Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

Djibouti Port. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

By External Source
CAPE TOWN, South Africa, May 27 2020 (IPS)

The African Continental Free Trade Area was launched two years ago at an African Union (AU) summit in Kigali. It was scheduled to be implemented from 1 July 2020. But this has been pushed out until 2021 because of the impact of COVID-19 and the need for leaders to focus on saving lives.

Studies by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and others state that the free trade area has the potential to increase growth, raise welfare and stimulate industrial development on the continent. But there are concerns. Some countries, particularly smaller and more vulnerable states, could be hurt. For example, they could suffer revenue losses and other negative effects from premature liberalisation.

African countries are increasingly connected to the global economy, but tend to operate at the lowest rung of the ladder. They are mainly supplying raw materials and other low-value manufactured outputs. Cooperation is needed between Africa’s emerging entrepreneurs and industries to improve their competitiveness in global markets

The impact of COVID-19 will only worsen these structural weaknesses. The Economic Commission for Africa has reported that between 300,000 and 3.3 million people could lose their lives if appropriate measures are not taken. There are several reasons for this level of high risk. These include the fact that 56% of urban dwellings are in overcrowded slums, 71% of Africa’s workforce is informally employed and cannot work from home and 40% of children on the continent are undernourished.

Africa is also more vulnerable to the impact of COVID-19 because it is highly dependent on imports for its medicinal and pharmaceutical products and on commodity exports. The latter include oil, which has suffered a severe collapse in price.

Other contributing factors are high public debt due to higher interest rate payments than Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, a weak fiscal tax base, and the negative impact on Africa’s currencies due to huge stimulus measures taken by OECD countries.

The COVID-19 crisis has brought these weaknesses into sharp relief. But it also provides an opportunity for African countries to address them. For example, they could accelerate intra-regional trade by focusing on the products of greatest need during the health crisis. Countries could also start building regional value chains to advance industrialisation, improve infrastructure and strengthen good governance and ethical leadership.

These are all vital to guiding African countries through the current crisis.

These goals can be achieved if African states adopt a “developmental regionalism” approach to trade integration. This would include fair trade, building regional value chains, cross-border investment in infrastructure and strengthening democratic governance.

 

Fair trade

A number of conditions need to be met for a free trade area to succeed.

Firstly, African states vary widely in size and economic development. As a result some may warrant special attention and specific treatment. In particular, among Africa’s 55 states 34 are classified by the United Nations as least developed countries. These are low income countries that have severe structural problems impeding their development.

Building trade agreements in favour of small and less developed economies will contribute to fairer outcomes of the free trade deal.

Secondly, African governments should include their stakeholders – businesses (both big and small), trade unions and civil society organisations – in the national consultation process. This will require effective institutions that enable the fullest participation.

Additional steps countries should take to cope with the fallout from COVID-19:

• Reduce tariffs on vital pharmaceutical products (such as ventilators), personal protective equipment and food products;
• Stimulate intra-regional trade by prioritising these products for an immediate or early phase down in the free trade area.

 

Building regional value chains

African countries are increasingly connected to the global economy, but tend to operate at the lowest rung of the ladder. They are mainly supplying raw materials and other low-value manufactured outputs.

Cooperation is needed between Africa’s emerging entrepreneurs and industries to improve their competitiveness in global markets. This would have a number of positive outcomes including:

• triggering industrialisation, which will transform economies
• helping African countries obtain a fairer share of the value derived from African commodities and labour, and
• improving the lives of people on the continent.

The current crisis creates an opportunity for African countries to build value chains on medical equipment, pharmaceuticals and personal protective equipment.

The clothing and textile sector could also be restructured to meet the needs of the health sector while taking advantage of the breakdown in supply chains from China and Europe.

As more countries lock down their economies and apply movement controls, agricultural and processed food supply chains are disrupted. This creates opportunities to build regional supply chains and partner with retailers.

There are also opportunities to build infrastructure to support the health response: hospitals, water and sanitation, schools, low-cost housing and alternative energy.

African countries can also benefit from the growing interest in environmental tourism.

 

Cross-border infrastructure investment

Since most African countries are less developed, and many are small, intra-regional trade will require them to cooperate to improve their infrastructure. This includes physical ports, roads and railways as well as customs procedures, port efficiency and reduction of roadblocks.

Progress is already being made. Examples include the Mombasa-Nairobi Corridor; the Addis to Djibouti road, rail and port connection; and the Abidjan-Lagos Corridor, which handles more than two-thirds of West African trade.

Increased investment in these types of cross-border infrastructure projects will benefit regional integration.

 

Democracy and governance

Most African states have started accepting multi-party systems of governance. Many have also embraced a culture of constitutionalism, rule of law and human rights.

Democratic governance supported by active citizenship will create an environment of transparency and predictability that encourages domestic and foreign investment. Both are vital for growth and industrialisation. The process is also essential for the sustainability of regional economic integration and democracy in Africa.

Countries are becoming better at fulfilling their democratic obligations. For example, 40 African countries, including the Seychelles and Zimbabwe, voluntarily joined the African Peer Review Mechanism. The mechanism is a remarkable achievement that the free trade area agreement must build on.

 

The way forward

The free trade area could become a landmark in Africa’s journey towards peace, prosperity and integration. The COVID-19 pandemic, notwithstanding its devastating impact on the health and economies of Africa, could be an opportunity to advance the free trade area in a more developmental, inclusive and mutually beneficial way for African countries.

Faizel Ismail, Director of the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, University of Cape Town

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

The post How a Post-COVID-19 Revival Could Kickstart Africa’s Free Trade Area appeared first on Inter Press Service.

A communal farmer harvesting her maize crop in Seke communal lands, Zimbabwe. In recent years, Zimbabwe has witnessed a rapid growth in digital agriculture. Credit: Tonderayi Mukeredzi/IPS

By Tonderayi Mukeredzi
HARARE, May 27 2020 (IPS)

Shurugwi communal farmer, Elizabeth Siyapi (57) can no longer be scammed by unscrupulous middlemen to sell her crops cheaply. Nowadays, before she takes her produce to market she scours her mobile phone, which has become an essential digital agriculture data bank, for the best prices on the market.

“When my livestock are sick, instead of waiting for an extension officer to physically visit me for help, which may take days, I just consult my phone to look for information on what to do,” she told IPS.

Siyaphi is one of approximately 34,000 small holder farmers across the country collectively using two smart phone-based solutions, Kurima Mari and Agrishare, promoted by German development agency, Welthungerhilfe Zimbabwe, to find markets, extension services, weather information and hire agriculture equipment.

Tawanda Mthintwa Hove, the head of digital agriculture at Welthungerhilfe Zimbabwe, said farmers have been using Kurima Mari to learn good agricultural practices and link with markets since 2016.

“Kurima Mari is available offline which eliminates the need for buying data. An extension officer updates the application on a regular basis and the updates are shared using bluetooth making it costless to the farmer,” he told IPS. “Whilst Agrishare is an online-based solution, it enables farmers to secure the best equipment in their homes, which reduces mobility costs.”

Over the last three years Siyaphi has utilised digital agriculture to find good agricultural practices. And her maize yield has multiplied from two 50-kilogram bags of maize to over three and a half tonnes.

• Though during the current COVID-19 lockdown in this southern African nation, her yields have reduced because of water restrictions.
• She told IPS that while markets remain available through the app, mostly via farmer to farmer contacts, transporting her produce to market has become the biggest problem because of lockdown restrictions. The current lockdown is in place indefinitely, though reviewed every two weeks by government. 

Hove said that mobile digital technologies improve the quantity and quality of farmer’s harvests by giving them current information on production practices. They also facilitate linkages, weather advisory services, add efficiency to commodity systems, which in the long run help increase farmer’s yields and make them more profitable.

In recent years, Zimbabwe has witnessed a rapid growth in the use of digital agriculture.

• Other digital agriculture innovations include the Zimbabwe Farmers Union (ZFU) and Econet Wireless championed, Ecofarmer Combo programme, which delivers weather-based insurance, real time location-based weather information and farming tips to over 80,000 communal farmers.
• Started by the churches in 2019, Turning Matabeleland Green, is another digital agriculture programme that uses satellite technology to send weather information and farming advice to over 2,000 farmers via the short message service.

Paul Zakariya, ZFU executive director, told IPS that mobile technology has enabled farmers to get farming advice in real-time, make online payments for inputs and services and access extension services from the tap of a phone, services that were previously available only through pamphlets and meetings.

According to the Food Sustainability Index, created by the Barilla Centre for Food and Nutrition (BCFN)  and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), “Precision farming and new digital tools can help, enhancing the efficiency and sustainability of farming, while improving yields”.

But Charles Dhewa, the chief executive officer of Knowledge Transfer Africa, an indigenous systems company that operates eMkambo, another digital agriculture solution, said mobile applications were not yet directly benefitting smallholder farmers here.

“A few elite farmers with appropriate android phones could be benefitting here and there. That is why we have not positioned eMkambo Nest as a lead solution in our eMkambo platform,” he told IPS. 

Dhewa stated that although content was important, many farmers and traders don’t have time and bandwidth to toy with many of the available mobile and digital farming applications. The channels have reached their limits and are disintegrated, in addition to causing information asymmetry amongst farmers.

Digital literacy and the high cost of mobile communication is also reversing gains that could have been made by digital technology.

“The high cost of mobile money is worsening the situation, rendering mobile technology more of a luxury than a necessity,” he said. “Paying for agricultural commodities through mobile money is now more expensive.” 

Zakariya said despite an increased deployment of digital technologies in agriculture, farmers were using ICTs much less to improve agri-business. Beyond mobile applications, the country has been slow in adopting other appropriate technologies and innovations crucial in commercialising the country’s agriculture, which remains mostly subsistence. 

There is little use of high-end technologies with potential to enhance production and value chain competitiveness such as crop protection technology, soil and moisture sensors, drones, precision farming, molecular technology, use of global positioning systems and geographic information systems (GIS).

Zakariya said the uptake of modern, sophisticated technologies was capital intensive for most farmers while many more farmers lacked knowledge on the use and efficacy of the newer technologies.

Dhewa said that GIS has a better future in agriculture than mobile applications sharing information.

• The Digitalisation of the African Agriculture Report 2018-19 said there has been a significant growth in digitalisation for agriculture across the continent during the past 10 years.
• The report, authored by the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation, said by 2019, there were about 390 distinct, active digitalisation for agriculture solutions, where 33 million small holder farmers were registered.
• But despite the impressive growth figures, only 42 percent of the registered farmers and pastoralists are using the solutions with any frequency.

According to Hove, it is rural farmers that have been hit hard by COVID-19 lockdown restrictions and prohibitive data costs, as such many can’t move their produce easily and have been deprived of income. This has forced some farmers to resort to middlemen.

Still, Hove said, some rural farmers have been able to find markets through the contact list (farmer to farmer) on the app as opposed to using the real-time markets list.

Meanwhile Siyapi said that she and other farmers struggle to buy data. As a lead and successful farmer, she requires about $16 a month in data but says other farmers can make do with $2.20 to download updates and peruse the marketplace.

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The post Digital Agriculture Benefits Zimbabwe’s Farmers but Mobile Money is Costly appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

In recent years, Zimbabwe has witnessed a rapid growth in the use of digital agriculture but uptake of modern technology is capital intensive for farmers.

The post Digital Agriculture Benefits Zimbabwe’s Farmers but Mobile Money is Costly appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Dr Julia Stamm
BERLIN, May 27 2020 (IPS)

Crises make us think smaller. When everything is uncertain, we turn inward: to our families, our communities, the immediate needs around us. We focus on the essential and the immediate; we survive.

On an individual level, this instinct can be clarifying, as it may bring into focus the realm of the Truly Important: our closest human relationships, our health, our community, our freedom.

Looking past this circle of immediacy, however, it’s clear to see that the current global pandemic will demand much more of us. Beyond the here and now, it is becoming increasingly clear that he Covid-19 crisis is creating enormous need and essential work for the future.

Preparing for and addressing these future challenges is also a matter of great urgency. Responding to the urgent needs of the moment while keeping the futures we want in our field of vision requires us to be intentional and thoughtful about the choices we make now.

The Futures Project exists precisely at this juncture where present and future come into conversation, and from this vantage point, it is clear that we cannot talk about problem-solving in the present without making sure we know where we want to go.

One need not look far to see the roadmap of future needs that is emerging in light of the Covid-19 crisis. If you follow the cracks, long-existent but willfully ignored, that have come starkly into view in the past few months, you can trace your way to some of the challenges that will shape our future.

With the closure of schools, we see not only the fact of disparate access to internet networks, but also the direct translation of this disparity into outcomes: some students will return to school having kept up with their learning, and others will fall further behind.

We see that for those without stable housing and access to food and water, social distancing, handwashing, and safe shelter at home are simply not possible. We see that our essential workers have long been the least celebrated, their livelihoods among the least protected. These are only a few examples.

Julia Stamm

We see also that solutions are possible—that, especially if we are willing to acknowledge the inequalities that we’ve grown comfortable with, in the parts of the world that benefit from them, we can fix our problems. This will take a massive reimagining of what’s possible, and a massive recalibrating of what is acceptable to us.

The UN75 global conversation initiative, launched to celebrate the 75th birthday of the United Nations in October 2020, has opened an international dialogue on precisely these topics.

The initiative asks people to talk about the future, asking three “big questions”: what kind of future do we want to create? Are we on track? What do we need to bridge the gap?

Of course, when these questions were written and the initiative launched, no one foresaw the upheaval that was to come. Given the massive disruption that Covid-19 has caused, these questions may, at first glance, feel out of place. In a crisis, everything feels immediate. And to some extent, it is true: we have to adapt, respond, pull together, and make it through.

Our view, though, is that crisis response and thinking about the future go hand-in-hand. In this uncertain moment, asking ourselves and each other about the futures we want to inhabit provides light for our path.

Given the sometimes-overwhelming scope of the crisis, using the future as our guide will help us find our next small step. 2020 was to be the beginning of a crucial decade for the UN Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and even though most did not factor a global pandemic into their response plans, the SDGs also provide a blueprint for the future that can serve to guide our crisis response.

If we have any hope of repairing the cracks, of finding solutions to urgent problems that not only carry us through the moment but also pave the way to a more resilient future, we must bring people together across borders, sectors, and boundaries to create a vision for the future and make plans to act.

This is exactly the task that the UN75 questions facilitate, and the backdrop against which The Futures Project builds its work.

Our commitment during this time is to serve as a steward of thinking and doing that helps us all keep the futures we want to inhabit, and the futures we hope future generations can inhabit, in our field of vision.

Our current initiative, Innovators for the Future, bridges reflection and action, thinking and doing, by building off of the UN75 questions. By identifying projects that are having positive impacts on their communities now, while also keeping an eye on the future they want to see, we are looking at what the UN75 questions look like in action.

Innovators for the Future extends the UN75 dialogue by asking not only what kind of future we want to create, but also, what are we doing to get there? And for our part at the Futures Project, we’re asking: how can we help build the bridge between thinking and doing; between present and future?

Through our Social Impact Accelerator, we’re also lending a hand, supporting the do-ers of the world and the future visions for their communities towards which they are building.

Above all, The Futures Project and the Call for Innovators are about commitment to the idea that we can—and will—build better futures. We do not know exactly what this looks like.

Creating these future visions are part of the work. We do, however, believe wholeheartedly that our imagined world of tomorrow can teach us about how to do better today. We are committed to doing the work it takes to build the world that we see outlined in the UN Vision, and we remain hopeful.

The post UN@75 & the Future We Want appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Dr Julia Stamm is Founder & CEO, The Futures Project, described as a “nonprofit initiative to transform the way we think about and shape the future, re-envisioning the role that technology and innovation can play in helping us realise the futures we want to create.”

The post UN@75 & the Future We Want appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Open drainage ditch, Ankorondrano-Andranomahery, Madagascar. Credit: Lova Rabary-Rakontondravony/IPS

By Gareth Willmer and Fiona Broom
May 26 2020 (IPS)

Crucial global goals to reduce hunger and poverty and curb climate change have gone backwards or stalled, the United Nations Secretary-General warns in a new report, as the COVID-19 outbreak moves from being a health crisis to becoming the “worst human and economic crisis of our lifetimes”.

The number of people suffering hunger has increased, climate change is occurring faster than predicted, and inequality is increasing within and among countries, António Guterres says in his ‘Progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals’ 2020 report.

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were launched four years ago to address the most pressing global needs for a sustainable future, including education and health improvements and reductions in social and economic inequalities.

“The effects of the pandemic and the measures taken to mitigate its impact have overwhelmed the health systems globally, caused businesses and factories to shut down and severely impacted the livelihoods of half of the global workforce,” he says in the report.

It comes on top of an existing slowing in progress towards many of the SDGs, and Guterres had launched a Decade of Action in September to turn things around.

The latest report, published last week (14 May), illustrates “the continued unevenness of progress and the many areas where significant improvement is required”.

The report has been released ahead of UN Economic and Social Council high-level meetings scheduled for July to provide a global, data-driven overview of the SDGs.

 

Women and girls

Last year’s report had already warned that there was “simply no way that we can achieve the 17 SDGs without achieving gender equality and empowering women and girls”.

In the 2020 review, Guterres says “the promise of a world in which every woman and girl enjoys full gender equality and all legal, social and economic barriers to their empowerment have been removed, remains unfulfilled”.

Only half of the world’s women who are married or ‘in-union’ make their own decisions regarding sexual and reproductive health and rights, based on 2007-2018 data from 57 countries, the report says.

“People are talking about a global response in terms of a vaccine, I think we should pay attention to those who are talking about a global response to the coming food crisis.”

Social and economic development has been shown to accelerate when women have access to mobile phones, the report says, but phone ownership remains higher for men than for women.

More than 260 million children were out of school in 2017 and 773 million adults — two-thirds of whom are women — remained illiterate in 2018.

As of 2019, less than half of primary and lower secondary schools in Sub-Saharan Africa had access to electricity, computers, the internet and basic handwashing facilities, the report states.

Billions of people worldwide still lack access to safely managed water and sanitation services, including 2.2 billion people without safe drinking water.

And, the world is projected to miss the target to end poverty in all its forms as hunger increased for the fourth consecutive year and about 50 million children experienced acute undernutrition. Globally, 144 million children under five were still affected by stunting in 2019, with three quarters of these children in Central and Southern Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa.

Claire Heffernan, director of the London International Development Centre, a membership organisation, says the SDGs are incompatible with the COVID-19 pandemic on a political level.

“The SDGs reflected the political will of the time,” she says. “Today, in the midst of this pandemic, I think it’s safe to say global political will is in short supply.”

 

Food crisis

Subir Sinha, senior lecturer in institutions and development at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), says he is sceptical of suggestions in the report that progress has been made on poverty, because the quality of data from national governments has become worse.

He says that wage protections and labour rights need to be made into political issues to ensure they stay on governments’ radars.

“COVID-19 is going to make questions of hunger much worse,” Sinha says. “People are talking about a global response in terms of a vaccine, I think we should pay attention to those who are talking about a global response to the coming food crisis.”

The SDG progress report comes after the United Nations predicted last week that the COVID-19 crisis could push 130 million more people into poverty in the next 10 years.

About 35 million people are expected to fall below the extreme poverty line this year as a result of the pandemic, with 56 per cent of them in Africa, the UN’s World Economic Situation and Prospects as of mid-2020 report predicted.

The global economy is forecast to lose a staggering US$8.5 trillion in production over the next two years due to the pandemic, the UN report says.

This is a “tremendous setback” for sustainable development, Elliott Harris, UN chief economist and assistant secretary-general for economic development, told SciDev.Net.

“[The pandemic] is particularly affecting the more vulnerable groups … because these are the ones whose activities generally require some form of physical proximity to others.”

 

Remittances

Remittances from migrant workers in the global North could face a hit – in countries such as Haiti, South Sudan and Tonga, remittances constitute more than a third of gross domestic product.

“You have an abrupt cut of people’s livelihoods and incomes, and then you’ve got different kinds of cascading effects through the bigger food system,” says Sophia Murphy, senior specialist in agriculture, trade and investment at the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD).

There are also fears about what the pandemic could mean for long-term food security, with the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) estimating that 130 million more people in low- and middle-income countries may be pushed into acute food insecurity this year.

Bumper crops in some regions are at risk of being wasted. India has been hit by COVID-19 at harvest time, with crops left unpicked and difficulties getting grain to market for sale before it spoils.

This comes after rising hunger in the three years to 2018 pushed undernourishment back to levels seen around 2010.

Evidence of price rises has already emerged. In Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of the Congo, the WFP notes a 10 per cent surge in the price of a typical local basket of food – comprising fish, pulses, peanut paste, cassava flour, oil and condiments – in the space of two weeks.

The organisation expects food price rises to occur more widely, as this is happening in countries such as Syria, where prices have more than doubled in the past year.

“I think it’s probably much more widespread than we realise because we’ve never encountered an emergency on this sort of scale before,” says Jane Howard, head of communications, marketing and advocacy at the WFP’s London office.

“It’s like having an emergency in every single country that you’re working in.”

Some countries are already reeling from other problems, such as the locust swarms in East Africa, leading to potentially “devastating” impacts, she adds.

 

This story was originally published by SciDev.Net

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By Dr. Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury
SINGAPORE, May 26 2020 (IPS-Partners)

Despite all the preoccupation with the current raging pandemic, it sadly appears that there has been no let-up in the global arms race among the major powers. In mid-May, the United States President Donald Trump, at an event for his new Space Force at the White House made a significant announcement, It was that the US was building right now an “incredible” new missile which would travel faster than any other in the world “by a factor of almost three”. This was obviously a response to the latest Russian ‘Avangard’ missile, which Russian President Vladimir Putin claims in invincible, with a speed of twenty times that of sound. The Chinese, reportedly are also feverishly working on their own hypersonic counterparts. All these would be strategic tools to significantly alter the war-fighting capabilities of humanity in the future.

Dr. Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury

Up until recently, around the times of the First Great War (1914-1918) war fighting was based on come rather simple techniques Battlefield outcomes could be based on certain straight forward equations. One was a mathematical model, named after its proponent, called ‘Lanchester’s Law’. According to it, between two confronting sides, the higher number or greater firepower had better chances of winning. More complex formulae were derived therefrom. But it had too many limitations for use in contemporary conflict.

So, ideas evolved further. A system called ‘network’ enabled smaller numbers with lesser firepower to be more effective in an ‘asymmetric conflict’ which is also now called ‘sub-conventional’ war Non-state actors like the ‘Hizbulllah’ in Lebanon used these principles involving a hierarchical mode of communications effectively against an ostensibly more powerful Israeli army.

In 1996 two researchers of the US Rand Corporation, John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt gloated a more refined concept in a document entitled ‘The Advert of Network’. The US has since pioneered an even more sophisticated version, which only modern well-equipped armies were capable of implementing. This was called ‘Network-centric operations’. Simply put, it involved four loops of sensors: First, identification of enemy assets, second, command and control of decision-making; third, target elimination, and fourth, logistics. Most modern armies now have ‘net-work command’, with latest communications and computers, with the Signals Branch at its care.

Now there are those who hold that even this ‘network-centrism’ is vulnerable. This is particularly go with the advent of ‘Artificial intelligence (AI) in warfare. The ‘Networks’ could be susceptible to disabling by such weapons. Today, as the new US space Force makes evident, battlefield domains are no longer confined to land, air, and sea. It now also includes space, deep-sea, cyber-space, and the solar electro-magnetic spectrum. Cyber-attacks can knock-out high value assets, including not only military command and control, but also critical civilian functions like banking, travel and telephony which would paralyze life-style, without a single shot being fired!

Today there is a race to build ever more ‘autonomous weapons’ such as smarter drones. Contemporary ‘intelligent machines’ can react at superhuman speeds, that are hard presses to match. There are those who argue future ‘Artificially intelligent’ weapons may be able to think ahead of the human brain, which could cause unique issues.

Actually, this is not much different from some 2500 years ago, the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu wrote : “speed is the essence of war”. Military analysts are already speaking of a coming “battlefield singularity” in which the pace of combat will eclipse the pace of human decision-making. Fastest reaction in the shortest possible time will be the key to overwhelming the adversary. It would be akin to what is known as “OODA’ in aerial dogfighting. The ‘Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act’. So, will machines in battlefield take over from the human protagonists? The answers, at least for now, is happily, no. Even if fully autonomous weapons could possible led humans to code battlefield control, the ultimate critical decisions about how this technology is used, will still rest in human hands.

The principal security threat that the world confronts now is not military, it is an unconventional one, a malady, COVID-19 like the ‘Smart Weapon’, it is a ‘smart virus’, It is unseen, moves swiftly, adapts fast and mutates easily. Any battle-strategy, classical of modern, would advocates to those equally susceptible, the need to combine budget and brains to combat this unforeseen and deadly foe. True, it is easier said than done. But the clear absence of any-logical alternative would be a powerful factor in achieving this end. Uniting against this common, enemy COVID-19, is our Hobson’s Choice, one that has no option.

Dr. Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury is Principal Research Fellow at ISAS, National University of Singapore, former Foreign Advisor and President of Cosmos Foundation Bangladesh.

This story was originally published by Dhaka Courier

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South Africa’s white rhinoceros recovered from near-extinction thanks to intense conservation efforts. Experts around the world have called for international and local cooperation for biological preservation to prevent future pandemic. Credit: Kanya D’Almeida/IPS

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, May 26 2020 (IPS)

A future repetition of the current COVID-19 pandemic is preventable with massive cooperation on international and local levels and by ensuring biological diversity preservation around the world, experts recently said.

How to prevent the current crisis in the future

• According to the World Health Organisation the coronavirus originated in bats, and original theories had circulated the virus spread to humans from a wet market in Wuhan, China.

In celebration of the International Day for Biological Diversity held on Friday, May 22, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) held a series of panels, bringing together experts to speak about this year’s theme “Our solutions are in nature”.

The current COVID-19  pandemic was the key theme in all the discussions and various experts from around the world shared their thoughts on topics such as the link between the current coronavirus crisis and biodiversity, methods and practices that can unite different communities and solutions that humans can carve out from our access to nature.

Many of the experts echoed the notion that better conservation can play a crucial role in preventing such a crisis in the future.

“Better conservation of large intact natural areas, including natural world heritage sites and urgent measures to address illegal wildlife trade are really considered important to limit the emergence of new diseases in the future,” Mechtild Rössler, director of the World Heritage Centre (WHC), said at the panel. 

“Focus should not only be gazetting protected areas but also on creating and [enabling] conditions [where] these areas can fulfil their biodiversity conservation objectives,” she added.

Paul Leadley, a researcher at the University of Paris-Saclay, pointed out that human health is “linked indissociably” with the condition or health of nature, and that about 70 percent of emerging diseases are a result of human contact with animals, including causes such as deforestation and trade and consumption of wild animals.

As such, he said, it’s crucial that we have preventative measures instead of carving out measures only in response to a crisis, as is happening now.

“We need to be more proactive and researchers and decision makers must understand that we need it to be upstream,” he said at the “What changes are necessary?” panel. “We need to identify diseases that could emerge before they spread, [and] we [need to] start to better understand the change from transmission from animals to man.”

And these issues have an economic impact as well.

Rössler noted that heritage sites in 90 percent of the countries where heritage properties are located have been partially or fully closed due to loss of entrance fees, thus contributing to the local economy in a negative way.

Closures of sites have caused major socioeconomic impact for communities living in and around these sites, Rössler said, including disruption of community life, aggravated poverty and serious issues related to the monitoring of conservation practices.

Rössler isn’t alone in this observation.

Roderic Mast, co-chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature SSC Marine Turtle Specialist Group, recently told IPS that they have been receiving reports of how a lack of monitoring and enforcers on the ground have caused increased illegal poaching in places such as Indonesia and French Guiana.

International and local cooperation

Leadley, who is also an Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) expert, further said it’s crucial for international and local cooperation in order to prevent such transmissions.

Rössler echoed a similar thought, and called for a “stronger commitment” between all parties.

“We need a stronger commitment from all governments to conserve and manage these areas, to exclude them from unsustainable development activities and we need increased solidarity and cooperation among nations to achieve that,” she said, adding that it will also help communities further contribute to actions surrounding climate change.

Tim Christophersen, coordinator of the Nature for Climate Branch at United Nations Environment, highlighted the youth’s activism on the matter.

“We see the emergence of a global restoration movement from youth networks to communities that want to rebuild their livelihoods all across the world so this movement is already emerging,” he said at the panel “What are the possible ways to regenerate ecosystems and restore our connections with biodiversity?”

Christophersen is also a focal point for the U.N. Decade on Ecosystem restoration 2021-2030, and said the next decade has a lot of opportunities for learning between local and international communities.

“What we can do with the U.N. decade is to link local activities to a global umbrella to give people at a local level more tools and hopefully more resources, more inspiration and a connectedness to a global movement where we can learn from each other,” he said.

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Rafiullah Wardak looks upon his newborn daughter Amina, recovering after being wounded by gunmen who stormed a maternity award in Kabul on May 19, 2020. Mr. Wardak's wife, Nazeya, was among at least 24 people killed in the attack, including women, nurses, and newborns. Credit: Courtesy of the Rafiullah Wardak family published @csmonitor

By Sheikha Hend Al Qassimi and Siddharth Chatterjee
NAIROBI, Kenya, May 26 2020 (IPS)

Consider this. 24 women, children and babies were murdered at a hospital in Kabul, the Afghan capital. Even by standards of a country as accustomed to bloodshed as Afghanistan, the May 12 attack on a Kabul maternity clinic was an event of unmitigated horror.

That anyone could target women at their most vulnerable and infants in their first hours of life defies belief and makes one despair of the world that welcomed little Amina. Born just two hours before the attack that killed her mother, Amina’s leg was shattered by a bullet.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said: “Any attack on innocents is unforgivable, but to attack infants and women in labour… is an act of sheer evil”.

The incident throws into relief the need to protect vulnerable populations even as the world struggles with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Health workers operating in difficult circumstances, such as the heroic Dr Najibullah Bina who led the team that conducted the first surgery on little Amina’s leg, continue to expose themselves and their families to the virus as well as to terror attacks.

Sheikha Hend Al-Qassemi

The pandemic has an alarming potential to reverse hard-won socioeconomic gains inspired the March 2020 appeal by UN Secretary-General António Guterres for an immediate global ceasefire, which asked all warring parties to silence their guns to facilitate the delivery of aid and open up space for diplomacy

Women generally are at specific risk and disadvantage in Afghanistan, largely for reasons of culture. Their lives, quite separately from their deaths, are constrained in many ways that affect their health, education, nutrition and well-being. One of the most dangerous places in the world for a woman to give birth, Afghanistan is a microcosm of vulnerability for women and children, with a maternal mortality rate of around 638 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births and around two physicians for every 10,000 people.

Afghanistan must figure out how to best support women and children when health efforts are under threat by both terrorists and a dangerous virus.

Around the globe, COVID-19 is worsening the situation for women already at risk, such as those in abusive relationships. Many millions are now required by emergency regulations to remain at home with their abusers, removed from the gaze of those who might otherwise see them and offer help.

And with one in every three women globally experiencing physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner in their lifetime, the issue is startlingly grave.

Siddharth Chatterjee

UNFPA, the UN’s Population Fund, says the COVID-19 lockdown is disproportionately affecting women and children. It is resulting in millions more cases of violence, child marriage, female genital mutilation and unintended pregnancy. “The new data shows the catastrophic impact that COVID-19 could soon have on women and girls globally,” said Dr. Natalia Kanem, UNFPA’s Executive Director.

Their well-being and economic resilience are threatened not only by the lockdown itself, but also by scaling down of health services and support such as hotlines, crisis centres, shelters, legal aid, protection, and counselling services.

The horror in Afghanistan further illustrates the urgency of the UN Secretary General’s clarion call for the peace-humanitarian action-development nexus to deal with conflicts, violent extremism, and other forms of instability. Now more than ever, there is a need for approaches that address social, economic, and political drivers of radicalisation.

There will be no one-size-fits-all model, and each country must continually assess which members of society are at the highest risk. If vulnerable groups are not properly identified and suitable responses developed, the consequences of this pandemic may be more devastating than we have dared to imagine.

Humanity has often been guilty of detachment regarding the plight of vulnerable populations. The COVID-19 threat is an opportunity to change course. While the virus does not discriminate, we must be careful lest our responses to it end up further entrenching current inequalities.

Images of two-hour-old Amina, swaddled in a blood-drenched blanket and with a bullet in her tiny bones must exponentially rouse our collective humanity and question the normalisation of indifference to the most vulnerable.

Sheikha Hend Al Qassimi, a multifaceted Emarati Princess, is an accomplished editor and writer, successful entrepreneur and architect and a committed philanthropist. She has a Masters in Marketing, Management & Communications from the Paris Sorbonne University. A Bachelor of Arts and Design with a double major (Architecture and Design Management) from the American University of Sharjah. Follow her on twitter- @LadyVelvet_HFQ

Siddharth Chatterjee is the United Nations Resident Coordinator to Kenya. He has served in various parts of the world with UNFPA, UNICEF, UNDP, UNOPS, UN Peacekeeping and the Red Cross Movement. A decorated Special Forces veteran, he is an alumnus of Princeton University. Follow him on twitter-@sidchat1

This OPED was originally published in Forbes Africa.

The post No Woman Should Ever Die Giving Life appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Zoltán Kálmán is Permanent Representative of Hungary to the Rome-based UN agencies (FAO, IFAD, WFP). He was President of the WFP Executive Board in 2018.

By Zoltán Kálmán
ROME, May 26 2020 (IPS)

Hunger and food insecurity continue to rise. The official 2019 statistics refer to 821 million people suffering from hunger all over the world. According the recently launched Global Report on Food Crises, there are further 135 million people facing crisis levels of hunger or worse. WFP estimates that due to the impacts of COVID19, additional 130 million people could be pushed to the brink of starvation by the end of 2020. This means a total increase of 265 million people. If there will be no appropriate and urgent actions, “we could be facing multiple famines of biblical proportions within a short few months”, said David Beasley, WFP Executive Director, addressing the UN Security Council on 21st April.

The most important drivers are conflicts, weather extremes and economic shocks, and all linked directly to extreme poverty and inequalities. This alarming situation is aggravated by and strongly interlinked with unsustainable practices in agriculture. Land use/cover change, environmental pollution, climate change are important drivers of biodiversity loss and soil degradation. Food losses and waste, diet-related health impacts are further undesired consequences of unsustainable food systems.

Transition to more sustainable food systems could be an adequate response to these challenges. Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals including the zero hunger target is still possible but it would require urgent and coordinated efforts. There is a growing consensus that transition to more sustainable food systems is indispensable and requires innovations.

Transition should start with the sustainability assessment of current food systems, including the economic dimension of sustainability. In this regard, we should bear in mind that economic viability is largely determined by policy incentives. Governments worldwide spend around USD 700 billion (OECD Economic Outlook 2019) every year on farm support, contributing to the profitability of the food systems and the farming methods applied. As a result, in many countries of the world, unsustainable, input intensive industrial, monoculture farming has become profitable. However, science can demonstrate that with a levelled playing field, sustainable approaches and practices would be economically viable and competitive alternatives. This becomes even more obvious if we apply the “true cost accounting” principle and internalise all positive and negative environmental and social externalities. To reverse the negative trends and to make food production more sustainable, appropriate and evidence-based policy incentives are required to promote and favour sustainable and innovative solutions.

In agriculture “innovation is an imperative” but it should not be considered as an objective itself. Innovation should rather serve as means to reach our shared goals: to eliminate poverty and hunger and respond to the challenges listed above. Therefore, we should ensure that innovations are available, accessible and affordable also in the most remote areas, and for the poorest of the poor. In the least developed countries priority should be given to those innovations that are focusing on the basic needs. In any way, innovations should be inclusive and follow the participatory approach. National priorities should be respected and development proposals should be elaborated together with local communities, to improve their livelihood, including through alternative farm- and non-farm employment opportunities (in food processing, services, etc.). Sustainable innovative approaches, such as agroecology, are inclusive, rely on traditional knowledge and apply the most advanced, objective science and most up-to-date innovations and technologies. The Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS) is an evidence of the feasibility and usefulness of combining traditional knowledge and innovation. Artificial intelligence (AI), digitalisation, precision agriculture, drones, satellites, smart phones and many other innovations could be supportive of agroecology and have a role in optimizing food chains, managing water resources, fighting pests and diseases, tackling desert locust upsurge, monitoring forests, increasing preparedness of farmers when disasters strike, etc. Regarding artificial intelligence, it is appreciated that FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu has recently taken an important step by signing the Rome Call for AI Ethics, emphasizing the need to “minimize the new technology’s risks while exploiting its potential benefits”.

Innovations, according to past and present prevailing practice, have been focusing on how to produce more, how to get higher yields, how to increase productivity, etc. These are all important, but we need to bear in mind that we already produce enough food for the whole world. More than one third of the food produced is lost or wasted, provoking unnecessary (and avoidable) environmental impacts of food production.

Departing from the past, innovations should focus on the real problems and offer solutions to current challenges of preserving biodiversity, restoring soil fertility, reduce pollution, modernise rural infrastructure and reduce the digital divide, preserve and create rural jobs, improve education, reduce food losses and waste, etc. All having essential role in achieving the basic objectives: eliminate poverty and hunger.

Innovations, including biotechnological methods, should be sustainable. Great majority of broadly accepted and applied biotechnological methods (fermentation, cheese making, etc.) are considered appropriate from sustainability point of view, while others (such as genetic modification – GM) are contentious. In addition to the human health concerns related to the GM crops, the undesired impacts of monoculture cropping on soils and on biodiversity and the seed- and other input supply dependency for farmers, particularly smallholder family farmers, justify following the precautionary principle. In this regard, independent and neutral scientific research should help all countries and all farmers to understand the potential risks and benefits of GM crops. There is no “one size fits all” solution, therefore, farmers should be in a position to take a free and informed decision and choose to produce them or not. While providing policy advice to countries, FAO, as a knowledge-based UN technical agency should continue to follow this approach and neither promote nor speak against producing GM crops. To maintain its credibility and independence, FAO should continue to generate and disseminate neutral scientific evidence on this complex and contentious issue.

Sustainable innovations, such as agroecology, could contribute to economic viability, provide appropriate solutions to many of the environmental challenges and are socially inclusive, addressing rural employment and livelihood. This is particularly relevant in Africa, where in some countries 60-80% of the population live in rural areas and their livelihood is based on agriculture.

It is important to note, however, that developed countries would also need to transform their food systems, making them more sustainable, applying sustainable innovations. In this regard, it is remarkable that the European Commission has proposed the innovative Farm to Fork Strategy for a fair, healthy and environmentally friendly food system and the EU Biodiversity Strategy to bring nature back into our lives, preserving and restoring ecosystems and biodiversity. The two strategies are at the heart of the European Green Deal and are “mutually reinforcing, bringing together nature, farmers, business and consumers for jointly working towards a competitively sustainable future“.

 

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Excerpt:

Zoltán Kálmán is Permanent Representative of Hungary to the Rome-based UN agencies (FAO, IFAD, WFP). He was President of the WFP Executive Board in 2018.

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Women farmers in rural Nepal. Credit: IFAD/Anwar Hossain

By Priti Shrestha and Navanita Sinha
KATHMANDU, Nepal, May 26 2020 (IPS)

In an interview*, Bina Pradhan, an independent researcher, focuses on gender, macroeconomics and emerging issues of inequality.

She is affiliated with the Federation of Business and Professional Women, Nepal (FBPWN), and has been working on the promotion and advancement of women in enterprise development and trade, post-earthquake community reconstruction, and rebuilding people’s lives and livelihoods with a focus on sustainability.

In this interview, Ms. Pradhan shares her views on the socio-economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically on women and excluded groups in Nepal.

Q: As a feminist economist, what is your assessment of the COVID pandemic in Nepal?

A: COVID-19 is as much of a human and economic crisis as it a health crisis and we are beginning to see its socio- economic impacts in Nepal.

With the announcement of the lockdown and other restrictive measures, we see that both the demand and supply side have been affected; and sectors such as hospitality and tourism severely impacted. We are likely to see a significant rise in unemployment and poverty. Households that depend on remittances will be hit the hardest.

In Nepal, over the years, the primary and secondary sectors have not been contributing much to the economy as the tertiary sector. However, with the ongoing crisis, this sector is going to plummet resulting in serious setbacks to the progress that we have made in poverty reduction, income, health, education and living standards in the last 20-30 years.

Q: Do you think that women especially those from the excluded groups will be disproportionately affected by this pandemic? What is the emerging evidence pointing to?

A: Women are often an after-thought in a humanitarian crisis. In Nepal, we do not yet have data on how the pandemic is affecting women health-wise.

Our experience from the past humanitarian crisis – the 2015 earthquake in particular showed that whether the crisis is natural or manmade, women will be impacted more because of prevalent gender roles, their subordinate position in society and the patriarchal structure of our society.

Bina Pradhan

Women act as shock-absorbers of the household – when there is a shortage of food, women reduce their own consumption, so that there is more food for other household members, especially their children. In such situations, women’s unpaid work burden also goes up substantially, as women strategize their time to compensate for whatever is lost in the households.

When they are in paid employment, women are likely to be the first to be evicted during an economic crisis. We also need to recognize that due to prevalent occupational segregation, more than 70 per cent of health workers, social sector workers or care- givers are women. Therefore, on all fronts, women are much more vulnerable and are likely to be disproportionately affected.

Therefore, this crisis, whether in terms of health or violence or just the ability of households to sustain or recover their livelihoods will be substantially borne by women.

Q: What are your views on the Government of Nepal’s response to COVID thus far? What are some of the challenges that the Government is likely to face in rolling out these relief measures in the current federal context?

A: The relief package is announced but we are yet to see how it is rolled. There must be proper food aid and how it rolled out is important. There should be an orientation on the process to be followed in distribution or there will be no seriousness.

A message has to go to the most marginalized group of people, and it would be good to see a larger increase in relief for that group of women. There should be the implementing mechanism and the government’s commitment to take it seriously., but the delivery of this package will be a challenge.

Q: From a feminist lens, what should be the core elements of the policy response?

A: It is important to recognize that households are not just consumers but also as producers. In our analysis, we need to bring in a sharper focus on women’s work especially their unpaid and domestic work which includes their vital work in care and subsistence.

For this, we need a much more inclusive structure of development – which is not based on the dichotomy of paid and unpaid care work, but instead on a recognition of women’s unpaid work, and its contribution to the national economy.

Q: Given the far-reaching impact of COVID – what are the long-term measures that the Government needs to adopt?

A: I think the ongoing crisis is an opportunity for the Government to act considering the short and long-term impacts of these actions. The top priorities could be:

• The households as economic unit of production and consumption will be hit hardest by the ongoing crisis. Women were managing the remittance sent to households which resulted in improvements in development indicators like health and education. In this crisis too, they will continue to shoulder the burden of paid and unpaid work to recuperate households’ economy. So, it is important to consider household level cash transfer, especially to women.
• We need to focus on addressing the problem of unemployment, which has contributed to increased migration. With the ongoing crisis and its impact on the world economy, the Government should focus on sectors such as infrastructure to generate jobs that can absorb returnee migrants. Emphasis should be on tapping the different capacities and skills of the returnee migrants. This could also mean giving a financial stimulus through investment capital to migrant laborers; to help them establish start-up ventures in Nepal.
• Given the significant numbers of women in MSME (micro, small and medium enterprises, there is need for to financial packages to address the specific challenges of women in this sector. Further there should be continued focus on skill development and upgradation (including technical and managerial skills and non-traditional skills) to help them move their businesses from the micro-scale to small scale.
• The Government should engage with feminist economists or economists and ensure models of development are inclusive (of households); and create spaces for diverse voices and perspectives to be reflected in the planning and budgeting process.

*This was originally published in UN Women’s Weekly News Update

 

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By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, May 26 2020 (IPS)

With well over five million Covid-19 infections worldwide, and deaths exceeding 340,000, the race for an effective vaccine has accelerated since the SARS-Cov-2 virus was first identified as the culprit.

Expecting to score politically from being ‘first’ to have a vaccine, US President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed promises to get 300 million doses to Americans by January, after the November polls, following several failed attempts to monopolize vaccines being developed by European companies.

Anis Chowdhury

More than 115 vaccine development efforts are ongoing around the world. Eight human trials are underway, including five in China, with the most promising one government financed. Meanwhile, affordable access is the primary concern for most of the world.

Fighting epidemics together
Sixty-five years ago, Jonas Salk insisted that the polio vaccine he had developed remain patent free. Asked who owned the patent, he replied, “The people I would say. There is no patent. You might as well ask, could you patent the sun?”

Making vaccines and life-saving drugs available freely or affordably has been crucial for containing infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, HIV-AIDS, polio and smallpox. Smallpox had a 30% mortality rate among those infected, and was responsible for 10% of the world’s blind.

In 1958, the Soviet Union urged the World Health Organization (WHO) to eradicate smallpox, offering funding for a plan. Surprising many, the US, already WHO’s major funder, agreed, resulting in the rivals’ most successful collaboration during the Cold War.

Smallpox was eradicated in 1977, following a WHO campaign seeking total eradication within a decade, launched in 1967, when there were over 2.5 million cases worldwide. However, the paltry budget approved by the WHA would not even have paid for the vaccines required.

The programme was launched in developing countries with vaccines donated by other countries including both Cold War rivals. Developing countries quickly developed vaccine producing and vaccination capabilities with generous technical assistance from abroad.

A people’s vaccine?
More than 140 world leaders and experts signed an open letter before the World Health Assembly (WHA) began on 18 May, calling on governments to commit to a ‘people’s vaccine’ against COVID-19, with all vaccines, treatments and tests patent-free, mass produced, fairly distributed and available to all, in every country, free of charge.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Leaders of Italy, France, Germany, Norway, the European Commission and Council urged that the vaccine be “produced by the world, for the whole world” as a “global public good of the 21st century”. President Xi promised that a China developed vaccine will be a “global public good”, with “accessibility and affordability in developing countries”, with President Macron pledging likewise.

The United Nations Secretary-General also emphasized that everybody must have access to the vaccine when available. The WHA unanimously acknowledged that vaccines, treatments and tests are global public goods, but was vague on implications.

Nevertheless, the US disassociated itself from over-riding patents in the interests of public health, objecting that it would send the “wrong message to innovators”. Both Johnson & Johnson and French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi have US government contracts to develop potential treatments, but the US Health and Human Services Secretary refuses to guarantee they will be affordable.

Earlier, the US did not join the 24 April world leaders’ pledge to increase cooperation against Covid-19, besides ignoring a 4 May pledge by international leaders and organizations to spend US$8 billion to make available a vaccine and treatments.

Contain China, not the pandemic
Unfortunately, three decades after the Cold War ended, the context is very different now, due to politics and profits. Trump’s ‘America first’ administration and some key allies seeking to check China fear that Beijing’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis has boosted its already fast rising standing.

By April, the US and its allies were blaming China for the pandemic due to the “Chinese virus”. Trump upped the ante on 27 April by threatening retaliatory measures against China for billions of dollars of damages worldwide, claiming that China could have stopped the epidemic at source, but did not.

Offering no evidence, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has also accused ‘China-affiliated’ hackers of trying to steal intellectual property (IP) for Covid-19 vaccines, treatments and testing. Meanwhile, some US states, politicians and companies have also filed lawsuits against China for damages.

All this has also undermined the WHO, now depicted as China’s puppet. POTUS’s tough letter to the Director-General demanded “substantive”, but unspecified “improvements” at the WHO within 30 days, threatening to permanently end already suspended US funding and to quit altogether.

‘America first’ vs global public interest
With elections less than half a year away, Trump’s recent rhetoric and policies appear preoccupied with boosting his re-election prospects, slipping due to his handling of the outbreak.

Unsurprisingly, international concerns over US control of an effective Covid-19 vaccine have grown. German weekly, Die Welt am Sonntag reported in March that POTUS had offered German biotech company, CureVac about US$1 billion for exclusive access to the vaccine it is developing.

Earlier this month, Sanofi hastily backed down after the French Prime Minister insisted that access for all was “non-negotiable” following the CEO’s 13 May announcement that the US government had “the right to the largest pre-order because it’s invested in taking the risk” despite French government support for Sanofi worth hundreds of millions of euros.

Profits vs public interest
Only a few giant companies can develop and produce a vaccine from start to finish, due to the expense and range of expertise required. Historically, most vaccines have been developed in the North, often reaching the South much later.

During the 2009 swine flu pandemic, some OECD governments contracted with pharmaceutical giants to monopolize the H1N1 swine flu vaccine. After developing a promising Zika vaccine in 2017, the US Army assigned production rights to Sanofi, but the deal fell through following profiteering charges by US watchdog organizations and Senator Bernie Sanders.

Despite enjoying the patent system’s extended monopolies, at the expense of public health, limited prospects for lucrative profits have generally discouraged investments to develop affordable medicines and vaccines for developing countries.

What can be done
Some pharmaceutical giants, e.g., Glaxo-Smith-Kline and Sanofi, claim they do not expect to profit from the Covid-19 vaccine. But such recent industry promises not to profiteer from making the vaccine globally available are hard to reconcile with the record that drug research and development has long been driven by the prospect of massive profits.

Such firms have been urged to make the Open Covid pledge to voluntarily relinquish their IP rights (IPRs), at least until the Covid-19 pandemic is over. But Oxfam fears this may not be enough. As Big Pharma has long enjoyed massive government subsidies, national authorities can enforce the pledge.

Governments can also use ‘compulsory licencing’, permitted by World Trade Organization rules, to enable companies that do not have the IPRs, to make, manufacture and sell generic versions of patented medicines only for national sale, as the Bush administration did with Tamiflu a decade and a half ago in the face of the Avian flu threat.

 

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At least 54 percent of sexually active adolescent women in Kenya who would like to postpone pregnancy have an unmet need for modern contraception. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Miriam Gathigah
NAIROBI, May 25 2020 (IPS)

It was only when 17-year-old Eva Muigai was in her final trimester that her family discovered she was pregnant. Muigai, a form three student who lives with her family in Gachie, Central Kenya, had spent her pregnancy wearing tight bodysuits and loose-fitting clothes that hid her growing baby bump.

“The plan was to have an abortion but I was too scared. My classmate had an abortion last year and she almost died, so I kept postponing the abortion.

“I gathered courage at five months and my cousin took me to a man who does abortions at the shopping centre. He refused to do the abortion because he preferred pregnancies that were not older than three months,” Muigai tells IPS.

Muigai says that one day, while seven months pregnant, she “just fainted and my mother tried to loosen my clothes so that I could get more air”.

“It then became clear that I was pregnant,” she recalls.

Last month, two weeks shy of her due date, Muigai was rushed to hospital with severe abdominal cramps. The attending doctor rushed Muigai into theatre for an emergency caesarian section.

Her newborn baby did not survive.

Last week, Muigai was re-admitted to hospital with further complications after first experiencing swelling in her stomach and then her entire body.

“Complications of pregnancy and child birth are a leading cause of preventable deaths and ill health among adolescent women, aged 15 to 19 years, in Kenya,” Angela Nguku, executive director of the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood, Kenya, tells IPS.

The alliance has been at the forefront of advocating for adolescent health and universal access to sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) and is a Deliver For Good partner organisation in Kenya.

• Deliver For Good is a “global campaign that applies a gender lens to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and promotes 12 critical investments in girls and women to power progress for all”. Powered by Women Deliver, a global advocacy organisation that champions gender equality and the health and rights of girls and women, more than 400 organisations have joined the Deliver for Good Campaign.

Tamara Windau-Melmer, a senior manager for Youth Engagement at Women Deliver, says that adolescent girls are often left behind because the policies, programmes, and investments meant to serve them are not designed in an inclusive, gender-responsive way.

“Adolescent girls must be meaningfully and authentically engaged in decision-making about their own lives, especially as it pertains to information about and access to contraception,” she tells IPS.

• According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), adolescent mothers face higher risks of eclampsia, uterine infection and systemic infections than women aged 20 to 24 years.
• Babies of adolescent mothers face higher risks of low birth weight, preterm delivery and severe neonatal conditions.

“Additionally, comprehensive sexuality education is critical as it offers the opportunity to reach adolescent girls with important information and skills to take control of their lives and pursue a brighter future for themselves, their families, and their communities,” Windau-Melmer says.

But the provision of comprehensive sex education in Kenya remains a hotly-contested issue by religious leaders, who hold great sway on such matters, and it is yet to be rolled out in line with National Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health policy.

Nguku says that despite a 2012 government commitment to provide affordable and accessible high quality reproductive health services to adolescents, this promise remains on paper in the form of the National Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health policy.

“The policy was updated in 2015 so that adolescents can have accurate, timely information and quality services but adolescent women still have many unmet needs,” she says.

• Adolescent women in Kenya account for an estimated one-fifth of the female population of over 26 million, and account for approximately 14 percent of all births, according to the most recent Kenya Demographic and Health Survey. 
• Statistics by the Guttmacher Institute, a leading global research organisation, show that 63 percent of pregnancies among adolescents in Kenya are unintended, as was the case with Muigai. 35 percent of these unintended pregnancies are aborted. 

But research by the Guttmacher Institute shows that at least 54 percent of sexually active adolescent women in this East African nation who would like to postpone pregnancy have an unmet need for modern contraception.

• The institute’s research further shows that satisfying the unmet need for modern contraceptives among adolescent women in Kenya would result in a 73 percent drop in unintended pregnancies. Currently, adolescent women account for an estimated 86 percent of all unintended pregnancies in the country. 
• Further, the Guttmacher Institute shows that a combination of modern contraceptives for all adolescents who need it, and adequate care for all pregnant adolescents and their newborns, would reduce adolescent maternal deaths by 76 percent. Currently maternal deaths stand at 450 per year.

Georgina Nyambura, the founder of Umoja Women Mobile Health Care, a registered, community-based organisation with over 6,000 members across the country, says that stigma and discrimination remain barriers to adolescent women seeking SRHR services. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

These grim statistics pale in comparison to the country’s impressive progress toward the increased uptake of modern contraceptives.

At the end of the 2012 Family Planning Summit in London, where governments and donors committed to ensure more women and girls could access modern family planning by 2020, Kenya committed to increasing the uptake of modern contraceptives by married women to 58 percent. 

By 2017, Kenya surpassed the set target, increasing the uptake of modern contraceptives for all women by a third. Statistics by the Ministry of Health show that contraceptive usage for all women now stands at 61 percent. But for adolescent women this usage stands at 40 percent.

As a result, nearly one in every five teenage girls has either had a live birth or is pregnant with their first child, according to the Ministry of Health.

“Our society is very religious and even where policies allow young girls to access all the sexual and reproductive health services all women are entitled to, the situation is very different on the ground,” says Georgina Nyambura, the founder of Umoja Women Mobile Health Care, a registered, community-based organisation with over 6,000 members across the country.

“It is a common saying that girls are more afraid of pregnancy and, therefore, evidence that they are having sex, than of HIV.”

• In Kenya, nearly half of new HIV infections occur among the country’s youth aged 15 to 24 years.

To address fears of stigma and discrimination towards adolescent women, Nyambura urges the government and actors in the health sector to re-evaluate the manner in which this cohort access services, including information on sexuality.

However, the current coronavirus pandemic is expected to reverse any gains that have already been made. Kenya has reported some 1,214 COVID-19 cases. The country has been in a nationwide lockdown since April, with a nighttime curfew still in place and schools and religious centres closed.

“A health pandemic such as COVID-19 will only widen the existing gap between adolescent women and all the SRHR services that they need. Human and financial resources have now been directed into fighting this health crisis.

“On the other hand, people themselves will only come to the hospital now if it is a matter of life and death. Pandemics affect our health service seeking behaviours and patterns,” Grace Kanini, a nurse at one of the country’s referral hospitals, tells IPS.

However, adolescent health challenges informed the government’s family planning commitments made in 2017 during the second Family Planning Summit in London.

Two of the three revised government commitments on family planning target adolescent women. 

• The first commitment is to scale up contraceptive uptake from 61 percent to 66 percent for all women by 2030.
• The second commitment is to increase contraceptive prevalence rate among adolescent women from 40 to 50 percent by 2020, and to 55 percent by 2025.
• And a further commitment to reduce teenage pregnancy among adolescent women from 18 to 12 percent by 2020, and to 10 percent by 2025.

For the first seven months of her pregnancy, while she was hiding it from her family, Muigai did not have a single antenatal care checkup. And she is not an anomaly.

According to the Ministry of Health, 51 percent of pregnant adolescents have fewer than the four essential antenatal care visits recommended by the WHO, and 33 percent do not give birth in a health facility. 

Nguku says that the government will need to invest more into family planning programmes that target this cohort.

Fully meeting contraception, maternal and newborn health care needs for adolescents across the country would cost an estimated 89 million dollars each year.

But not meeting these needs will cost an estimated 114 million dollars annually, of which 63 million dollars would go to care related to unintended pregnancies, says the Guttmacher Institute.

The scenario speaks true to Muigai’s situation.

An ‘A’ student with dreams of becoming a neurosurgeon, she now lays in a referral hospital receiving medical treatment. 

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The post Kenya’s Adolescent Women Left Behind As More Married Women Access Contraception appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Complications of pregnancy and child birth are a leading cause of preventable deaths and ill health among adolescent women in Kenya. But research shows a combination of modern contraceptives for all adolescents who need it, and adequate care for all pregnant adolescents and their newborns, would reduce adolescent maternal deaths by 76 percent. So what needs to be done to prevent this?

The post Kenya’s Adolescent Women Left Behind As More Married Women Access Contraception appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Students learn with tablets in a school in South Africa. Credit: AMO/Jackie Clausen

By External Source
May 25 2020 (IPS)

Many well meaning education benefactors and commentators in South Africa have expressed that in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic online self-guided learning could solve some of the current teaching problems and address the educational backlog. What learners need, the reasoning goes, is to get free internet access to educational support materials on offer online.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, self-guided online learning is doomed to fail. Research shows an exceptionally high drop-out rate – even in developed countries. Learners simply have no incentive to keep at their studies without peer pressure, a teacher at hand or a structured learning environment.

In South Africa in particular, with socio-economic disparities and related problems, the drop-out rate would be even higher. More so in key subjects like mathematics and physical science where prior knowledge, conceptual understanding and self-motivation to succeed are critical.

Self-guided online learning is doomed to fail. Research shows an exceptionally high drop-out rate – even in developed countries. Learners simply have no incentive to keep at their studies without peer pressure, a teacher at hand or a structured learning environment

The only answer, in the country’s unequal teaching environment, is a customised version of blended learning. Blended learning integrates computer-assisted online activities with traditional face-to-face teaching (chalk-and-talk).

When used by a trained teacher, this approach can add valuable new dimensions to the learning process. It can allow learners to work at their own pace and teachers to fill content gaps.

 

Blended learning in South Africa

In many developed countries, blended learning is a well-established practice. It has enabled these countries to adapt to the demands of the current pandemic. Digital remote learning and teaching is backed up by dependable infrastructure and skilled, motivated teachers.

By contrast, the differences between South African schools have been thrown into sharp relief. The binary system of a privileged minority of schools and the rest remains, despite the political changes more than 25 years ago.

More than 80% of public schools are under-resourced. They are ill-equipped to respond to the teaching and learning challenges of the 21st century – let alone the latest demands of the pandemic.

The current lockdown has suddenly compelled teachers to adopt predominantly online, blended learning teaching practices. But nearly 90% of all households in South Africa are still without access to the internet at home. Very few schools had adapted to blended learning before lockdown and few schools would be able to adopt it during the lockdown. Therefore the schools that had fewer resources and skills will fall even further behind.

This is especially disappointing since the current cohort of pupils (born after 2000) have long expressed their preference for a blended learning model. Even the recent recognition by the South African government that science, technology, engineering and mathematics are important in the Fourth Industrial Revolution has had little effect on the skills development of teachers, infrastructure or modernisation of resources in schools.

Therefore, in the South African context, mainstream blended learning is not the complete answer. We need to go beyond blended learning.

 

Customised blended learning model

Since 2002, the Govan Mbeki Mathematics Development Centre in Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth has wrestled with these challenges.

The bad news is that there’s no way to make the teaching and learning of maths and science easy. But we’ve developed a number of interventions that have lifted the twin burdens of poor training and lack of infrastructure from the shoulders of teachers. Skills development linked to the use of user-friendly and interactive digital resources has allowed teachers to focus on attaining a high quality of teaching with subsequent learning successes.

Over the past decade, the centre has experimented with various combinations of online and offline self-directed teaching methods. It has worked specifically on blended learning for mathematics and physical sciences in secondary schools.

The greatest success has been a blended learning system that uses a combination of online and offline interactive resources with pre-installed apps that are aligned with the South African school curriculum. These can be used as a guide for teaching, home-schooling, after-school study and tutoring. We call it techno-blended learning: a structured approach, using mostly offline apps in an integrated way, with the full participation of a trained or experienced adult mentor or guide.
One of the centre’s more recent interventions is a mini personal computer called the GammaTutor™. This’s an offline device pre-loaded with interactive learning material. These resources have been specifically designed for South African school conditions.

 

The GammaTutor: a tutor in your pocket.

 

The GammaTutor™ software package is primarily intended for teachers: when plugged into any data projector, a TV or digital screen, it doubles as a flexible maths and science teaching assistant in the classroom and a learner support resource for after school hours. It fits in the palm of a hand, requires no data and is navigated by the click of a mouse. Its small size makes the device easy to keep safe and to take where it’s needed.

 

What needs to be done

It’s well known that major educational challenges exist in schools as a result of the country’s multi-language society – particularly in the teaching and learning of mathematics. The GammaTutor™ application offers mathematics concept explanations in eight indigenous languages.

The device covers the full curriculum for high school maths and physical sciences, presented in video, PDF or animated PowerPoint format – along with glossaries, exam revision support, translations from English into indigenous languages and many additional teaching support materials. It can be used for interactive teaching online and remotely.

The response from teachers, learners and stakeholders to this approach of teaching and learning has been overwhelmingly positive. Where these interventions have been applied, in pilot schools in the Eastern Cape province, the results have been gratifying. Marks have improved significantly and successful learners have been able to progress to university.

The new urgency for remote teaching caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has created an opportunity for the country to adopt policies to accelerate blending learning practices among teachers and learners. The Govan Mbeki Mathematics Development Centre offers lessons learned through more than a decade of research.

Werner Olivier, Professor in Mathematics and Director: Govan Mbeki Mathematics Development Centre, Nelson Mandela University

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

The post Education Post-COVID-19: Customised Blended Learning is Urgently Needed appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The image shows the countries from which remittance flows to Bangladesh, a service that is severely affected by the coronavirus outbreak.

By Star Online Report
May 25 2020 (IPS-Partners)

The UK and Switzerland are calling for greater global collaboration to ensure access to digital remittance services to support people during the coronavirus outbreak.

Such remittance accounts for more than five percent of the GDP in at least sixty developing countries. The World Bank predicts remittances to low- and middle-income countries will fall by 20 percent or $110 billion in 2020.

In a joint press statement, the two European countries said it is important to make sure diaspora communities around the world can continue to send financial support to their families.

The call is important for Bangladesh. A country that heavily depends on migrant remittance, which was $18 billion last year and is likely to decline by 22 percent this year. Also, several lakh Bangladeshi migrants may return home after facing job losses, while those aspiring to find jobs abroad may also not see the dream come true any time soon.

The joint statement issued on Friday highlighted the urgent need for people to be able to continue accessing money transfer services, and for governments to make sure those funds reach those relying on this support.

Both UK and Switzerland are also urging countries to support greater access to digital remittance services and to declare remittances an essential financial service. They are also encouraging remittance service providers to reduce costs and fees for people making payments.

Money sent by individuals to family and friends living in low- and middle-income countries totaled $554bn in 2019 and is a vital lifeline in many developing countries, boosting economic development and lifting people out of poverty.

But coronavirus is already having a big impact, with a drop in the wages of migrant workers and coronavirus restrictions making it more difficult for people to access money transfer services.

A drop in remittance would have a severe impact on countries where many people are already facing destitution and even starvation as a result of the huge economic impact of the pandemic.

UK’s International Development Secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan said, “The coronavirus pandemic means we are all concerned about how our family and friends here and overseas are coping. That’s why we’re making it easier for diaspora communities in the UK and other countries to continue to transfer money to their relatives.”

“This will be lifesaving for some families in developing countries where coronavirus is making a lack of food and healthcare, and extreme poverty, even worse. We are helping to prevent fragile economies from facing potential collapse during the pandemic.”

Federal Councillor Ignazio Cassis, head of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs added.

“Remittances are important, but difficult because of COVID-19. So, let’s make sure those barriers are removed worldwide! New technologies can help us here.”

The joint call was backed by partners, including the World Bank, the UN Capital Development Fund, UN Development Programme and the International Organisation for Migration. A number of countries have already joined, including Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Jamaica, Mexico, Nigeria and Pakistan.

The UK government has made it clear that in the UK people can continue to visit remittance centres should they need to, while observing social distancing and staying safe. Digital money transfer services are also available.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

The post ‘Declare remittance as an essential financial service’ appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

UK and Switzerland say in a joint statement

The post ‘Declare remittance as an essential financial service’ appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Human development backslides, education at global levels ‘not seen since the 1980s’ Young girl in Uruguay uses her laptop to study at home. Credit: UNDP Uruguay/Pablo La Rosa

By Saida Ali
NAIROBI, Kenya, May 25 2020 (IPS)

When I was a little girl, my mother told us the story of a woman who escaped from a monster by cooking stones: when the monster fell asleep waiting for his dinner, the woman ran for her life.

I thought of this tale when I read last month about Peninah Bahati Kitsao, a Kenyan widow who boiled stones in the hope of lulling her eight children to sleep. In Peninah’s case, the monster was hunger and poverty.

Shocked and saddened, Kenyans took to social media to call for help for her, but just a week later, Peninah’s four-month-old baby died. Unlike my mother’s story, unfortunately, there will be no escape from the monster for Peninah and millions of people like her, unless the world agrees to take action – and quickly.

For widowed women such as Peninah, the convergence of gendered norms and social and economic inequalities has always determined what befalls them: in the past, during the coronavirus crisis, and doubtless after the pandemic ends.

The multiple inequalities that she and so many other marginalised people face are not new phenomena: COVID-19 has merely placed them in the spotlight. These are the inequalities that have been the targets of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for the past five years.

When governments around the world adopted the SDGs’ 17 global goals and 169 targets in September 2015, they pledged to end poverty and food insecurity, protect the planet and ensure that no one would be left behind in the enjoyment of peace and prosperity by 2030.

These 17 ambitious goals were to be at the heart of a revitalized global partnership built on the spirit of strengthened global solidarity, focused on the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable. But as the COVID-19 pandemic grips the planet, the threat of a collapsing global economy has further slowed the limited progress that has been made on achieving these goals – to the point where the 2030 vision now looks more like a mirage than a roadmap.

In Niger, 1.6 million vulnerable children are affected by humanitarian crises, including border closures and COVID-19 containment measures.

As the unprecedented COVID-19 crisis continues to wreak havoc across the world – with the most vulnerable suffering the most – the UN chief said on last week that the task of eradicating poverty and achieving the development goals “has never been more challenging, more urgent and more necessary”. Credit: UNICEF/Juan Haro

Even long before the pandemic, it was clear that these goals would be challenging to achieve. Before the finalisation and adoption of the 2030 Agenda, feminists and civil society organisations participating in the negotiations were raising red flags when they realised that the implementation of the global goals would be undermined by the lack of will on the part of governments around the world to financing its development agenda and committing to the systemic, structural change essentials to tackling the roots of extreme poverty, economic inequality and the rising concentration of wealth.

COVID-19 crisis aside, what global inequality has shown us is that international economic governance is skewed in favour of developed countries. While we know that the populations and economies of many developed countries have been hard hit by the pandemic, we must not forget that even in the time of COVID-19, the extraction of financial and non-financial resources from the global South to the global North carries on unabated.

As inequalities scholar Branko Milanovic observes in his book The Haves and the Have Nots, wealth has been unevenly spread throughout the world for many centuries, and where you are born largely determines your wealth and opportunities in life.

These determinants are key factors in the financial commitments that have been made to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda by the world’s governments. And even the commitments made before the pandemic were not sufficient: the shortfall in the funding needed to achieve SDGs in developing countries is now estimated to be $2.5 to $3 trillion per year.

This comes on top of the shortfall in financing for development more generally, with many wealthy nations failing to meet their obligation of 0.7% of their gross national income to official development assistance (ODA).

We do not yet know the full toll that COVID-19 will take on humanity – but the signs are deeply troubling. Research by the United Nations University (UNU-WIDER) warns of an increase in global poverty by as much as half a billion people, or 8% of the total human population.

This will not only set us back to the poverty levels of the early 1990s, but also means that our ability to achieve the SDGs is under immense threat. New analysis from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has also pointed to the consequences of the pandemic on women’s and girls’ health and exercise of rights.

The global projections shared by UNFPA are mind-blowing: for every three months that the COVID-19 continues, up to 2 million more women will go without access to modern contraceptives, there will be an additional 15 million cases of gender-based violence, and over the next decade, 2 million additional female genital mutilation cases and 13 million additional child marriages will occur – all of which could have been averted. We can already see the reversal of decades on gains in women’s rights.

COVID-19 is amplifying deep-seated gender inequalities, but we must remember that in pre-pandemic times we had barely shifted the needle on the status of millions of people in precarious, informal work.

Peninah Bahati Kitsao was a laundry lady before social distancing policies meant that she and millions more domestic workers lost their incomes, and those whose work was already undervalued and underpaid and for whom food insecurity was a daily reality were pushed even further away from the world envisioned by the 17 global goals.

In their worldwide pledge to “leave no one behind”, the global goals explicitly intended to address the rights and needs of people such as Peninah: the people least often heard and already furthest behind.

Achieving the SDGs always required explicit, concrete steps to end extreme poverty, curb inequalities, confront discrimination and fast-track progress for the hundreds of millions who need it most – and COVID-19 has not changed this requirement. Around the world, the calls for concerted action are increasing.

As part of its Economic Rescue Plan for All, Oxfam is urging both immediate debt cancellation for poor countries, and direct help via cash grants to people such as Peninah. Feminists led by AWID (the Association for Women’s Rights in Development) are rallying behind a campaign for bailouts for people such as Peninah, including domestic workers, sex workers, undocumented workers, underpaid and unpaid care workers, migrant workers, seasonal agricultural workers, and all those whose work is essential to our societies.

Feminist economists remind us that contradictions and crises are a constant feature of financialised capitalism and the system rides on the backs of the poor.

One of the most important lessons from Peninah Bahati Kitsao’s terrible, preventable anguish is that without addressing gender inequality, the SDGs’ promise of equitable social development will not be fulfilled.

Her story underscores the fact that women and girls comprise the majority of those living in poverty, experience persistent and multi-dimensional inequalities, and bear the brunt of the impact of the COVID-19 crisis.

Discrimination, place of residence, socio-economic status, governance and vulnerability – all factors identified by the United Nations Development Program – are why Peninah and her countless sisters around the world in precarious jobs, with no access to family planning or education, have always been left behind.

We will never build a better world until we all step up to do battle with the monster of hunger and inequality that took Peninah’s child.

 

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The post Are the SDGs in Reverse Gear? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Saida Ali is an intersectional feminist and international policy analyst based in Nairobi, Kenya, and an Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity. She tweets at @SaidaAaliyah

The post Are the SDGs in Reverse Gear? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By External Source
May 24 2020 (IPS-Partners)

In the context of COVID-19 crisis, what are the risks for climate action?

Climate change still continues and climate impacts are still very visible in the Pacific. A few weeks ago, we had major forest fires in Australia and in other countries. Now we’re battling tropical cyclone Harold which is a result of climate change. This week a new study was released, pointing out that the great barrier reef in Australia suffered one of its most severe bleaching in 5 years. Climate change is still happening, so climate actions have to be pursued. People might have different priorities these days, with funding being reoriented to other activities, but the action definitely needs to be continued to strengthen the resilience of our systems to global changes.

How is the crisis changing the way CCES works?

First, we had to revisit all of our projects and programs and develop contingency plans. For a lot of our activities, that means postponing, delaying, suspending some of the missions and travels. Workshops have to be reprogrammed. There’s a lot of anticipation and planning work going on. We are also anticipating: developing terms of reference, tender documents – In fact, getting ready for when activities pick up again. We are also keeping everybody informed, with the Pacific Territories Regional Project for Sustainable Ecosystem Management (PROTEGE) for example. We’re sending newsletters, reaching out all the partners via Skype and videoconferencing. We will have a regional steering committee next week by videoconference. Things are happening, a bit differently, but they’re happening: contingency planning, anticipating and still going on, and we are working hard to meet the needs of our members.

How do you manage to keep the work going?

Like all of the divisions and teams at SPC, we’ve been relying a lot more on IT solutions. I would like to acknowledge the work of the IT team at SPC. They’ve been outstanding in getting us ready for that. When the confinement started, we were all ready. [We’ve faced] minimum problems as far as I can tell in terms of reaching out and working together. We’re also paying a lot more attention to people, making sure that no one is left behind – These are the values of SPC and of the Pacific as well. We’re making sure everybody is ok, we try to reach out to everyone, both as a team, and as an organization.

How will global climate action look like in 2020?

It will look different for sure. The climate change year is punctuated with a lot of international events, conferences, and that helps advance the negotiations and the decision-making processes. All of these conferences have been postponed: the One Planet Summit, the Ocean Conference, the IUCN congress and now the COP26 postponed to 2021. The first thing that is happening is a lot of logistics, with the need for reorganizing and reprogramming all of these big events and conferences.

Secondly, a lot of things are still happening. We are currently submitting all of the contributions for the ocean and climate call for submission. A lot of things are happening online as well. And a major virtual ocean and climate conference is being organized for early June.

What will happen after the crisis ends?

With that crisis, there are a lot of things that are going to be changing as well at the international level. There’s a greater understanding now that things are global, and that climate change is a global issue, just as COVID-19. We have to address it together. We have this communality, this multilateralism that I hope will be stronger. We’re also looking now at a more systemic type of approach. Climate change, like COVID-19, has to be treated in a systemic way, looking at job uncertainties as well as financial risk and food security. Climate change will have to have a more systemic approach looking at all these issues.

My final point is the capacity to adapt, which is proper to climate change: we’re talking about climate change adaptation and mitigation. We have to make sure that we build the systems and the infrastructures to adapt to shocks and crisis. This is the case now with COVID-19, and it’s going to be the case tomorrow with climate change. We have to strengthen the resilience of our systems, including ecosystems, and of our infrastructure to build a more resilient system for the Pacific, and the rest of the world.

Division
Climate Change and Environmental Sustainability (CCES)

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Mexico's state-run oil giant Pemex faces a difficult outlook due to the fall in international oil prices and the crisis resulting from the coronavirus pandemic, which threatens its production and finances, in a situation analysed during the 29th La Jolla Energy Conference, organised online by the Institute of the Americas. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, May 22 2020 (IPS)

While it attempts to cushion the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, the Latin American and Caribbean region also faces concerns about the future of the energy transition and state-owned oil companies.

These questions were discussed at the 29th La Jolla Energy Conference, organised by the Institute of the Americas. It was held online May 18-22, rather than bringing together more than 50 speakers at the institute’s headquarters in the coastal district of San Diego, in the U.S. state of California, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Alfonso Blanco of Uruguay, executive secretary of the Latin American Energy Organisation (OLADE), said during a session on global trends and the regional energy industry that the changes seen during the pandemic will spread after the crisis and will be long-lasting.

“There will be structural transformations and we are convinced that most consumer behaviors will change after the pandemic. Demand will vary due to changes in the main areas of transportation and other energy areas. The effects on fossil fuel consumption will be strong and there will be a greater impact on renewable energies,” he said.

OLADE, a 27-member regional intergovernmental organisation for energy coordination, estimates that electricity demand has fallen by 29 percent in Bolivia compared to 2019, as a result of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which causes COVID-19, and by 26 percent in Argentina, 22 percent in Brazil and 11 percent in Chile."There will be structural transformations and we are convinced that most consumer behaviors will change after the pandemic. Demand will vary due to changes in the main areas of transportation and other energy areas. The effects on fossil fuel consumption will be strong and there will be a greater impact on renewable energies." -- Alfonso Blanco

Likewise, final energy demand plummeted 14 percent in Brazil compared to 2019, 11 percent in both the Andean and Southern Cone regions, nine percent in Mexico, seven percent in Central America and five percent in the Caribbean.

As countries went into lockdown to curb the spread of COVID-19, electricity consumption by businesses and factories declined, due to the suspension of activities.

Leonardo Sempertegui, legal advisor to the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), said the pandemic may be a wake-up call for countries lagging behind in the energy transition.

“This may be the new normal. The structure and governance of the energy architecture to cope with the next phase are changing dramatically. Energy poverty and the energy transition cannot be solved regardless of who controls a resource; these challenges cannot wait,” he said in the same session.

In Latin America, nations like Argentina, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Honduras and Uruguay have made progress in the energy transition since 2015, while Brazil has slid backwards and countries like Mexico are stuck in the same place, according to the World Economic Forum’s Energy Transition Index, released May 13.

As the region heads into the fourth month of the pandemic, countries are assessing their electricity markets, which have been shaken by the crisis.

Nations like Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Peru have resorted to long-term electricity auctions, which have generated low prices for renewables, while Mexico suspended such schemes in 2019.

In Argentina, as Andrés Chambouleyron, a non-resident fellow at the Institute of the Americas, explained, industrial consumption fell by 50 percent and electricity distributors have not been able to obtain sufficient revenues to cover fixed costs or electricity purchases.

The government has thus provided financing to Cammesa – the electricity wholesale market administration company – to pay the generators, since it is bound by contracts to buy the energy.

“There will be a permanent change in electricity consumption in Argentina. We have cheaper gas than before; the models say that you have to use more gas because it is cheaper than other sources. We won’t see much change in Argentina’s energy mix, and that could extend to all of Latin America,” said Chambouleyron, who warned of breach of and renegotiation of contracts for energy purchases.

Low oil prices threaten to slow down the energy transition in Latin America, although renewable energies already compete with the costs of fossil fuels, agreed experts at the 29th La Jolla Energy Conference, organised online by the Institute of the Americas. The photo shows solar panels on a house in Ajijic, in the western Mexican state of Jalisco. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

While renewables are already competing in price with conventional sources, low oil and gas prices undermine their expansion, a predicament that alternative energy sources have been facing in recent years.

In addition, the rise in the cost of international credit and the fluctuations of the dollar against local currencies may make generation more expensive.

In another session on the outlook for state-owned oil companies, Marta Jara, former president of Uruguay’s public oil company ANCAP, said the current crisis could accelerate the transition, but called it a “major challenge”.

“The temptation is to be opportunistic and forget the roadmap of the energy transition. We must invest in sustainable energy systems, decarbonise transport. It is important to secure funding and create jobs. I hope the crisis opens the door to be more innovative,” she said.

Viable or not?

The plunge in fossil fuel prices is damaging the finances of the region’s oil producing countries, such as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela, and state companies in the sector are facing problems with regard to planning and operations.

But it benefits net importers, like the countries of Central America or Chile, whose oil bills have shrunk, while for consumers in both oil producing and importing countries the cost of electricity could go down.

“The most competitive will be the countries with lower oil extraction costs. Some projects will not be economically viable. We will see greater economic problems than in 2019,” predicted Lisa Viscidi, director of the Energy, Climate Change and Extractive Industries Programme at the non-governmental Inter-American Dialogue, during a panel on the situation in several Caribbean nations.

The pandemic and a rise in Saudi production announced on Mar. 10 led to a collapse in oil prices and the consequent risk of bankruptcies in the industry. State-owned oil companies have fared better than others so far in the crisis.

In another session on the outlook for state-owned oil companies, John Padilla, managing director of the private consulting firm IPD Latin America, stated that “it will take time to get out of this situation, with effects for the region, and the need for great efficiency.

“Most nations have been exporters, efficiency will be the key. What has not been done is to cultivate domestic and regional markets, state enterprises are not going to play the same role as they always have,” he said.

Public companies such as Brazil’s Petrobras and Colombia’s Ecopetrol entered the crisis in a better position than Mexico’s Pemex, Venezuela’s PDVSA and Argentina’s YPF, according to experts.

“These are difficult times, even for the best prepared. We can hope that if the country and its company are in trouble, if governments need money, they can get more out of the companies,” said Francisco Monaldi, interim director of the Baker Institute for Public Policy’s Latin America Initiative at the private Rice University in the U.S. state of Texas.

In his view, “Mexico is in better fiscal conditions, it should not be a problem. But Pemex can drag Mexico down. If the government doesn’t change direction, it could become a serious problem,” he said as an example.

Although Pemex will increase its investment in 2020, the oil company reported losses of 20 billion dollars in the first quarter of this year. Due to the crisis, Petrobras limited its investment to 3.5 billion dollars and its daily production to 200,000 barrels, and postponed the sale of eight refineries.

For Lucas Aristizábal, a senior director in Fitch Ratings’ Latin American corporates group, some state-owned oil companies are viable and others are not.

“In 2021, the financial contribution of oil will be lower for governments. If they want the companies to play a key role, they will put more pressure on their financial structure. The current situation illustrates the economics of these corporations,” he said during the forum.

Pemex and YPF were already losing money per barrel in 2019, while Petrobras has more balanced production costs.

On the oil horizon, and in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, Guyana has become the rising star, although there is still political uncertainty, as the result of the Mar. 2 presidential elections is still unclear.

“It’s hard to predict what will happen. There is a risk of U.S. sanctions that would not affect investment in the sector, but would pose a political risk to the country,” said Thomas Singh, in the Department of Economics at the public University of Guyana.

The country expects to extract 600,000 barrels per day by 2024 and take in revenues of five billion dollars, with reserves exceeding five billion barrels.

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The post Crisis Hits Oil Industry and Energy Transition Alike appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Credit: Remi Yuan / Unsplash

By Ana María Hernández Salgar
BONN, May 22 2020 (IPS)

Restoring damaged ecosystems is vital to avoid the collapse of nature’s most valuable contributions to people, but International Day for Biological Diversity 2020 should also be a wake-up call about the importance of addressing our social, economic and systemic values, because it is these that are driving the destruction of nature.

We are part of nature, but our choices and behaviours have pushed the rest of the natural world to the brink of disaster. Hunger, disease, loss of livelihoods and rising levels of risk and insecurity are the direct result of our own actions. To shift to a more sustainable future, the best-available expert evidence tells us that we need transformative change to reset our fundamental relationship with our environment.

This will require us to tackle the nature and climate emergencies directly and simultaneously, uniting behind both climate and biodiversity science. We have already hit ‘snooze’ for too many decades on the warnings of experts from every discipline and every region – further delays are entirely at our own peril.

Transformative change means a fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors. It means addressing not just the direct and most visible threats to biodiversity – such as land-use change, overfishing, pollution, climate change and invasive alien species – but also tackling the values and behaviours that find expression through indirect drivers such as population trends, production and consumption patterns, weak governance and conflicts.

The way we lead our lives and do business has effectively been freeloading on the bounty that nature contributes to people, taking for granted the natural processes that revitalize our environment. Instead of living within our means, we’ve been using up more and more ‘natural capital’ – well beyond what nature can replenish – and it’s a debt that is now past due. This is one of the reasons that the World Economic Forum’s latest Global Risks Report recognized that the top five risks to business around the world are all environmental.

Ana María Hernández Salgar

With the publication last year of the IPBES Global Assessment Report, science has spoken: the damage we do to nature can no longer ever be justified as an externality. When we harm nature, we directly hurt ourselves as well. When we fail to act as responsible stewards of the environment, it is our future that we jeopardise.

The good news, however, is that many sustainable solutions to these problems can also be found in nature – and are, therefore, still within reach. The efforts that many countries, organizations, communities and institutions have already put into recovering biodiversity are beginning to bear fruit.

It is important for us to learn from these good examples, and from our mistakes, to chart a realistic and rigorous path, with concrete actions, but based on our different national and regional circumstances.

Investing in nature holds great promise. Nature-based solutions to climate change, for instance, such as restoring degraded lands, can provide more than a third of the mitigation needed by 2030 to keep climate warming well below 2°C.

Implementing both existing and new policy instruments through interventions that are integrative, informed, inclusive and adaptive will enable the global transformation that we need.

Coordinated action at local, national, regional, and international levels is needed to safeguard remaining habitats, undertake large-scale restoration of degraded habitats, and more broadly to place nature at the heart of decision-making and sustainable development.

Importantly, this will also entail a change in our understanding of what constitutes a good quality of life – decoupling the idea of a good and meaningful life from ever-increasing material consumption and forging individual, collective and organizational actions towards sustainability.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unavoidable delay in the planned global negotiations on the post-2020 framework for biodiversity, but 2020 is still a “Super Year for Nature”. The world has had the chance this year to see very directly the importance of changing values, approaches and behaviours, and to better understand the vital connection between people and nature.

After this crisis we will confront a ‘new normal’ – hopefully this will also be a watershed moment with values, approaches and behaviours – the indirect drivers of change in nature – at the forefront of policy and action.

The available evidence makes it clear that going back to ‘business as usual’ – ignoring our collective impacts on nature – would be a grave mistake.

The burning question on this day to commemorate the importance of nature is if and when we will change and seriously face the emergencies unfolding around us.

Enquiries: media@ipbes.net

Ana Maria Hernandez is the Chair of IPBES – the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, which, much like the IPCC does for climate change, provides objective scientific assessments about the state of knowledge regarding the planet’s biodiversity, ecosystems and the contributions they make to people, as well as options and actions to protect and sustainably use these vital natural assets.

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Hawaii is home to many of the world's rarest plants and animals, recognised globally as a 'biodiversity hotspot.' “We have seen a lot of positive actions being taken around the world, especially new green initiatives, in response to the pandemic,” Mrema of the Convention on Biological Diversity, said. Credit: Jon Letman/IPS

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, May 22 2020 (IPS)

This year’s International Day of Biological Diversity falls amid the coronavirus pandemic and the slow easing, in some nations, of a global lockdown. While the lockdown has forced most people to stay at home, there have been reports of more wildlife being spotted – even in once-busy city centres. 

This change is fitting for this year’s theme: “Our solutions are in nature.” Experts say that this is an opportunity for humans to see the footprint they are leaving behind on earth, and time to reflect on how to work towards a better future for the sustainability of the environment and for wildlife in the future. 

“We know that humanity stands at a crossroad with regard to the legacy we wish to leave to future generations,” Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, Acting Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, told IPS. “As noted by the recent IPBES [Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services ] Global Assessment report, the current global response has been insufficient, given that nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history, and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating, with grave impacts on people around the world. Transformative change is necessary in order to restore and protect nature.”

‘Pandemic of complacency’

“I’m hoping what this pandemic does for us is draws attention to the pandemic of complacency that we were in before and [how that] contributed to the higher carbon [footprint], to greater human footprint, [and] plastic pollution in the ocean,” Roderic Mast, Co-Chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature SSC Marine Turtle Specialist Group, told IPS. “Hopefully it’ll make people realise they were having an impact.”

Mast added that one issue that has come up during this lockdown is a rise in illegal poaching in places such as Indonesia and French Guiana. Although this information is yet to be verified, Mast said he has unofficial accounts from community members on the ground that a lack of enforcers on the job means there more illegal poaching is taking place. 

Meanwhile, Mrema of the Convention on Biological Diversity said conservation efforts have actually strengthened under the pandemic.

“The present COVID-19 crisis has provided us with a reset button – as well as confirming what we already know, that biodiversity is fundamental to human health – and has given new urgency to the need to protect it,” Mrema said. 

However, both experts echoed each others’ sentiments that now is not the time to become complacent seeing the changes the lockdowns have brought to wildlife. For example, just because more sea-turtles are seen out in the open does not mean the crisis has been resolved, Mast said. 

“This temporary reduction of stress is not sufficient and we need greater changes in the way we treat our environment,” Mrema said.

“The only thing wrong with the ocean is all the stuff that we humans put in it and all the stuff we humans take out,” Mast added. “So if we can limit what we put in the ocean in terms of pollution, boat traffic, and sounds, and if we can limit what we take out in terms of fisheries — that’s when we’re going to start seeing healthier oceans.”

According to the IUCN’s Red List, 31,030 species of the 116,177 that have been assessed are threatened with extinction. Here are glimpses of conservation efforts and endangered species around the world:

 

Biological Diversity by Inter Press Service

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Excerpt:

Today, May 22, marks the International Day of Biological Diversity. Experts say that conservation efforts have actually strengthened under the COVID-19 pandemic.

The post Biological Diversity is Fundamental to Human Health appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM / ROME, May 22 2020 (IPS)

It is easy to generalize about migration. Populist politicians often portray migrants as strangers and ”our” homeland as a stable entity, rooted in an old agricultural society. When they do so they tend to forget that most of us are in fact migrants who have left that traditional farming community far behind and if it was not we who did so, it was our ancestors.

Another form of generalization is to mirror the general in the personal, something that is done in novels and films. I believe that virtually every country on earth can present moving descriptions of people leaving the countryside for the city. Reading a novel or watching movie describing this process may help us to realize that behind every migrant, international as well as internal, there is a unique human destiny.

I came to think about this when I several years ago was working with The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), which at that time had its offices by Sveavägen in the centre of Stockholm. From my window I could look down on Malmskillnadsgatan, which was Stockholm´s most prominent prostitution street and a little further away I could see the twin towers by Kungsgatan. For me, who came from a small rural town, it was a powerful feeling to sit by my desk with a view of Stockholm’s metropolitan heart.

By the beginning of the 20th century the Brunkeberg ridge had been dug and blasted through to make way for a prestigous avenue which was going to be named Kungsgatan, The Royal Street. Derelict houses were demolished and the rubble cleared away while Stockholm was transformed into a metropolis.

Along the 1.5 kilometre long Kungsgatan, impressive buildings were erected and eventually dwarfed by the stately Royal Towers, joined with the Malmskillnadgatan through a bridge spanning across the wide parade street. The 60-metre-high towers were inaugurated in 1925 and were at that time Sweden’s tallest skyscrapers. They became a symbol of modern Stockholm, somewhat excessively advertised as an equal to Berlin, Paris, and New York.

Kungsgatan was lined with luxury department stores, fancy nightclubs and extravagant movie palaces. I mentioned that Malmskillnadsgatan was a prosititution street since I associated that street with Kungsgatan, a novel I read the same year as I ended up at Sida’s offices. It was written in 1935 by Ivar Lo-Johansson, member of what came to be known as the Proletarian Authors. In Lo-Johansson’s novel, Kungsgatan, with its big city pulse, glittering neon lights, cars and well-dressed revellers, becomes a bait attracting rural youth to the growing metropolis.

The peasant boy Adrian and day labourer Marta experience a brief and tumultuous love affair in one of Sweden’s many poor, rural villages, where life had been largely unchanged, generation after generation. Marta’s and Adrian’s delicate relationship is broken when Marta’s dreams urge her to the big city. She does not want to waste her life in the poverty of a dying countryside, subjected to the ever-present interest from people she is forced to share her humdrum existence with. Her dirt poor parents trudge along the same trampled paths, day after day, from cradle to tomb. No, Marta wants to get ahead with her life and spend it in accordance with her own wishes and goals. She wants to make money and hopefully help her parents and siblings to escape their bondage and misery. She wants to come back to her village as a ”successful” person, someone who has become wealthy, urbane and sophisticated.

Marta arrives in Stockholm and gets a job in a café, though her meager salary is not sufficient for her to acquire any of the alluring goods exposed in the storefronts of luxury boutiques. Nevertheless, Marta discovers that her good looks attract the city dwellers. Together with a friend she plans to establish a perfume shop, but lack of capital and the realization that her appearance can become an asset, make Marta join the ”joy girls”, i.e. the prostitutes who haunt the Kungsgatan. She is enabled to send a fair amount of money to her poor parents back home and thus increases their prestige in the eyes of the neighbours. However, Marta becomes increasingly bold and careless. The lurking catastrophe becomes a fact when Marta’s pious mother visits her elegant daughter. During a restaurant visit the truth dawns upon the mother, who in the midst of the dining guests breaks down in tears. Shame and despair befall an increasingly desperate Marta. In the past, she managed to choose her clients with some distinction, but she now loses control over her existence, suffers from a severe sexually transmitted disease and eventually succumbs to her misery and dies.

Adrian had arrived in Stockholm somewhat later than Marta. More reserved and thoughtful than his former fiancée he suffers from alienation and initially lacks the sense of belonging he had experienced in his home village. Neverthelss, Adrian also experience a sense of freedom and the thrill of challenging opportunities. He gets a job at a construction site where he is badly treated by bosses and fellow workers, but he successively adapts to the new living conditions. Despite being disillusioned, defenceless and marginalized Adrian realizes that he has become an adult and can actually stand on his own feet, without the support of a socially enclosed peasant community. He discovers socialism and consorts with bohemians and writers.

Adrian sometimes bumps into Marta, though these are difficult encounters. They live in different worlds and to cover up their uncut rural background both have changed their speech and behaviour. They have become helplessly stuck in their respective roles. Despite their ambivalence Marta and Adrian try to restore some of their lost love, through Adrian becomes infected by Marta’s dangerous STD. Both are hospitalized and their respective convalescence becomes long and painful. Adrian escapes this purgatory, strengthened by his experiences: ”All what I perceive is not without meaning, on the contrary, it is the only capital of a poor man like me.” Both Adrian and Marta get lost, though Adrian finds a meaning with his existence, while Marta becomes a bitter loser who cannot go on living.

Adrian’s pursuit of self-insight, his observations and disappointments are central to the novel, while Marta is gradually transformed into a secondary protagonist. It was Ivar Lo-Johansson´s intention to present a woman’s voice against the backdrop of Sweden´s transformation from a mainly rural society into a modern welfare state. Even if Lo-Johansson had experienced what he wrote about, his story is lost in a common template, in particular through his depiction of the plight of Marta. Most of the famous male members of the Swedish Proletarian ”school” failed to identify with the problems of poor women and only a few female Proletarian women authors gained access to a wide readership.

Almost every country may have authors like Ivar Lo-Johansson, describing the fatal allure of growing cities and the stagnant life in poor, rural communities. We have been confronted with hundreds of films and TV series about innocent rural girls lured into prostitution – like the Canadian-British hard-boiled and disconsolate film Eastern Promises from 2007 and equivalent films made in development countries, like the Mexican Las Poquianchis and Lo mejor de Teresa, both from 1976. Proletarian authors from all over the world have also described a development like the one experienced by Adrian, often influenced by internal migration that at this very moment is taking place in countries like China, India or Brazil.

Two examples, among many others, of the importance migration from rural to urbanized areas has had on a country’s culture are The U.S. Great Migration and the Italian Push to the North. Between 1916 and 1970, six million African-Americans migrated out of the rural Southern states to urbanized areas of the North and West. The exodus was primarily caused by poor economic conditions, as well as racial segregation and discrimination. Prior to 1910, more than 90 percent of the African-American population lived in the South, by the end of The Great Migration, less than 50 percent of them remained in the South, while more than 80 percent of African-Americans nationwide lived in cities. Like the Swedish migratory movement mentioned above, The Great Migration resulted in increased cultural activities, particularly within Afro-American communities. In the field of literature it gave rise to the so-called Harlem Renaissance and the American music scene was radically changed by the influx of Afro-American musicians from the South, who brought with them blues and jazz.

Italy experienced a similar movement from south to north when the Economic Boom of northern Italy attracted large numbers of southerners to the so-called Industrial Triangle between Turin, Milan and Genoa. During a great part of the 20th century, southern Italy suffered from a high rate of poverty, mainly due to the poor fertility of agricultural areas, which due to the fragmentation of land properties no longer could meet the needs of farming families, who additionally often suffered from insecurity caused by organized crime. Millions of Italians were pushed to emigrate both abroad, and to the northern part of Italy. Internal migration reached its peak between 1958 and 1963, when one million three hundred thousand southerners moved north.

Migration from southern Italy to the north still continues, though to a lesser degree than before. The last peak was reached between 1968 and 1970. Only in 1969, 60,000 migrants from the south arrived in Turin. Like in the U.S. it has in Italy been common to accentuate a cultural divide between ”north” and ”south”, a notion internal migration has diminished by fostering cultural exchange in both directions, thus contributing to unifying the nation and invigorating the arts.

Migration is an ongoing process that will never cease, we are all shaped by it, something that is mirrored by individual experiences described in tales told all over the world. Culture is based on shared experiences and openness, meaning that it prospers if human mobility is embraced instead of being considered as a threat.

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.

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Workers at a ready-made garment factory wash hands having learned about importance of handwashing through hygiene behaviour training. Narayanganj, Bangladesh, 2020. Credit: WaterAid/Drik/Parvez Ahmad

By Ruth Romer
LONDON, May 22 2020 (IPS)

As COVID-19 lockdown restrictions across the globe start to be relaxed, the collective conversation has shifted towards plans for a ‘new normal.’

With the IMF predicting a three percent dive to global GDP in 2020, the biggest economic downturn in almost a century, global corporations are considering what this means for them, and how they can safely re-establish their suspended operations.

Regular handwashing with soap and physical distancing are vital to prevent the spread of infection and should form the foundation of any plan to resume work.

Yet in the world’s poorest countries, which are home to millions of workers employed in apparel and agricultural supply chains, implementing these measures will be a huge challenge.

Unavoidable physical proximity coupled with a lack of soap and water for workers to wash their hands – and even a lack of knowledge about when they should be doing so – mean that the threat posed to business by the pandemic is far from over.

Many of these countries have fragile economies, which make implementing COVID-19 resilient water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) solutions even more challenging.

The ILO has called for employment policies to predominantly focus on important employment and income protection mechanisms in an attempt to prevent vulnerability to poverty.

An improvement to labour standards must also include progressive and equally prioritised action with regards to the health and hygiene of workers. If access to clean water and good hygiene facilities are not considered, not only will millions of lives be at risk, but businesses will face significant challenges in re-establishing operations.

Global supply chains will only survive if businesses take action when it comes to hygiene – the health of tea pickers, farmers, artisans, and textile producers and other supply chain workers in the global south, underpin the success of businesses in a post COVID-19 world.

With one in ten people globally lacking clean water at home and one in four having no decent toilets, it’s vital not only to consider not only the factory and field, but beyond the operational fence line, to the communities where workers live, to reinforce workplace resilience.

Workers at a ready-made garment factory wash hands having learned about importance of handwashing through hygiene behaviour training. Narayanganj, Bangladesh, 2020. Credit: WaterAid/Drik/Parvez Ahmad

WaterAid has longstanding relationships with a number of apparel factories in Bangladesh, where we have worked with partners to provide water, sanitation and hygiene access to workers, and on intensive hygiene behaviour change campaigns for both those employed in the factories, and the surrounding communities.

Since the pandemic outbreak, we installed additional handwashing facilities and delivered a COVID-19 specific hygiene campaign reaching more than 20,000 workers within one week. We continue to work closely with factory management to enable their safe return to operation post lockdown.

Action on water, sanitation and hygiene has the potential to safeguard companies against operational, reputational, regulatory and financial risk in the short-term response to COVID-19 and build the foundation for vital long-term resilience against future shocks.

For companies with global supply chains who have experienced immense logistical and financial disruption, the intersection between workforce health and economic prosperity has been made abundantly clear.

Globally, it is estimated that every dollar invested in clean water, good hygiene and decent toilets returns $5.50 in increased productivity.

As a partner of global governments in their fight against COVID-19, WaterAid has a global footprint and four decades of expertise within the sector and is offering to develop bespoke guidance, tailored to businesses who approach them.

WaterAid has launched its guidance Prioritising hygiene for workforce health and business resilience and is inviting companies to work with them to bring sustainable changes within their supply chains that will improve resilience and productivity.

To discuss water, sanitation and hygiene management strategy and bespoke materials tailored to your company, contact corporate@wateraid.org.

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Excerpt:

Ruth Romer is Senior Private Sector Advisor, WaterAid

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