almost certain defeat in the elections come November. So, when the so-called Abraham Accord between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was sealed in a telephone call between him and the leaders of Israel and the UAE, signalling a sliver of silver lining in the otherwise hovering dark clouds over him, Trump was ecstatic. A Trump twitter called it a “HUGE breakthrough among “three GREAT friends!”.

Dr. Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury

How realistic was that claim? Not much. The deal was merely formalizing what has really been happening for years between Israel and the UAE under the table, away from public gaze, but not from public knowledge. Then why this fanfare of high-profile hullaballoo? The timing was important. Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner were brokering a strategy of “outside- in” to resolve this “core” Palestinian crisis in the Middle East. It entailed the strategy of getting Arabs further away from the “centre”, that is, Palestine to create greater pressure on the already besieged Palestinians. The pillar of the deal was that the West Bank would not be annexed. But the pillar began to crumble immediately when the Israelis let the cat out of the bag. Israel said the decision to annex was still on the agenda, but only temporarily suspended at US request so that the agreement may be signed. It seemed a pretty raw deal for the Palestinians, the people most concerned with the agreement, but without any wherewithal to influence it.

The first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab country was the one signed in March 1979 between Cairo and Tel Aviv in 1979, for which the Egyptian President, Anwar Saadat, paid with his life. The second was between Israel and Jordan in 1994. But those were between Israel and two of its border states with whom there was a history of wars. The UAE shared no borders and had no military conflicts with Israel. This accord breached an Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) principle that Israel’s bordering (or front-line Arab States) could advance their interests vis-à-vis Israel in the manner they chose as for them the issue was existential. The distant OIC members would continue their non-recognition of Israel in support of the Palestinian cause. The UAE, was the third Arab country to reach such understanding with Israel, and the first from the Gulf. This indicated a success of pro-Israeli powers to salami-slice support away from the Palestinians from other Arab countries.

Broadly, the Abraham accord agreed to the full normalization of relations between Israel and the UAE, including the exchange of Ambassadors. Also, it would be followed by agreements on investment, tourism, direct flights, security, telecommunications and other issues. Then there was that dicey provision on the annexation of West Bank by Israel which was already unravelling. A massively significant concession was made to Israel by an Arab OIC state without any palpable benefit to the Palestinians. But then, why? Some analysts believe the idea was to give Trump a feather in his cap, where there was none, by his Israeli and Emirati friends. If that was the reason the Accord was a sacrifice of crucial Palestinian interest for a very marginal benefit even for Trump, because the US elections will be fought mainly on domestic issues. Foreign affairs will matter little, and the Middle East, not at all.

There are those who believe the UAE would not have taken this step without a nudge and a wink from Saudi Arabia. Both countries do nothing significant these days without consulting each other. Their Crown Princes, who call the shots in both capitals, are the best of chums. While an overt Saudi Peace treaty with Israel is unlikely to be imminent because the cost to its reputation as the custodian of two of Islam’s holiest shrines would take a big hit , their other Arab friends such as Bahrain and Oman might well be in the queue.

What has been the global reaction to this event? The United Nations and its Secretary General , Antonio Guterres, hardly in a position to, first ,give umbrage to the White House, its provider of financial sustenance, and second, to oppose any peace treaty anywhere, cleverly linked the ‘normalization’ to the hope for a two-State resolution of the Palestinian issue. But Abu Dhabi surely realized that the US was too divided to satisfy all sides, when Trump’s rival, Joe Biden, unable to offend Israel and at the same time unwilling to give Trump any credit, focused mainly on the key issue of annexation. He said: “Annexation would be a blow to the cause of peace, which is why I oppose it now, and will oppose it as President”.

Much of the rest of OIC, led by the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, was opposed. Abbas denounced the deal outright. The famed Palestinian negotiator, Hanan Ashrafi, called it a “sell out by friends”. Rejecting the Accord, Hamas saw it as serving the “Zionist narrative”. Iran, a vowed enemy of the Arab monarchies and sheikhdoms (except Qatar- such are the intricacies of the complex intramural Middle east policies), termed the UAE’s action as “a strategic stupidity”, and equated it with “stabbing the Palestinians in the back”. An equally livid Turkey stated that “history will not forget and never forgive the hypocritical behaviour of the UAE”. In South East Asia , close to my perch in Singapore, in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur officials have so far been tight-lipped, though former Prime Minister Mahathir of Malaysia called the accord “a step backward for peace “, and warned that it would “divide the Muslim world into warring factions” with Israelis adding “fuel to the fire”.

In South Asia, Pakistan, poor yet powerful, had to be, and was, more discreet. Prime Minister Imran Khan, whose voice carried weight in the OIC, but whose purse could be light without Saudi and Emirati support, has not spoken himself as at writing, but the Foreign Ministry in Islamabad has issued a carefully crafted and calibrated statement. It said that the deal “has far reaching implications” and that “Pakistan has an abiding commitment to the full realization of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, including the right of self-determination “, obviously bearing Kashmiris in mind. It added “Pakistan’s approach will be guided by our evaluation of how Palestinian rights and aspirations are upheld, and how regional peace, security and stability are preserved”. Like motherhood, no one could quarrel with that line of sentiment.

In the meantime the average Palestinian must be wondering if, for him or her, the Abraham Accord, close at the heels of the festival Eid -ul-Adha, would transform into an Abrahamic sacrifice!

Dr Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury is Principal Research Fellow at the Institute of South Asia Studies, National University of Singapore. He is a former Foreign Advisor (Foreign Minister) of Bangladesh and President of Cosmos Foundation Bangladesh. The views addressed in the article are his own. He can be reached at: isasiac @nus.edu.sg

This story was originally published by Dhaka Courier.

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Credit: United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR)

By Lawrence Surendra
BANGKOK, Thailand, Aug 24 2020 (IPS)

The COVID 19 Pandemic continues relentlessly. Deaths approaching a million globally, 22 million infected and growing. Brazil, India, the US and Russia accounting for almost 50% of the total cases in the world.

Medically the promise of a vaccine is given as signs of hope; what surprises awaits us when such a vaccine is available, would be another story. Economically, to address the uncertainty and the grim future ahead, the UN, some governments and even Joe Biden the US Presidential hopeful, are waving “Build Back better” as ways to achieve ‘a new normal’ out of the current pandemic.

“Build Back Better” emerged out of the 3rd International Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction held in Sendai, in March 2015 and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction which had outlined seven clear targets and four priorities for action to prevent new and reduce existing disaster risks. (1) Understanding disaster risk; (2) Strengthening disaster risk governance to manage disaster risk; (3) Investing in disaster reduction for resilience and; (4) Enhancing disaster preparedness for effective response, and to “Build Back Better” in recovery, rehabilitation and reconstruction.

Other concepts such as Circular Economy (CE) are gaining more adherents. Professor Martin Charter in a recent edited book, “Designing for the Circular Economy’, published by Routledge (2019), says, “product circularity means taking an extended lifecycle perspective that focusses on maximising value in economic and social systems for the longest time”.

He offers ‘CE’ as a key part of achieving the SDGs, though he also cautions that CE is not a magic bullet and “achieving a more sustainable future will require integrated, systemic thinking, creativity, hard work and change”. The book is a very useful collection of contributions covering different industries and design specialists.

While we see young engineers and others, even in developing countries, applying concepts like CE and biomimicry to contribute to sustainability, CE also has its critics. ‘Low Tech Magazine’ (www.lowtech.org) is of the view that, “The circular economy – the newest magical word in the sustainable development vocabulary – promises economic growth without destruction or waste.

However, the concept only focuses on a small part of total resource use and does not take into account the laws of thermodynamics”. CE would need a movement from all sides, government, industry and consumers to be actually implemented in practice.

Talking of movements, one is represented in ideas around ‘Degrowth’. Provoked by a question, the famous French philosopher Andre Gorz, asked around 1972, “Is the earth’s balance, for which no-growth – or even degrowth – of material production is a necessary condition, compatible with the survival of the capitalist system? ”, gave rise to the famous word “décroissance”, French for ‘degrowth.

After the COVID 19 Pandemic, ‘Degrowth’ is also gaining currency. In, ‘Degrowth – A Vocabulary for a New Era’ published by Routledge, three ecological economists, Giacomo D’Alisa, Frederico Demaria and Giorgis Kallis, bring 51 contributors to examine a wide range of topics and themes related to Degrowth. Published in 2015, it gains greater relevance now.

The Editors state in their Preface, “When the ordinary language in use is inadequate to articulate what begs to be articulated, then it is time for a new vocabulary”. They point to the deep ills plaguing the world such as growing inequalities, socio-ecological disasters, climate change and the continuous disaster of deaths by lack of access to land, water, and food.

To this we can add, the pandemic deaths, the Australian Bush fires, the Beirut explosion and the massive oil spill in the serene territorial waters off Mauritius endangering livelihoods and marine life. Apocalypse now? May be not! The quote at the beginning of this contribution, is from a must read chapter in the book by Serge Latouche titled, ‘Pedagogy of Disaster’.

Latouche says, “Worshippers of progress immediately accuse anyone who reflects on the dangers that threaten our civilization of pessimism”. He quotes Hans Jonas, philosopher and author of the much celebrated book, ‘The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age’ who had said, “it is better to lend an ear to the prophecy of misfortune than to that of happiness”.

In Latouche’s view, Hans Jonas, “does not masochistically hope for a taste of the apocalypse, but precisely to ward it off”. For Latouche, Jonas’ appeal is “an alternative to the suicidal optimism of a ‘politics of ostriches’. In a tone of melancholy, he says, “It is this latter blissful (and passive) optimism that will lead certainly to more disaster than an attitude of a crystalizing catastrophe”.

The ”worshippers of progress” in the world today are many. Among the powerful, Bolsinaro, Modi, Putin, Trump and Xi Ping represent the “progress fundamentalists” and the world of “business as usual”. In the context of the growing consciousness and awareness around climate change, these leaders also seem to represent thinking that goes back 50 years.

More than 28% of the Brazilian Rain Forest is burning, with little concern shown or actions taken to prevent it by Bolsinaro. Trump wants more fossil fuel driven “unlimited growth”; so too Narendra Modi whose government is busy dismantling environmental safeguards, built over decades and which however imperfect could in the past delay the destruction of ecology and provide defence to nature, biodiversity and forests in India.

Currently, while undermining India’s long term security, to immediately boost the economy post-Covid-19 and reduce costly imports, 40 new coalfields in some of India’s most ecologically sensitive forests are to be opened up for commercial mining.

Increasing evidence shows, the link between forest destruction and increase in viruses and pandemics. We are losing more forests and disrupting nature, says Katarina Zimmer, writing in the National Geographic.

According to her, “Over the past two decades, a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that deforestation, by triggering a complex cascade of events, creates the conditions for a range of deadly pathogens—such as Nipah and Lassa viruses, and the parasites that cause malaria and Lyme disease—to spread to people”.
(read full story at <https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/11/deforestation-leading-to-more-infectious-diseases-in-humans).

In such a scenario, the UN seems powerless, with most of its economists especially in regions like Asia clinging on like religious fundamentalists to some outdated neoliberal economics much of which has brought us to where we are now. SDGs and “Build Back Better” are just labels applied by these economists “on old bottles” of wine that has almost become vinegar!.

There are no road maps nationally and globally for “sustainable futures” or “build back better”. The latter two are aspirational, what we need is more specific identification of normative pathways like Green Growth and a systems approach to achieve it by normative global public goods organization like the UN and those who work for it. Otherwise we may be back, metaphorically to, “Parachuting Cats into Borneo”.

In the 1950s, when the malaria epidemic was out of control in Sarawak and the adjoining state of North Borneo, now called Sabah, the WHO advised indoor spraying of DDT to control the spread of the malaria carrying mosquitoes. The indigenous people of Sarawak and Sabah live in each village in long houses with thatched roofing that could house as much as hundred families.

The spraying of DDT led to a chain of events such as deterioration of the thatched roofs and collapsing of the roofs which the locals complained about. A WHO team sent to investigate found out that the some of the moth larvae (caterpillars) living in the thatch were able to distinguish the presence of DDT and so avoided eating thatch sprayed with the chemical, whereas their parasites, small chalcid wasps that injected their larvae into the caterpillars, were highly susceptible to DDT, causing their decline and the subsequent increase in caterpillar numbers.

A 50% increase per roof area in caterpillar larvae led to deterioration of the thatch roofs and collapses. Accompanied by the death and decline of cats due to the DDT spraying and the boom in rat population resulted in a double crisis. The latter required new cats having to be parachuted into the area. The whole chain of events, captured in the metaphor, “Parachuting Cats into Borneo” demonstrates how one track thinking devoid of a systems approach could just lead us out of one disaster into another.

The same metaphor of ‘Parachuting Cats into Borneo’ has been very cleverly and productively used by Alan Atkisson and Axel Klimek, two among the world’s leading systems thinking practitioners and trainers, and change management experts, to produce a book of the same title, ‘Parachuting Cats into Borneo – And Other Lessons from the Change Café’.

Published by Chelsea Green Publishers, the book is offered as a ‘Toolkit of Proven Strategies and Practices for Building Capacity and Creating Transformation’. While the UN and some of their professional economists are advising member states ‘to look for a black cat in a dark room where there is no cat’ and till the UN decides that institutional reform is urgent and gets down to it, we may have to do our own homework for change and change management.

Axel Klimek and Alan Atkisson’s book, have much to contribute in these efforts towards fundamental transformations in thinking that can take us closer to sustainable futures.

* Views expressed are his own and do not represent organizations he has been affiliated or currently affiliated with.

 

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Excerpt:

Lawrence Surendra is a Chemical Engineer and Environmental Economist and a former staff member of UN-ESCAP and Council Member of Sustainability Platform Asia (TSP Asia)*

“I feel it coming, a series of disasters created through our diligent yet unconscious efforts.
If they’re big enough to wake up the world, but not enough to smash everything, I’d call
them learning experiences, the only ones able to overcome our inertia”.
                                                               Denis de Rougemont, 1977

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By External Source
Aug 21 2020 (IPS-Partners)

The Pacific Community (SPC) 7-week research expedition to monitor the health of world’s largest tuna fishery has departed from Honolulu on Saturday 15 August 2020 despite the significant challenges presented by COVID-19. With most research and fisheries observer programmes currently suspended, the importance of this cruise cannot be overstated. Half of the world’s tuna catch comes from the Western & Central Pacific, providing a critical source of protein and export revenue for Pacific Island Nations.

Source: The Pacific Community (SPC)

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By External Source
Aug 21 2020 (IPS-Partners)

Pandemic-related lockdowns, flight cancellations, and border closures may be putting a crimp on summer vacation plans. However, the precipitous drop in tourism will have an outsized impact on countries that rely on foreign travelers—with potentially large-scale effects on their economies’ national accounts.

Costa Rica, Greece, Morocco, Portugal, and Thailand could be among the hardest hit with losses in tourism proceeds exceeding 3 percent of GDP, according to the IMF’s recently released 2020 External Sector Report.

The chart calculates direct tourism impacts on imports, exports, and current account balances under a scenario that envisions gradual reopenings in September but a drop of about 70 percent in tourism receipts and international tourism arrivals in 2020.

A country’s current account balance is a measure of its total transactions—which includes but is not limited to trade in goods and services—with the rest of the world. For some economies, a drop in tourism (which is considered an export) could have an impact on overall current account balances.

For example, in Thailand, a decrease in tourism due to COVID-19 could bring the country’s overall exports down by 8 percentage points of GDP and have a direct net impact of about 6 percentage points of GDP on its current account balance in 2020. That could erode part of the 7 percent overall current account surplus the country had in 2019.

The outlook for smaller, tourism-dependent nations is even more stark. This chart and the External Sector Report focus on medium to large economies, but, under the same scenario, some smaller states especially reliant on tourism could see a dramatically larger direct impact on their trade and current account balances.

Still, the overall effect a decline in tourism will have on current account balances may be less than these projected direct impacts foretell. Smaller, tourism dependent countries and even larger economies with a large tourism industry may see offsetting indirect effects. For example, smaller nations with less domestic resources often rely on more imports to support their tourism industries. A drop in tourism exports and the economic activity that it drives, both directly and indirectly, will lead to a corresponding drop in imports—lessening the overall impact on the current account balance.

Much is still unknown about the pace of tourism recovery in 2020. Peoples’ desire and ability to travel abroad may continue to face headwinds going into 2021 due to the ongoing pandemic, leaving an uncertain outlook for tourism industries in economies both big and small.

Source: International Monetary Fund

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Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the needs of the ageing population in various African countries were not adequately addressed. However, since the pandemic a recent survey has shown that the pandemic has further compounded the existing health challenges, further increasing neglect of older persons.Credit: Dolphin Emali/IPS

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 21 2020 (IPS)

Nearly three quarters of respondents in a survey across 18 African countries have claimed that their countries’ COVID-19 responses are gravely lacking in addressing the ageing population.

The survey, conducted by the Stakeholder Group on Ageing (SGA) Africa, found that factors such as inadequate social protection, health care infrastructures and multi-sector engagement mechanisms on ageing on all levels are contributing to these countries’ woeful lack of policies geared towards the ageing population.

On Thursday, SGA organised its second webinar on the Rights of Older Persons in Africa with a focus on the “Inclusion of Older Persons in COVID-19 Policy Response and Development Agendas”.

“Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the needs of older persons in various African countries were not adequately addressed,” Dr. Emem Omokaro, co-chair SGA Africa, told IPS after the webinar.

“Unfortunately, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has further compounded the existing health challenges due to the shift in government attention from those existing challenges to containment of the COVID-19 pandemic, which further increase neglect of older persons.”

Full excerpt of the interview below:

Inter Press Service (IPS): What did this webinar aim to address?

Dr. Emem Omokaro (EO): COVID -19 is a global health, social, economic and psychosocial pandemic. Its intense activity and the mortality toll among the geriatric population have been evidenced by disaggregated data. The SGA Africa survey on the impact of COVID-19 containment and mitigation initiatives exposed social injustices, deepening inequalities, inadequate — or in some countries — non-existing healthcare and social protection infrastructure.

In Africa, the impact is materially more intense, with a prolonged systemic tendency to leave older persons behind. For a COVID-19 recovery, we cannot afford to continue as usual. The fundamental question for SGA Africa then became, what can we do differently? How do we influence the approach of ministries, departments and agencies of governments, organisational and agencies in their intervention efforts? How can we bring compassion, passion, research and data, to influence political decisions? How can we influence African member states to deliberately set up multi-sector stakeholder platforms for collective and intersecting decisions, and to set up common structures of engagement for older persons centred policy actions?

IPS: How has the ageing population in the 18 African countries (as mentioned in your brief) been affected by COVID-19?

EO: When the question was asked, responses from the various participating countries showed clearly there were certain older person-specific issues that the strategies did not fully cover. Some of the issues include: access to medical care, abuse and violence, lack of social protection for older persons, lack of research/information about older persons, voices of older persons not [being] heard, access to nutritional intervention services, age discrimination, neglect in the distribution of palliatives, and inadequate sensitisation for older persons.

The health and economic impacts of the virus are borne disproportionately by poor people. For example, homeless people who lack safe shelters, and people without access to running water, among others.

Specifically, the impacts of COVID-19 on older persons include the following:

• increased mortality rate among older persons;
• older Persons with pre-existing health challenges who lack access to health care;
• neglect and maltreatment of older persons in care homes and other institutions;
• disruption of older persons’ social networks and support systems;
• increased incidences of abuses of older persons;
• isolation, neglect and loneliness due to social distancing;
• social protection has been grossly affected; and
• erosion of the means of livelihood of older persons due to the lockdown.

IPS: How does it affect the ageing population when they’re not included in policy responses to COVID-19?

EO: Older men and women can be perfectly healthy even though their metabolic rates may slow down and their strength declines. Some mental activities also slow or change completely. These changes and declines occur at different levels and at different rates. In favourable environments, the changes will hardly be apparent, and the benefits of old age may often mean that life improves and older persons are happier, and unsure of its veracity and essence.

COVID-19 is more than a health crisis, but a human, economic and social crisis; attacking the core of the human society–as it heightens inequality, exclusion, discrimination, xenophobia, vulnerabilities and global unemployment in the medium and long terms. It affects all segments of the population and it is particularly detrimental to those in the most vulnerable situations, including people living in poverty situations (especially women), older persons, and persons with disabilities, youth migrants, and refugees among others.

IPS: In what ways have the governments responded to specific needs of the ageing population in these countries under the current pandemic?

EO: There were varied responses. Some African countries, including Togo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Madagascar indicated that their countries had not made much progress in terms of older person-specific programmes.

Expectedly, the majority of African countries made tremendous progress in the implementation of containment and mitigation services to older persons. A few African countries that made outstanding progress in older person-specific containment and mitigation services are Rwanda, Kenya and South Africa.

The responses in these countries indicated that they’d accomplished measures such as sensitisation of social distancing, provision of food to older persons, food distributions to older persons, advocacy for older persons’ voices to be heard, building of older persons care homes, and access to medical insurance.

IPS: From the concept note, it’s clear that there’s a large focus on regional partnership to address this issue. Why is a partnership so crucial to addressing the issue? In what ways can it enhance the efforts to improve the situation? 

EO: Establishment of partnership with national, regional and international agencies and bodies is very crucial in the fight against ageism and as well in the achievement of [Sustainable Development Goals] SDGs Agenda 2030 and [African Union] AU Agenda 2063. Older persons are diverse and ageing is multi-sectoral.

Partnerships are crucial for resource mobilisation, exchange of information and knowledge, new technology, and capacity building. It is necessary to have inter-agencies and multi sectoral -older persons centred interventions. Specifically, partnership will promote effective coordination efforts towards multi-sector and comprehensive response to ageing and older persons during and post COVID-19. SGA Africa is advocating for a policy directive on an intervention methodology which commands all United Nations Agencies with countries in Africa to build the multi-agency mechanisms on ageing.

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The post Q&A: Ageing Africa Left out of COVID-19 Policies appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM / ROME, Aug 21 2020 (IPS)

 

You can shine your shoes and wear a suit
you can comb your hair and look quite cute
you can hide your face behind a smile
one thing you can’t hide
is when you’re crippled inside.                                                                                                               John Lennon

COVID-19 made some of us aware of how dependent we are on one another, this is why so many of us become upset when confronted with the reckless behaviour of those who do not respect rules, like social distancing and the wearing of face masks. Lack of empathy appears to be spreading throughout our global society. ”Why do I have to care about others? The most important thing is my own well-being and success,” a way of reasoning that fosters contempt, misogyny and racism and worst of all – disdain for those who are old and weak, and/or for various reasons have been bodily incapacitated, making it hard for them to participate in the rat race for beauty and success.

It is becoming increasingly common to be transfixed by the idea that character is reflected by appearances and thus many individuals become obsessed with obtaining, or maintaining, an aesthetically pleasing appearance. An entire business has developed around our cult of bodily beauty, as well as the youth, glamour and success assumed to be connected to it. Beauty contests, fashion shows, cosmetic surgery, fitness studios, make-up products and a host of other phenomena profit from this craving for human beauty.

The United States of America even has a president who made a fortune from organizing beauty pageants and appeals to people´s desire for glamour and success. He even made his own name into a brand equivalent to his shallow ideals. However, that same man has through speech and actions made us aware of the abominable backside of the beauty cult — ”the ugly”, ”the fat”, ”the old and decrepit”, ”the deviants”, ”the others”, ”the aliens”, i.e. all those who do not correspond to an image of perfect beauty are by him labeled as ”losers”, or threats to ”our way of being”. One of the worst displays of the mindset of this powerful bigot was when he in public made fun of a disabled man and to the approving cheers of his followers imitated his difficulties to coordinate his body movements.

Among children, it is common to make fun of other kids with mental, or physical difficulties, happily ignoring the fact that victims of such jokes may become traumatized for life. What attract the mockery may even be quite insignificant and not even a disability – a limp, a birthmark, small stature, obesity, dark skin, big ears – you name it. Seldom have these ”pecularities” anything to do with the victim´s character.

The disdain of people with physical disabilities may result in a denial of their rights to live a decent life. On top of that comes the discomfort, or even revulsion, which several of us demonstrate while being confronted with severe ailment and disfigurement. One particularly painful stigma is facial disfigurement, something which is described in Kobo Abé´s novel The Face of Another and The Monster, a short story by Stephen Crane.

The Japanese novel describes how a man´s face is burned and disfigured in an industrial accident and how his wife becomes nauseated by his new appearance. He succeeds in undergoing a plastic surgery that alters his looks. After experiencing how his life was before his disfigurement, during it and after he had obtained a ”new” face, the main character becomes acutely aware of how his own personality is affected by how other people react to his appearance. In the end he becomes a stranger to himself.

Abé´s novel deals with several aspects of how we and others perceive us, based on our outer appearance. Among other examples he describes the awful experiences of men returning from wars with their faces disfigured from burns and head wounds and how the first question of severely wounded soldiers tend to be: ”What about my face? Is it intact?” a worry that often is greater than their concern for limbs and organs.

Crane´s short story was written in 1898 and is even more tragic. It deals with a black coachman in the southern states of the U.S., whose face became horribly disfigured when he saved the son of his employer from a fire. The boy´s father is a well-liked surgeon in a small town, and he feels obliged to take care of his son´s saviour. However, the coachman´s face looks so horrible that people become afraid of him, in spite of the fact that he remains a nice man and furthermore is a hero. That the doctor takes care of a man with such an awful complexion makes him a victim and pariah, forces him out of his practice and turns him into a wretch as well.

Apart from a deep-set aversion to other people´s disabilities we have a tendency to grade misery. For example, I once had a colleague who was severely hearing impaired. He told me: ”I often wish I had been blind instead of deaf. People feel sorry for blind people, but I am generally treated like an idiot, because I talk in a peculiar manner and people have to make an effort to make themselves understood by me. I am a nuisance to myself and everybody else.” This may be the reason for the English expression ”deaf and dumb” and the fact that not so long ago hearing impaired people were assumed to be mentally retarded and even ended up in asylums.

A slight problem might have huge consequences. A popular Swedish author and entertainer, Beppe Wolgers, suffered from stuttering. In his autobiography Wolgers described a life-long suffering from stuttering, which he at the same time acknowledged to be the reason for his success as a comedian and author – it made him aware of the extreme importance of language and to think carefully about every utterance he made. However, he did not deny that his stuttering had been an incapacitating affliction.

Late in life he met with other stutterers, who also happened to be authors and actors. Between themselves they could talk about stuttering, nervousness and fear, about finding different words and tricks to express themselves via detours, a need for finding synonyms, other verbal tools and useful gestures. ”An internal professional talk about stuttering, without inhibitions and lots of laughs.”
Wolgers realised that most of his suffering had evolved from the behaviour of ”well-meaning normal people.” Many of them had avoided talking to him about his problems and during his entire life he had been laughed at, openly or secretly. Words that he never had intended to say had been put in his mouth and made him feel stupid and isolated. In the company with other stutterers Wolgers had felt free to laugh at his problems, but when the ”outside world” laughed at him and imitated his stuttering he suffered from an ever-increasing paralysis and fear.

The current presidential candidate and former Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden has struggled with stutter throughout his life and declared that it is a handicap that people laugh and humiliate others about, often if they do not even mean to do it. Joe Biden is just one example of stutterers who while investing immense physical and mental energy to overcome their handicap have become entertainers, actors and politicians.

However, disabilities seldom lead to success, instead they might isolate you and loneliness devours your self-respect. The worst is when you have a visible physical ”disorder” that is impossible to hide from yourself and others. In spite of their good intentions ”outsiders” might judge physically disabled individuals based on their appearances. Attitudes tend to be embossed by prejudices towards the ”sick” and ”disabled” and thus our actions may be blemished by moralizing and superficial conventions. ”Non-affected” persons might carry with them a self-congratulating, vicarious suffering that prevent several victims of disabilities to be accepted as integrated parts of our society. Our awkwardness is great when it comes to spending time with afflicted indiviuals and we might thus make others ashamed of their illnesses and/or embarrassed about their disabilities. I once had a pupil who tried to explain her suffering to me:

– As you and everyone else can see I am dwarf. No one considers Eve (not her real name) as just Eve, I am always ”Eve the Dwarf”. I have found that the only way to be who I am is to accept that I am a dwarf. I have begun to admire dwarfs who work in circuses and show business. They make others laugh or cry, they make art out of their disabilities, they can even laugh at themselves. If people cannot see me as anything else than just a dwarf, so be it. Let me be a dwarf. I am a good actor, and when I act I feel free. I even applied to the Theatre School, but was not accepted. They told me: ”You´re a good actor and quite funny, but you must understand … your disability is tabú, you cannot laugh at a disabled person. We´re sorry.”

The only thing I was able to tell her was: ”OK, then you have to forget about making a living from acting. You are a good student. I assume you could go to the university and enter academia.”

She started to cry and told me: ”It´s easy for you to say.”

Instead of falling victims to a cult of bodily beauty stigmatizing those who do not meet the standards of what we assume to be ”normal and beautiful”, let us try to find the inner beauty of all those who are judged due to their appearance and realise that empathy and equal rights is something that benefit us all.

Jan Lundius holds a PhD. on History of Religion from Lund University and has served as a development expert, researcher and advisor at SIDA, UNESCO, FAO and other international organisations.

The post To Understand the ”Other”: How Disabilities Define Us appeared first on Inter Press Service.

A protest by UN staff in Geneva. Credit: United Nations

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 21 2020 (IPS)

As it continues to vociferously preach the virtues of equality—advocating equal rights for all, irrespective of race, sex, language or religion– the United Nations has been quick to condemn racism and racial discrimination worldwide.

But how hypocritical is it when racism raises its ugly head in its own backyard— particularly in Geneva which, ironically, is home to the UN Human Rights Council and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)?

A survey of over 688 UN staffers in Geneva has come up with some startling revelations re-affirming the fact, which has long remained under wraps, that “racism exists within the United Nations”.

The survey revealed that “more than 1 in 3 staff have personally experienced racial discrimination and/or have witnessed others facing racial discrimination in the workplace. And two-thirds of those who experienced racism did so on the basis of nationality”.

A separate survey by the UN Staff Union in New York was equally revealing.

According to the findings, 59% of the respondents said “they don’t feel the UN effectively addresses racial justice in the workplace, while every second respondent noted they don’t feel comfortable talking about racial discrimination at work”.

Meanwhile, the UN Secretariat in New York, faltered ingloriously, as it abruptly withdrew its own online survey on racism, in which it 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.

A non-apologetic message emailed to staffers on August 19 read: “The United Nations Survey on Racism has been taken offline and will be revised and reissued, taking into account the legitimate concerns expressed by staff.”

The findings of the Geneva survey also reveal:

1. Among those who experienced or witnessed racism, a majority of staff indicated that racial discrimination affected opportunities for career advancement. A significant number of staff also indicated that racial discrimination manifested itself in the form of verbal abuse and exclusion from work events, such as decision-making, trainings, missions, assignments etc.
2. A large number who experienced or witnessed racial discrimination, harassment or abuse of authority indicated that they did not take any action. Lack of trust in the organization’s recourse mechanisms was cited as the most common reason. Many also stated that that they feared retaliation.
3. Respondents believed racism needed to be addressed in a number of different ways. These include accountability and zero tolerance, training and sensitization, greater transparency in hiring, broader diversity, and a more open dialogue on the issue.

UN staff in New York. Credit: United Nations

Prisca Chaoui, Executive Secretary of the 3,500-strong Staff Coordinating Council at the UN Office at Geneva (UNOG), told IPS: “We belief, as a staff union, that it is high time for the organization to seriously combat pervasive racism and racial discrimination. This means greater accountability and a zero tolerance Policy towards any racial act.”

She said: “We are glad to see that the UN management is willing to address this issue, and as a staff union, we are ready to assist in coming up with serious measures that go beyond empty words and lead to a real change so that the UN shows it is capable of upholding the principles that it preaches to the overall world.”

“We are concerned that many cases of racism remain unreported due to the lack of trust of the staff in the existing recourse mechanisms ad well as fear of retaliation,” she declared.

“The findings of the survey confirm that racism exists within the United Nations, as earlier stated by the Secretary-General. They also show that supervisors and senior managers have an important role to play, as do all staff, in tackling this issue”.

She said the results of the survey “will guide our interactions with management at the duty station and globally. They will also be used to help the Council propose to senior management at UNOG a strategy to fight racism in the workplace”.

Patricia Nemeth, President, United Nations Staff Union, told IPS the UN Staff Union in New York, which has a strength of over 6,500 members– with the local staff in peacekeeping operations overseas estimated at approximately 20,000 plus– ran its own survey entitled “UNHQ-NY pulse survey on racial justice”.

She said the murder of (the African-American) George Floyd on 25 May, added to those of Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Akai Gurley, Jerame Reid, Elijah McClain and so many more, “reopened the wounds of racial injustice that afflict our host country and the world as a whole”.

The United Nations, she pointed out, has a normative framework to address racial discrimination within the organisation, but work remains to be done, as recognised by the Secretary-General on June 4.

“In this spirit, the Staff Union is committed to serving as a platform for progress towards greater inclusion, diversity, dignity and social justice both within the UN and beyond,” declared Nemeth, who is also Vice President for Conditions of Service – the Coordinating Committee of International Staff Unions and Associations (CCISUA),

The New York survey was intended to provide the Staff Union with a better understanding of the current situation regarding racial injustice within the United Nations Secretariat and will help determine “how we as staff can contribute to making improvements and will also feed into broader policy discussions”.

The survey combined questions about racial discrimination in the workplace in all its forms; “questions about your own experience with racial discrimination; and specific questions about discrimination against individuals of African descent, which is a key focus of concern at our duty station right now.”

The responses received included:

1. 44% of the respondents noted there is no adequate racial diversity within their department and 46% noted that they feel that staff of African descent aren’t adequately represented within their department.
2. 43% of the respondents noted they have experienced workplace harassment or intimidation as a result of their race.
3. Staff members have experienced acts of racial discrimination at the workplace, primarily in tone and language used towards them, in selection and promotion processes and in recognition of their authority and grade. When it comes to witnessing racist conduct towards others, the order remains the same, but at a higher percentage.
4. New York staff would welcome if the Organization were to ensure diversity in positions of authority; establish an anonymous channel for reporting racial discrimination; and ensure racial diversity in Human Resource and Executive Offices and staff-facing offices in the formal and informal justice system, so that staff members feel safe sharing their concerns, and confident they will be understood and taken seriously.
5. Respondents believed racism needed to be addressed in a number of different ways. These include training and sensitization, greater transparency in recruitment, need for action instead of words, creating safe workspace and inclusiveness, understanding structural and systemic racism.

Nemeth said the survey results will allow the staff union’s coordination group on racial justice to plan subsequent actions tailored to the specific needs of the UN staff community in New York.

“In order to frame the conversation, we have already initiated a series of expert talks that aim to provide historical context regarding the scale and gravity of the transatlantic slave trade, the meaning and persistence of systemic racism, but also the outstanding cultural richness and contribution of the African diaspora around the world”.

Despite the inherent difficulties caused by social distancing, she said, “we will continue to find creative ways to encourage colleagues to have the difficult conversations that enable us to overcome the challenge of racism in the workplace.”

Meanwhile, in a letter to UN staff, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said last June: “The position of the United Nations on racism is crystal clear: this scourge violates the United Nations Charter and debases our core values.”

Ian Richards, former President of the Coordinating Committee of International Staff Unions and Associations, and an economist at UNCTAD in Geneva, told IPS: “The survey has shown a problem exists, and not just based on skin colour but mainly on nationality, which for an organization called the United Nations is worrying.”

Therefore, in fixing this, management needs to recognize that each country, culture and duty station experiences racism in different forms, whether linked to slavery, colonialism, immigration, national rivalries, or conflicts. And each of these needs its own treatment, he added

“We look forward to working with the Secretary-General to solve this problem,” declared Richards..

The post Staff Surveys Reveal Widespread Racism at the United Nations appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The United Nations has warned that water shortages could affect 5 billion people by 2050. Credit: International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD)

By Sareen Malik and Benazir Omotto
NAIROBI, Kenya, Aug 21 2020 (IPS)

There is an intimate connection between corruption and COVID-19. This pandemic is making everyday life more desperate, especially in poorer communities, and that means more opportunities for those preying on vulnerable people.

Measures to manage the coronavirus has put millions of people out of work and increased the demand for water to maintain good hygiene – and in most low-income settings, fetching water is women’s work.

Where official services are insufficient or non-existent, this means women and girls are chasing a scarce resource and often do not have enough money to pay for it.

The all-too-common result is ‘sex for water’: unscrupulous water suppliers, almost exclusively male, from informal vendors to utility staff, demanding sexual favours as payment for water.

Before the pandemic, getting enough water for basic needs was a daily struggle. Women and girls would spend hours each day collecting water from the nearest source or waiting in long queues at the local tap or pump.

For females living in these circumstances, there has always been the threat of verbal abuse, physical attack or sexual assault while gathering water for their households. Now, with squeezed incomes, weak governance and huge burdens on limited government resources, the danger has got much worse.

Credit: Shutterstock/ Sanitation and Water for All (SWA)

The following three stories from recent interviews with women in Kenya – their names changed for anonymity – are depressingly familiar to activists on the ground.

Goldie

Goldie goes to the water point at 4pm and leaves at around 6 or 7pm. She talks about the lack of courtesy – the men who jump the queue and are served without being rebuked. She does not complain because she fears being beaten up.

The government’s dusk-to-dawn COVID-19 curfew has made queues worse and the situation more tense. She has been sexually assaulted three times during water collection but she says she dare not complain to anyone, fearing that this would leading to “worse consequences” for her. She now fetches water as early as possible to avoid confrontation by these men.

Maureen

Maureen fetches water in the morning with her sisters. When there is a water shortage, she must be out of the door by 4am. She walks for 30 minutes to the water point. She has grown accustomed to harassment, often by people known to her. She feels powerless to do anything about it.

The men, mainly motor bike operators, often block the path and try to ‘woo’ Maureen and her sisters. If they play along, they are allowed to proceed with their business. She has even given her phone number to one of the men and agreed to his advances, which has guaranteed her protection from other men along the route.

However, at the water point, the vendor flirts with her and touches her without her consent, making her feel violated. When Maureen has stood up for herself, the water vendor behaves harshly, yelling at her for any spillage, hiking the price and often ganging up with vendors from other water points to abuse and body-shame her.

Lucy

Lucy fetches water in the evening after doing household chores and studying. Due to water scarcity in her village, she often queues for an hour at the water point, during which she receives advances from various men, including the water operators. If she is amenable to them, she gets to jump the queue.

However, some men then try to follow her home. Lucy has been cornered four times by different water operators who expected to take their ‘relationship’ a step further. She rejected them and is now denied water access and suffers public humiliation through the obscenities they hurl at her.

She is now forced to walk for 30 minutes to a new water point, accompanied by an older relative, usually her mother. Lucy is not comfortable speaking up, given that perpetrators have been known to bribe their way out of trouble and come back to the village to cause problems for the whistleblowers.

Unfortunately, stories like these are not rare. The numbers are elusive, as victims feel compelled to hide their experiences, but activists and NGO staff regularly receive testimony from girls and women whose lives are being made a misery by men demanding sexual favours for water.

COVID-19 has not created this problem, but it has certainly made it more acute. Its existence is a damning indictment of the failure of effective, accountable governance when it comes to water supply and, for that matter, sanitation and hygiene services.

Governments have the power to act swiftly. Many of the alleged perpetrators work for utilities and other official service providers. Chains of command and mechanisms of accountability must be implemented immediately to restore confidence among the public and donors alike. Unofficial, unsupervised water vendors should be removed from the market by governments to ensure universal service coverage.

That any women or girl is being sexually violated to obtain water for their family is criminal, inhumane and unacceptable. Access to water and sanitation are human rights. During the pandemic, the importance of these rights cannot be overstated.

Sextortion for water is a symptom of multiple problems, which means it will take multiple stakeholders to eradicate it. Representatives for water, sanitation, gender, governance and government must come down hard on this most pernicious of practices and end the nightmare for women and girls being forced to trade their bodies for something as essential and irreplaceable as water.

 

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The post How Women & Girls are Forced to Trade Sex for Water appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Sareen Malik is Coordinator, African Civil Society Network on Water and Sanitation (ANEW) and Steering Committee Vice-Chair, Sanitation & Water For All (SWA), and Benazir Omotto is Integrated Urban Environmental Planning Officer, UMANDE TRUST, Kenya

The post How Women & Girls are Forced to Trade Sex for Water appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta has resigned. Paul Morigi/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

By External Source
Aug 21 2020 (IPS)

What appears to have started as a mutiny, and resulted in a coup, came on the heels of renewed civilian protests in Bamako, the Malian capital. Tensions have been high since president Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta’s 2018 re-election which was marred by irregularities. All the while, he has continued to face allegations of corruption and fraud.

On Tuesday, August 18, reports of mutinying soldiers firing into the air and taking control of an army base filtered out of Mali. With limited information on the initial motives of the soldiers, fears of a mutiny, or worse, a coup, set in. The situation escalated quickly when senior government officials were arrested and tanks appeared on the streets of the capital Bamako.

By afternoon, soldiers stormed the presidential palace and arrested both president Keïta and prime minister Boubou Cissé. The two were taken to the Kati military base, where the mutiny had begun. Soon after, the president resigned in a national television address stating:

If today, certain elements of our armed forces want this to end through their intervention, do I really have a choice?

Large scale protests calling for Keïta’s resignation began in early June 2020. In July 2020, Keïta dissolved the country’s constitutional court, ostensibly in an effort to ease tensions. In April 2020, this same court overturned parliamentary election results for some 30 seats, a move that advantaged Keïta’s political party. This sparked protests in which at least 11 protesters were killed by security forces, intensifying the calls for Keïta’s resignation.

Promoting inclusiveness among the country’s various interests can help 2020 look more like Mali’s 1991 coup, that led to multiparty elections, rather than its 2012 experience

On top of potential election fraud and crackdowns by security forces, Keïta’s government has bungled its response to ethnic-religious violence. The Tuareg rebels, a group that has historically had separatist aspirations, have loosely aligned with jihadist groups, posing a steep challenge to the state.

The group Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM) conflates the material grievances of the Tuareg with the ideological concerns of various prior Salafi-Jihadi groups, posing another ongoing threat to the state and its military.

Mali’s recent political turmoil has only been exacerbated by its economic struggles. Reliant on gold mining and agriculture, the country has been especially vulnerable to volatile commodity prices that have suffered further declines in the midst of the global pandemic. In addition, nearly half of the country’s population lives in extreme poverty.

 

Mali’s history of military unrest

Mali is no stranger to political unrest. In 2012, a small, localised mutiny at the Kati barracks escalated to the overthrow of then president Amadou Toumane Touré. The fallout was dramatic, prompting a failed countercoup and political and civil disorder.

Worse still was the loss of half the country’s territory to insurgents. As a result, the international community intervened in an effort to mediate the crisis.

Yet, it is important to consider the parallels. The 2012 coup occurred when disgruntled soldiers rioted to demand better weapons, ammunition, and equipment to battle against Tuareg insurgents in the north. When the defence minister’s attempts to negotiate with the mutineers failed, the crisis quickly escalated.

Though the original intent was not to overthrow president Touré, inaction led to a putsch. Mutinies are public events that occur within a state’s active armed forces, benefit from their collective nature, and have political aims short of the seizure of executive power. Coups, on the other hand, are rebellions led by the military and sometimes political elites, seeking to oust the executive.

While scholars have studied coups extensively, research on mutinies is still in its infancy. Mutinies are important to investigate as they can often have dire consequences for civilians and occur more frequently than coups in the post-Cold War era. Further, they can escalate to other, more severe forms of political violence.

Mutinies are also likely a proximate indicator for coup activity. For example, in 2011 Burkina Faso experienced four mutinies, shortly followed by a successful coup in 2014 and another coup attempt in 2015. Guinea Bissau saw three mutinies between 1998 and 1999 and experienced three coups, one of which was successful, between 1998 and 2000.

An interesting empirical question is raised here: why do some mutinies escalate to coups while others do not? While this is an emerging line of research and important question for policymakers, there is an initial consideration to be made in the case of Mali: mass political protests matter.

We know that protests spur both mutinies and coups. Further, protests in the capital city are most likely to spur coup activity, like those protests that have troubled Bamako this summer.

Protests can signal to mutineers and military leaders that there is widespread, civilian support for a putsch. This may shift mutineers’ or military leadership’s objectives from demonstrating grievances to upending the status quo and ousting the executive.

 

International reaction

The apparent coup drew sharp criticism from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). The influential grouping of 15 countries proceeded to close all borders with Mali and ordered sanctions against the conspirators. The African Union, European Union, and United Nations each also issued statements condemning the coup.

ECOWAS recently demonstrated its willingness to help oust illegitimate leaders, the most recent case being The Gambia. More broadly, the African Union has adopted a strong anti-coup norm, and the creation of the organisation’s anti-coup framework has seen an accompanying decline of coup attempts in the region.

Given the swift and wide-ranging international condemnation from regional organisations and world powers alike, Mali’s putschists would seem to be especially vulnerable to international responses. This is particularly the case given the substantial presence of foreign troops. These include over 11,000 soldiers deployed to Mali as part of the UN stabilisation mission and an additional 5,000 French soldiers.

Aid dependence here could also play an important role. The World Bank estimates that overseas development assistance amounts to around 70% of Mali’s central government expenditure.

International interventions can be important, but they will ultimately be informed, and either strengthened or weakened, by the role of Mali’s internal dynamics. While Burkina Faso saw Gilbert Diendéré’s 2015 coup unravel within a week, this was primarily due to internal resistance. In sharp contrast, there has so far been no public support for Keïta and his government.

Public opposition to Keïta makes his return unlikely, but external pressure can help right the ship. It remains to be seen what promises of elections will ultimately lead to.

Elections have increasingly become the norm following coups, and given swift international pressure a poll can be seen as a forgone conclusion. However, the holding of elections–even if “free and fair”–says little about the quality and durability of the future government.

Promoting inclusiveness among the country’s various interests can help 2020 look more like Mali’s 1991 coup, that led to multiparty elections, rather than its 2012 experience.

 

Christopher Michael Faulkner, Visiting Assistant Professor in International Studies; 2018-2019 Minerva-USIP Peace and Security Scholar, Centre College; Jaclyn Johnson, Director of Analytics (StableDuel), University of Kentucky; Jonathan Powell, Associate professor, University of Central Florida, and Rebecca Schiel, Postdoctoral researcher, University of Central Florida

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

The post Another Mutiny Turned Coup: Mali Is No Stranger to Military Unrest appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Ploy Phutpheng. Credit: UN Women.

By Valeria Esquivel
GENEVA, Aug 20 2020 (IPS)

The pandemic is disproportionately affecting women workers. Governments should prioritize policies that offset the effects the COVID-19 crisis is having on their jobs.

I am a feminist economist. My job is to examine how the inequalities between women and men are part and parcel of the functioning of labour markets, and to assist our constituents in implementing what we call “gender-responsive” employment policies – i.e., macroeconomic, sectoral and labour market policies that explicitly contribute to gender equality.

Prior to the onset of the COVID-19 crisis large numbers of women were excluded from the labour market. The pandemic has made things much worse.

It is disproportionately affecting women workers who are losing their jobs at a greater speed than men. More women than men work in sectors that have been hard hit by the economic fallout from the pandemic, such as tourism, hospitality and the garment sector. Large numbers of domestic workers, most of whom are women, are also at risk of losing their jobs.  The vast majority of health workers are women, which raises the risk of them catching the virus.

School closures and caring for those who become sick, has forced women lucky enough to remain in employment to cut down on paid working hours or to extend total working hours (paid and unpaid) to unsustainable levels

Moreover, the fragility of their employment situation, coupled with reduced access to labour and social protection have meant that women have found they are particularly vulnerable to the pandemic, even in sectors which, until now, have experienced less disruption.

One of the ideas at the core of feminist economics is that the unpaid care work that takes place in households and families to support everyday life is a vital part of the economic system. This type of work is primarily carried out by women and most of the time is not recognized as such. School closures and caring for those who become sick, has forced women lucky enough to remain in employment to cut down on paid working hours or to extend total working hours (paid and unpaid) to unsustainable levels.

Here are five ways to ensure that women’s job prospects are not damaged long-term by the COVID-19 crisis:

•  Prevent women from losing their jobs by implementing policies that keep them in work, as women have a harder time than men in getting back to paid work once crises have past. By compensating for wage losses caused by the temporary reduction in working hours or the suspension of work, these policies can help maintain women workers in their jobs, and safeguard their skills.
• Help women find new jobs if they’ve lost them:  Public Employment Services (PES), that connect jobseekers with employers, can help women find jobs in essential production and services. At the local level, they can speed up job placement in sectors that are recruiting amidst the pandemic
• Avoid cutting subsidies: Expenditure cuts in public services have a disproportionate effect on women and children. That’s why it’s so important to avoid cuts in health and education budgets, wages and pensions. Past crises have shown that when support for employment and social protection are at the core of stimulus packages, they help stabilize household incomes and lead to a speedier recovery.
• Invest in care: Care services have the potential to generate decent jobs, particularly for women. This crisis has highlighted the often difficult and undervalued work of care workers, whose contribution has been, and remains, essential to overcoming the pandemic. Improving their working conditions will have a significant impact on many women workers, given the large numbers who work in the care sector.
• Promote employment policies that focus on women: Governments need to pro-actively counterbalance the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on women. From a broader perspective, macroeconomic stimulus packages must continue to support and create jobs for women. Policies should focus on hard-hit sectors that employ large numbers of women, along with measures that help close women’s skill gaps and contribute to removing practical barriers to entry.

 

This article was originally published by Work in Progress

The post Put Gender Equality at the Heart of the Post-COVID-19 Economic Recovery appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Valeria Esquivel is Senior Employment Policies and Gender Officer, Employment, Labour Markets and Youth Branch, International Labour Organization (ILO)

The post Put Gender Equality at the Heart of the Post-COVID-19 Economic Recovery appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By External Source
Aug 20 2020 (IPS-Partners)

Small island nations face an existential and developmental threat from ship-source pollution endangering their vulnerable marine ecosystems and ocean economies. An effective international legal regime can help.

Often close to world shipping lanes, small island and coastal nations are at particular risk from oil spills.

MV Wakashio oil spill. Credit: IMO

Reliant on the marine environment and its biodiversity for tourism, fishing and aquaculture, islanders face an existential threat when oil spills happen in their waters.

This is why the environmental crisis unfolding in Mauritius is of grave concern.

It also brings into focus the international legal framework in place to provide support when ship-source environmental disasters strike, a new UNCTAD article says.

The seas and their use are governed by several international conventions. But some are not ratified by all countries that might benefit, and others are yet to enter into force.

This creates murky waters when oil spills happen, as not all parties have the same liability and compensation recourse, depending on which kinds of ships are responsible for the pollution and whether they have signed up to existing conventions.

“There’s a need for universal participation in the existing international legal framework, where all nations are party to agreements, so when incidents like this occur, vulnerable countries are protected,” said Shamika N. Sirimanne, UNCTAD’s technology and logistics director.

She said such oil spills herald negative environmental and socio-economic consequences for developing countries, especially small island developing states (SIDS).

Ms. Sirimanne added: “Sustainable Development Goal 14 calls on us to protect life below water and this means minimizing pollution at every possible turn, including putting all necessary precautions in place to manage environmental disasters like oil spills when they do happen.”

Using legal mechanisms to protect nations, blue economy

Different kinds of ships are subject to different international legal conventions.

The UNCTAD article maps out all the recent and applicable legislation which would apply to Mauritius based on the fact that liability and compensation will be critical in the aftermath of the spill on two fronts: economic and environmental.

The challenge in the Mauritius case is that the legislation that would provide higher compensation to the island nation does not apply, because the ship which ran aground is from a bulk-carrier, not an oil tanker.

Oil tanker pollution is governed by a different convention to that of bulk carriers, which is covered by the International Convention on Civil Liability for Bunker Oil Pollution Damage (Bunkers Convention).

It provides for a lower financial cap on liability, dependent on ship size or gross tonnage.

In the case of the MV Wakashio (101.932GT), the maximum compensation for economic losses and costs of reinstatement of the environment would be about $65.17 million.

If it were an oil tanker, the applicable International Oil Pollution Compensation Funds regime could have provided compensation of up to $286 million.

This is more than four times the Bunkers Convention provision and for Mauritius, could mean less financial aid to restore the environment and economic activity in the wake of the oil spill.

The UNCTAD article’s authors, Regina Asariotis and Anila Premti, emphasize the need for all countries to adopt the latest international legal instruments, given the potentially high costs and wide-ranging environmental and economic implications of ship-source pollution incidents.

What happened to the bulk carrier MV Wakashio?

The MV Wakashio, a Japanese-owned and Panamanian-flagged bulk-carrier, was sailing without cargo when it grounded on a coral reef on 25 July in an environmentally sensitive and biodiverse area off the east coast of Mauritius. The cause of the grounding is still unknown.

At the time of the grounding, the ship reportedly contained approximately 3,894 tons of fuel oil, 207 tons of diesel and 90 tons of lubricant oil on board.

By 11 August, some estimates indicated that between 1,000 and 2,000 tons of fuel oil had reportedly leaked from a breached tank and drifted into the surrounding lagoon, including areas of mangrove.

On 15 August, the ship split in two, at which point most of the fuel on-board had been recovered, according to the Japanese firm that owns the wrecked vessel.

The spill is considered as the worst in the history of Mauritius. It has endangered coral, fish and other marine life, imperiling the economy, food security, health and the $1.6 billion tourism industry in the country, already suffering from the negative effects of COVID-19.

Source: UNCTAD

The post Mauritius Oil Spill Puts Spotlight on Ship Pollution appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Deforestation due to the expansion of livestock farming dominates the landscape near Alta Floresta, a southeastern gateway to the Brazilian Amazon. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Sue Branford
Aug 20 2020 (IPS)

“The xapiri [shamanic spirits] have defended the forest since it first came into being. Our ancestors have never devastated it because they kept the spirits by their side,” declares Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, who belongs to the 27,000-strong Yanomami people living in the very north of Brazil.

He is expressing a commonly held Indigenous belief that they — the original peoples on the land, unlike the “white” Amazon invaders — are the ones most profoundly committed to forest protection. The Yanomami shaman reveals the reason: “We know well that without trees nothing will grow on the hardened and blazing ground.”

Now Brazil’s Indigenous people have gained scientific backing for their strongly held belief from two American academics.

In a study published this month in the PNAS journal, entitled Collective property rights reduce deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, two political scientists, Kathryn Baragwanath, from the University of California San Diego, and Ella Bayi, at the Department of Political Science, Columbia University, provide statistical proof of the Indigenous claim that they are the more effective forest guardians.

In their study, the researchers use comprehensive statistical data to show that Indigenous populations can effectively curb deforestation — but only if and when their full property rights over their territories are recognized by civil authorities in a process called homologação in Portuguese, or homologation in English.

 

Full property rights key to curbing deforestation

The scientists reached their conclusions by examining data on 245 Indigenous reserves homologated between 1982 and 2016. By examining the step-by-step legal establishment of Indigenous reserves, they were able to precisely date the moment of homologation for each territory, and to assess the effectiveness of Indigenous action against deforestation before and after full property rights were recognized.

In their study, the researchers use comprehensive statistical data to show that Indigenous populations can effectively curb deforestation — but only if and when their full property rights over their territories are recognized by civil authorities

Brazilian law requires the completion of a complex four-stage process before full recognition. After examining the data, Baragwanath and Bayi concluded that Indigenous people were only able to curb deforestation within their ancestral territories effectively after the last phase ­— homologation — had been completed.

Most deforestation of Indigenous territories occurs at the borders, as land-grabbers, loggers and farmers invade. But the new study shows that, once full property rights are recognized, Indigenous people were historically able to reduce deforestation at those borders from around 3% to 1% — a reduction of 66% which the authors find to be “a very strong finding.”

However, they emphasize that this plunge in deforestation rate only comes after homologation is complete. Baragwanath told Mongabay: The positive “effect on deforestation is very small before homologation and zero for non-homologated territories.” The authors concluded: “We believe the final stage [is] the one that makes the difference, since it is when actual property rights are granted, no more contestation can happen, and enforcement is undertaken by the government agencies.”

Homologation is crucially important, say the researchers, because with it the Indigenous group gains the backing of law and of the Brazilian state. They note: “Without homologation, Indigenous territories do not have the legal rights needed to protect their territories, their territorial resources are not considered their own, and the government is not constitutionally responsible for protecting them from encroachment, invasion, and external use of their resources.”

They continue: “Once homologated, a territory becomes the permanent possession of its Indigenous peoples, no third party can contest its existence, and extractive activities carried out by external actors can only occur after consulting the [Indigenous] communities and the National Congress.”

The scientists offer proof of effective state action and protections after homologation: “For example, FUNAI partnered with IBAMA and the military police of Mato Grosso in May 2019 to combat illegal deforestation on the homologated territory of Urubu Branco. In this operation, 12 people were charged with federal theft of wood and fined R $90,000 [US $23,000], and multiple trucks and tractors were seized; the wood seized was then donated to the municipality.”

 

Temer and Bolsonaro tip the tables

However, under the Jair Bolsonaro government, which came to power in Brazil after the authors collected their data, the situation is changing.

Before Bolsonaro, the number of homologations varied greatly from year to year, apparently in random fashion. A highpoint was reached in 1991, when over 70 territories were homologated, well over twice the number in any other year. This may have been because Brazil was about to host the 1992 Earth Summit and the Collor de Mello government was keen to boost Brazil’s environmental credentials. The surge may have also occurred as a result of momentum gained from Brazil’s adoption of its progressive 1988 constitution, with its enshrined Indigenous rights.

Despite wild oscillations in the annual number of homologations, until recently progress happened under each administration. “Every President signed over [Indigenous] property rights during their tenure, regardless of party or ideology,” the study states.

But since Michel Temer became president at the end of August 2016, the process has come to a standstill, with no new homologations. Baragwanath and Bayi suggest that, by refusing to recognize the full property rights of more Indigenous peoples, the Temer and Bolsonaro administrations “could be responsible for an extra 1.5 million hectares [5,790 square miles] of deforestation per year.” That would help explain soaring deforestation rates detected by INPE, Brazil’s National Institute of Space Research in recent years.

Clearly, for homologation to be effective, the state must assume its legal responsibilities, says Survival International’s Fiona Watson, who notes that this is certainly not happening under Bolsonaro: “Recognizing Indigenous peoples’ collective landownership rights is a fundamental legal requirement and ethical imperative, but it is not enough on its own. Land rights need to be vigorously enforced, which requires political will and action, proper funding, and stamping out corruption. Far from applying the law, President Bolsonaro and his government have taken a sledgehammer to Indigenous peoples’ hard-won constitutional rights, watered down environmental safeguards, and are brutally dismantling the agencies charged with protecting tribal peoples and the environment.”

Watson continues: “Brazil’s tribes — some only numbering a few hundred living in remote areas — are pitted against armed criminal gangs, whipped up by Bolsonaro’s hate speech. As if this wasn’t enough, COVID-19 is killing the best guardians of the forest, especially the older generations with expertise in forest management. Lethal diseases like malaria are on the rise in Indigenous communities and Amazon fires are spreading.”

In fact, Bolsonaro uses the low number of Indigenous people inhabiting reserves today — low populations often the outcome of past horrific violence and even genocide — as an excuse for depriving them of their lands. In 2015 he declared: “The Indians do not speak our language, they do not have money, they do not have culture. They are native peoples. How did they manage to get 13% of the national territory?” And in 2017 he said: “Not a centimeter will be demarcated… as an Indigenous reserve.”

The Indigenous territory of Urubu Branco, cited by Baragwanath and Bayi as a stellar example of effective state action, is a case in point. Under the Bolsonaro government it has been invaded time and again. Although the authorities have belatedly taken action, the Apyãwa (Tapirapé) Indigenous group living there says that invaders are now using the chaos caused by the pandemic to carry out more incursions.

 

A little girl in Sawré Muybu, an indigenous village on the Tapajós River between the municipalities of Itaituba and Trairao in the northern Brazilian state of Pará. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

 

Land rights: a path to conserving Amazonia

Even so, say the experts, it still seems likely that, if homologation was implemented properly now or in the future, with effective state support, it would lead to reduced deforestation. Indeed, Baragwanath and Bayi suggest that this may be one of the few ways of saving the Amazon forest.

“Providing full property rights and the institutional environment for enforcing these rights is an important and cost-effective way for countries to protect their forests and attain their climate goals,” says the study. “Public policy, international mobilization, and nongovernmental organizations should now focus their efforts on pressuring the Brazilian government to register Indigenous territories still awaiting their full property rights.”

But, in the current state of accelerating deforestation, unhampered by state regulation or enforcement, other approaches may be required. One way forward is suggested in a document optimistically entitled: “Reframing the Wilderness Concept can Bolster Collaborative Conservation.”

In the paper, Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares from the Helsinki Institute of Sustainable Science, and others suggest that it is time for a new concept of “wilderness.”

For decades, many conservationists argued that the Amazon’s wealth of biodiversity stems from it being a “pristine” biome, “devoid of the destructive impacts of human activity.” But increasingly studies have shown that Indigenous people greatly contributed to the exuberance of the forest by domesticating plants as much as 10,000 years ago. Thus, the forest and humanity likely evolved together.

In keeping with this productive partnership, conservationists and Indigenous peoples need to work in harmony with forest ecology, say the authors. This organic partnership is more urgently needed than ever, they say, because the entire Amazon basin is facing an onslaught, “a new wave of frontier expansion” by logging, industrial mining, and agribusiness.

Fernández-Llamazares told Mongabay: “Extractivist interests and infrastructure development across much of the Amazon are not only driving substantial degradation of wilderness areas and their unique biodiversity, but also forcing the region’s Indigenous peoples on the frontlines of ever more pervasive social-ecological conflict.…  From 2014 to 2019, at least 475 environmental and land defenders have been killed in Amazonian countries, including numerous members of Indigenous communities.”

Fernández-Llamazares believes that new patterns of collaboration are emerging.

“A good example of the alliance between Indigenous Peoples and wilderness defenders can be found in the Isiboro-Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS, being its Spanish acronym), in the Bolivian Amazon,” he says. “TIPNIS is the ancestral homeland of four lowland Indigenous groups and one of Bolivia’s most iconic protected areas, largely considered as one of the last wildlands in the country. In 2011, conservationists and Indigenous communities joined forces to oppose the construction of a road that would cut across the heart of the area.” A victory they won at the time, though TIPNIS today remains under contention today.

Eduardo S. Brondizio, another study contributor, points out alternatives to the industrial agribusiness and mining model: numerous management systems established by small-scale farmers, for example, that are helping conserve entire ecosystems.

“The açaí fruit economy, for instance, is arguably the region’s largest [Amazon] economy today, even compared to soy and cattle, and yet it occupies a fraction of the [land] area occupied by soy and cattle, with far higher economic return and employment than deforestation-based crops, while maintaining forest cover and multiple ecological benefits.” he said.

And, he adds, it is a completely self-driven initiative. “The entire açaí fruit economy emerged from the hands and knowledge of local riverine producers who [have] responded to market demand since the 1980s by intensifying their production using local agroforestry knowledge.” It is important, he stresses, that conservationists recognize the value of these sustainable economic activities in protecting the forest.

The new alliance taking shape between conservationists and Indigenous peoples is comparable with the new forms of collaboration that have arisen among traditional people in the Brazilian Amazon. Although Indigenous populations and riverine communities of subsistence farmers and Brazil nut collectors have long regarded each other as enemies — fighting to control the same territory — they are increasingly working together to confront land-grabbers, loggers and agribusiness.

Still, there is no doubt time is running out. Brazil’s huge swaths of agricultural land are already contributing to, and suffering from, deepening drought, because the “flying rivers” that bring down rainfall from the Amazon are beginning to collapse. Scientists are warning that the forest is moving toward a precipitation tipping point, when drought, deforestation and fire will change large areas of rainforest into arid degraded savanna.

This may already be happening. The Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM), a non-profit, research organisation, warned recently that the burning season, now just beginning in the Amazon, could devastate an even larger area than last year, when video footage of uncontrolled fires ablaze in the Amazon was viewed around the world. IPAM estimates that a huge area, covering 4,509 square kilometers (1,741 square miles), has been felled and is waiting to go up in flames this year — data some experts dispute. But as of last week, more than 260 major fires were already alight in the Amazon.

Years ago Davi Kopenawa Yanomami warned: “They [the white people] continue to maltreat the earth everywhere they go.… It never occurs to them that if they mistreat it too much it will finally turn to chaos.… The xapiri [the shamanic spirits] try hard to defend the white people the same way as they defend us.… But if Omoari, the dry season being, settles on their land for good, they will only have trickles of dirty water to drink and they will die of thirst. This could truly happen to them.”

 

Citations:

Kathryn Baragwanath and Ella Bayi, (10 August 2020), Collective property rights reduce deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares, Julien Terraube, Michael C. Gavin, Aili Pyhälä, Sacha M.O. Siani, Mar Cabeza, and Eduardo S. Brondizio, (29 July 2020) Reframing the Wilderness Concept can Bolster Collaborative Conservation, Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

 

This story was originally published by Mongabay

The post Indigenous Best Amazon Stewards, but Only When Property Rights Assured: Study appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Credit: 2020 John Holmes for Human Rights Watch

By A Kenyan Migrant Worker
DOHA, Aug 19 2020 (IPS)

Like thousands of migrant workers from Africa and Asia, I am finally in the land of my dreams, Qatar. I knew working here would be tough, but I thought I would be able to regularly send money home to my family and live decently.

I had imagined that once here, I could sneak a peek at gli Azzuri, the Italian national team and my favorite, but seeing the way Qatar treats workers like me preparing for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, my excitement dwindled. 

In the land of my dreams, every day feels like a nightmare. 

The soaring unemployment rate in Kenya, my home country, pushes thousands of young people to look for jobs overseas. A family friend had moved here recently to work in the hospitality industry. He appeared to have a decent life. That, plus the lack of income tax and the promise of medical coverage helped lure me here. 

My friend did say that working in the Gulf is not for the faint of heart, but I asked myself if things could be worse than they are in Kenya. I have a bachelor’s degree with honors and still found no stable job opportunities in my hometown. I knew I needed something to supplement the freelance writing I was doing.

Overworked, underpaid, and left on my own without any security net, I have a false choice: stick it out, or return to Kenya, defeated and drowning in debt

I found a local recruiting agent who agreed to facilitate my visa and job application process for a security guard job. He demanded $1,500 in recruitment fees. This is a huge amount, but I asked around and I found that all Kenyan migrant workers pay recruitment fees for a job in Qatar. My parents offered to cover me. They said it would leave them in a financial crunch, but it would be worth it to see my life take off. After working hard their whole lives, both of them will be forced to retire this year, so it is up to me to fend for myself and shoulder my family’s responsibilities. 

The recruiting agent turned out to be both disorganized and surreptitious. The flight he arranged for me was an eight-hour journey from my hometown. I had paid him to secure me a job as a security guard, but after the non-refundable payments were made, when he handed me my paperwork hours before my departure, I discovered my visa and employment contract were for a cleaning position. Not to worry, he said, when I get to Qatar I can change jobs.  

My Qatar dream was finally in motion as the plane powered into the gloomy night sky. I was greeted by the architectural masterpiece that is Hamad International Airport. Things were bound to pick up now, I thought. But my employer, who was supposed to meet me, was nowhere to be found. After numerous frantic phone calls, he told me to get a taxi and go to my accommodations.

Inside my room, at the shoebox accommodations I found four other workers who seemed miserable. We didn’t talk much. The place was rundown, with no beds, only used mattresses and soiled duvets which harbored an insect colony. I willed myself to be optimistic and decided to talk to my employer in the morning about changing jobs. 

My employer heard my concerns and took me for an interview at a local security services company. I was offered an employment contract that seemed fair. For eight hours of work a day, my monthly salary would be 1,500 Qatari riyals ($412), I would be paid at a higher rate for any overtime work, and the employer would cover my health care and housing.  

In Qatar, a migrant worker needs to get their previous employer’s written permission to change jobs while on contract. While for me, it was a smooth process, other workers have told me how difficult it was for them, and how employers often use the power they have over workers to further exploit them. My new company made it a point to inform me that they themselves never give workers the permission to change jobs. I didn’t think too much about this, I was just happy to leave my infested room and start earning money. In retrospect, I wish I had.  

The legal transfer of my immigration documents took a month, without pay, and when I finally was ushered into the security company’s housing, I was ready for better days. 

The new housing was better than where I had been living, but still not up to bare minimum standards. Ten of us were stacked in a stuffy room. About 15 people shared a toilet, and about 60 shared the communal kitchen, which was built for a handful of people.

Since then, with different assignments, I have lived in various places. At one point I was sleeping in the educational facility I was guarding. For the last month I have been sharing my room with five other men from my company, and for a while, water from the air conditioner was leaking onto our beds. 

As for my working conditions, the four hours of overtime I put in daily are ignored in my pay slips, I work seven days a week without a day off, wages are delayed for up to three months, and during this time they don’t even provide us with a food allowance. 

My March salary arrived in June, April’s salary came in July.  I have not been paid for May, June, and July. For every day that my wages are delayed, I go deeper into debt, because I send 1,000 Qatari Riyals ($275) a month home and have no choice but to borrow money for food. 

I have been here for more than six months, but I have not been issued a Qatar Identity Card, which is mandatory for migrant workers. Other employees tell me it takes eight to ten months for our company to issue Identity Cards. Without the card, I can’t take a complaint to the Labor Department; I can’t even step out of my housing without risking arrest.  

I have not had a single off day since I started working six months ago – a single day off will cost me 50 Qatari Riyals ($14). I desperately need a few days off to fight the fatigue that is dragging me down. However, I also desperately need a complete salary to break even and start moving toward a decent life. 

My assignments vary. I have worked at hotels, offices, and schools. Currently I stand for 12 hours a day, outside a hotel in one of Qatar’s upscale neighborhoods. I am tasked with directing and controlling traffic, conducting regular foot patrols, and assisting and escorting guests who enquire about whether rooms are available. My duty is made harder by the unwavering and relentless Middle East sun.  

I finally got a health card after five months. Imagine being in a foreign country during a global pandemic and not having health care. To make matters worse, it seems that my company doesn’t care much about personal protective equipment. They bring gloves and masks just once in a while.  The hotel staff often lends us masks. Luckily, the only person I know of who has had Covid-19 was a supervisor at the hotel before I was assigned here. 

My workmates encourage me when I am at my lowest points. We understand the systematic challenges workers experience daily. The government talks about reforming labor laws but most of it feels like it is only on paper. People on the ground are really suffering and rogue employers are getting away with gross injustices. The class division is stark in Qatar. The country is one of the richest in the world, but it was built and continues to run on the fuel of its migrants. The exploitation and oppression have taken a mental and physical toll on us, but the resolve to improve our lives keeps us going. 

The 2022 World Cup is another thorny matter. Even the biggest and glitziest stadiums can’t justify maltreatment of workers.  

Overworked, underpaid, and left on my own without any security net, I have a false choice: stick it out, or return to Kenya, defeated and drowning in debt.  

 

The author asked not to use his name for his protection.        

The post I Came to Work in Qatar to Pursue My Dreams, But My Life is a Nightmare appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

The author is one of the 93 migrant workers Human Rights Watch interviewed for a recent report on salary abuses ahead of Qatar’s 2022 FIFA World Cup, he has requested anonymity for his safety; work visas and residence permits for migrant workers in Qatar are directly tied to employers, hence workers are often afraid to speak publicly against salary abuses

The post I Came to Work in Qatar to Pursue My Dreams, But My Life is a Nightmare appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Women in Minsk, Belarus. Unsplash/Jana Shnipelson

By External Source
Aug 19 2020 (IPS)

President Aliaksandr Lukashenka’s government is teetering after he declared victory in a rigged 9 August vote. Protests have exploded. Moscow, Brussels and other stakeholders should avoid transforming the Belarus crisis into a European one, cooperate to warn against repression and insist on new, fair elections.

As protests and strikes in Belarus enter their second week, Moscow, Brussels and many other European capitals have struggled to respond. The politics that brought Belarusians to the streets of their villages, towns and cities are local: they are angry that their president of 26 years has tried to steal yet another election.

But if the crisis in Belarus is at its core anything but an East-West standoff, it is happening at a time when hasty responses by either Russia or Western states could turn it into just that. Because such a showdown would serve no one’s interests, all stakeholders should take care to consult with each other and coordinate their policies, even as they do what they can to help Belarus and Belarusians.

Aliaksandr Lukashenka has been president of Belarus since 1994, and both citizens and outside observers have roundly questioned the legitimacy of every vote in the country since the one that brought him to power. This one, held on 9 August, was even less transparent than its predecessors.

Instead of competing, Russia and other European states would be better advised to work together to help Belarusians chart their own path forward, including through mediation involving Tsikhanouskaya (now in Lithuania for her safety) and her team

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) complained that it was invited too late to send observers, while staff from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) stayed away due to COVID-19. Lukashenka’s primary opponent on the ballot, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, registered to run only a few weeks ago, when her husband, along with other prospective candidates, was prevented from doing so and arrested instead.

Tsikhanouskaya’s central campaign promise was a new, free, fair and transparent election within six months of taking office. Her campaign drew tens of thousands of citizens to its rallies in the lead-up to the vote, the first sign that this time might be different.

And, indeed, when Lukashenka claimed to have garnered an improbable 80 per cent of the vote, a lot of Belarusian citizens simply did not believe him. Solid evidence that they are right lies in their own numbers, which grow each day, even as both demonstrators and passersby are arrested en masse; the use of rubber bullets and, reportedly, live ammunition; and the clear signs of torture on the bodies of those released from Lukashenka’s jails, which are rapidly running short of space.

As even state-run factory workers call on Lukashenka to leave, television presenters refuse to work, and some police appear to join the protesters, the president has asked Moscow for help. This is a change – albeit not the first one – for Lukashenka, who one week ago claimed that Russian (as well as Polish) “puppet masters” were behind the opposition and, prior to the 9 August vote, announced the arrest of 33 alleged members of a Russian private militia, whom he accused of planning to destabilise the country. (Thirty-two were sent back to Russia on 14 August. The one with Belarusian citizenship stayed.)

Although Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated Lukashenka on his victory, relations between the two countries had been cooling for a while, as the Belarusian president periodically courted Western support to limit Moscow’s leverage.

Putin may see advantages in supporting a weakened Lukashenka – particularly if European states deem him illegitimate. Lukashenka may be counting on this eventuality. His most recent comments have clearly been aimed at Moscow, alleging that NATO troops are massing near the country’s borders, something the alliance has denied (and of which there is no evidence).

Some in the Kremlin may see this crisis as an opportunity for Russia to bring Belarus back more squarely into its corner. Nor would Moscow relish the precedent of an ally and neighbour losing power in the face of popular protests. That said, the Belarus opposition so far has not been particularly hostile to Moscow, and Russia risks alienating them if it throws its weight behind the discredited president. Lukashenka’s demise is far from guaranteed, but it seems increasingly plausible. Russia has reasons to keep its options open.

Up to now, Western countries have largely limited themselves to expressions of concern, although a few, including Lithuania, Estonia, the UK, Ireland and Canada, have declared the election illegitimate. But growing Russian/European divergence on Belarus could have more serious geostrategic implications. 

Just as NATO strategists often postulate that war with Russia would begin as a result of a Russian attack on a Baltic country, Russian scenarios for that same war often start with a Western-backed revolution in Belarus. What is happening today reflects neither scenario: as noted above, it is Lukashenka, not the opposition, who reached out to Western leaders in the past.

But Russian fears of Western influence in Belarus coupled with Western concerns over Russia’s hold on Minsk could undermine efforts from both to respond to the unfolding crisis and make it worse.

Either direct Russian military intervention or heavy-handed Western efforts to foster a transition would risk transforming this crisis into the NATO-Russia standoff it is not and turn the people of Belarus into pawns. Because this struggle has not been about East-West competition, Lukashenka’s fall, if it comes, need not be a geostrategic loss for Moscow any more than his survival would be a victory over Brussels or Washington.

Instead of competing, Russia and other European states would be better advised to work together to help Belarusians chart their own path forward, including through mediation involving Tsikhanouskaya (now in Lithuania for her safety) and her team. As of 17 August, Lukashenka has called for a constitutional referendum followed by new elections, an apparent effort to buy time. But with or without him, the next step ought to be the more transparent, fair race that Tsikhanouskaya promised.

In the longer term, Belarus will need support from all of its neighbours in order to rebuild, particularly given the public health crisis caused by poor management of the pandemic by Lukashenka’s team (which dismissed the coronavirus’ risks) – a crisis that could worsen as a result of mass detentions.

In the meantime, as long as the threat of further violence and repression remains, more states should follow Lithuania’s lead and ease entry requirements – paired with appropriate quarantine – for Belarusians, whether temporarily or, if needed, for the still uncertain long term.

 

This statement was originally published by the Crisis Group

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