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Tag: Development & Aid

  • Innovative Approach to Sustainable Development Policy and Investment for Public, Private Sectors

    Innovative Approach to Sustainable Development Policy and Investment for Public, Private Sectors

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    With one-fifth of farming households dependent on palm oil production, policy considerations that look after the environment, lives, and livelihoods were essential.
    • by Joyce Chimbi (nairobi)
    • Inter Press Service

    NAIROBI, Jun 20 (IPS) – Oil palm has brought significant benefits and prosperity to Liberia. The export of crude palm oil is a major source of foreign exchange earnings for the government. The palm oil crop covers more than 1 million hectares, hundreds of thousands are employed in the palm oil sector, and at least 21 percent of the farming households produce palm oil.

    Opportunities for the country’s palm oil and other palm products in the international markets are considerable—creating a temptation to prioritize development over environmental concerns.

    In 2020, policymakers in the Inter-Ministerial Commission on Palm Oil Concessions in Liberia faced a significant challenge: developing a policy path that pursued quick short-term profits and faced long-term negative consequences to the environment, lives, and livelihoods—or a beneficial approach for people and planet.

    Forests Belong to Humanity

    “When decisions are too short-term, narrow, and short-sighted, we do not take into account the long-term impact of our action. We need to recognize that some goods are common goods or public goods, such as forests. They do not belong to one person or one company; they belong to humanity as a whole,” says Francisco Alpizar, Wageningen University and Research.

    This was the case for Liberia’s palm oil sector, whose key stakeholders include government, the private sector, NGOs, business associations, smallholder associations, and households that directly or indirectly rely on it as their lifeline.

    “From an economic perspective, the prices of goods and commodities should reflect the true cost to societies, not just the immediate cost of producing them but also the environmental impact the production of those goods and services carries for societies,” Alpizar says.

    The Liberian National Oil Palm Strategy and Action Plan (NOPSAP) was facilitated by the Global Environment Facility-funded Good Growth Partnership. Here policymakers in Liberia decided to use the Targeted Analysis Scenario (TSA) to design a mutually beneficial policy path for communities, sectoral government agencies, and palm oil concessionaires.
    The Liberian National Oil Palm Strategy and Action Plan (NOPSAP) was facilitated by the Global Environment Facility-funded Good Growth Partnership. Here policymakers in Liberia decided to use the Targeted Analysis Scenario (TSA) to design a mutually beneficial policy path for communities, sectoral government agencies, and palm oil concessionaires.

    Targeted Analysis Scenario Benefits All

    As they developed the National Oil Palm Strategy and Action Plan (NOPSAP) facilitated by the Global Environment Facility-funded Good Growth Partnership, policymakers in Liberia decided to use the Targeted Analysis Scenario (TSA) to design a mutually beneficial policy path for communities, sectoral government agencies, and palm oil concessionaires.

    UNDP developed the TSA to respond to the growing demand from decision-makers and stakeholders for more policy-relevant sustainable development analysis to support national SDG implementation facing diverse policy, management, and investment choices.

    As an innovative analytical approach, the TSA captures and presents the value of ecosystem services within decision-making to help make the business case for sustainable policy and investment choices. By doing so, the TSA allows policymakers to calculate these costs and make decisions that harmonize with the environment.

    In Liberia, policymakers needed economic data that compared the outcomes of continuing with conventional palm production with the results of taking a different route to make sound, informed decisions leading to sustainable palm concessions.

    At the time, the situation in the West African country was characterized by contradictory forest management and concessions policies. The Commission had to balance the eagerness of communities and smallholder producers to engage in palm oil concessions because they brought employment and socioeconomic benefits and concerns in the global market about the environmental risks of palm oil production.

    UNDP’s TSA provided an answer, enabling the Commission in Liberia to include all the relevant social, environmental, and economic impacts. TSA offered a systematic approach covering all aspects of the sector.

    The TSA improves the decision-making process by capturing and presenting the value of ecosystem services and sectoral production to make policy decision-making more holistic. The tool applies to any sector, scenario, context, or country.

    “TSA can, for instance, be applied for decision-making at the national level, when taking a national perspective, regional, company or even household level. For each and every one of those decisions, we need a careful analysis of what the current situation looks like and how it will look in the future and, what would be the alternative situation,” Alpizar explains.

    Business-as-Usual Versus Sustainable Ecosystem Management

    One is considered a business-as-usual scenario, and the other a sustainable ecosystem management scenario.

    “When you compare one against the other, with a long-term perspective and focusing on the relevant indicators for the decision makers or the things that the decision maker cares for, then you can provide a better picture of the decision that is in front of us, and that is what targeted scenario analysis is.”

    He says targeted scenario construction of business-as-usual versus sustainable ecosystem management outcomes is presented to the decision maker. When this is done, in principle, the decision maker will have a powerful decision-making tool to make informed decisions based on evidence.

    “If we put ourselves in the feet of a decision maker, that is, for example, deciding whether to implement a series of policies to make the agricultural sector more sustainable, the business-as-usual scenario means you continue with the current practices. A sustainable ecosystem management scenario would be one in which you change a series of practices or actions, and with that, in principle, you achieve a different outcome,” Alpizar explains.

    He gives an example of producing pineapples under a business-as-usual scenario with an impact on surrounding lands, agrochemicals, deforestation, land use change, competing diseases, or diseases that spread to the surrounding area, which might be viable but over a short period of time. The alternative scenario is to create and implement a more long-term, sustainable approach.

    “Through UNDP’s application of TSA methodology, you can carefully construct the two scenarios by first asking this question: As the decision maker, what do you really care about? Is it employment, taxes, production, or reducing social unrest? Based on the answer, the analyst can construct a targeted scenario,” Alpizar says.

    Returning to Liberia, the TSA was able to show that Smallholder Production (SPO) scenario and environmental sustainability were in the best interests of the concessionaire and the Liberian economy – with substantially greater benefits compared with the business-as-usual scenario (USD 333 million versus USD 188 million over 20 years).

    When these results were discussed with the multistakeholder National Oil Palm Platform of Liberia, it was accepted and paved the way toward sustainable palm oil development in Liberia.

    Across the world, TSAs have been conducted to assess the economic value of ecosystem services for various strategic economic sectors such as hydropower, agriculture, and tourism under the business-as-usual and sustainable ecosystem management scenarios to create a sustainable development path where humanity is in harmony with the environment.

    IPS UN Bureau Report


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    © Inter Press Service (2023) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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  • Making the Impossible Possible, Chronicles of an Ambassadors Lifelong Frontline Battle to End Leprosy

    Making the Impossible Possible, Chronicles of an Ambassadors Lifelong Frontline Battle to End Leprosy

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    Yohei Sasakawa chronicles his campaign to rid the world of leprosy in his biography Making the Impossible Possible. Credit: Hurst Publishers
    • by Joyce Chimbi (nairobi)
    • Inter Press Service

    NAIROBI, Jun 19 (IPS) – In 1974, Yohei Sasakawa accompanied his father to a leprosy hospital he had funded. He saw leprosy patients inside the hospital still and expressionless. The smell of leprosy filled the air, the smell of pus from open sores.

    His father sat with the patients, touched their hands and faces, and encouraged them to be hopeful. Treatment was within reach, and they would live. At that moment, Sasakawa wondered about the life that awaited these patients outside the hospital – a difficult life of discrimination and alienation, with many ostracized from society. He silently vowed to dedicate his life to ending leprosy.

    Yohei Sasakawa chronicles his campaign to rid the world of leprosy in his biography Making the Impossible Possible. Credit: Hurst Publishers
    Yohei Sasakawa chronicles his campaign to rid the world of leprosy in his biography Making the Impossible Possible. Credit: Hurst Publishers

    In his newly published book, Making the Impossible Possible, he chronicles face-to-face encounters with an ancient disease shrouded in many myths and misconceptions. His travels to leprosy-endemic countries as WHO’s Goodwill Ambassador for Leprosy Elimination started in 2001 and has involved over 200 trips to nearly seventy countries.

    “Nearly all of my destinations have been remote locations where people live in quite desperate conditions. It has always been my belief that the place where the problems are happening is also precisely where the solutions will be found,” he says.

    “I am also a firm proponent of the Neo-Confucian idea that knowledge is inseparable from practice. I want to be a man of deeds. I became involved in my international humanitarian work out of a passionate desire to be involved on the front lines until my last breath, and I am the first to admit that my work is done, in that sense, for my own personal satisfaction.”

    As he retraces a remarkable journey on the frontlines of fighting the leprosy scourge, the Bergen International Conference on Hansen’s Disease by the Sasakawa Leprosy (Hansen’s Disease) Initiative and the University of Bergen in Norway will kick off on June 21, 2023, and end the following day.

    The conference is a nod to February 28, 1873, when Norwegian doctor Gerhard Armauer Hansen discovered Mycobacterium leprae, the causative agent of leprosy. To commemorate the historic anniversary, the conference seeks to highlight that 150 years later, leprosy is not a disease of the past.

    Leprosy still exists as a neglected tropical disease in more than 120 countries worldwide, with at least 200,000 new cases reported annually. Nevertheless, progress over the last half-century has brought the world closer to the goal of a world without leprosy.

    The Bergen conference is an opportunity to draw on the knowledge, experience, and wisdom of many people at the place where Mycobacterium leprae was first observed, and to build momentum to complete the last mile in leprosy, the hardest part of the journey.

    Sasakawa’s book is a treasure trove of challenges, triumphs, best practices, lessons learned, and insights into what it will take to finish the last mile in the decades-long marathon to eliminate the ancient disease.

    The book is the most detailed account of Sasakawa’s quest to work for a world without leprosy and the discrimination it causes.

    It is an account of his travels to remote communities around the world to hear directly from those affected by the disease, as well as his meetings with policy-makers, government leaders, and heads of state to advocate for a renewed commitment to the fight against leprosy, including measures to protect the human rights of those it affects.

    “For as long as I can remember, I have made a point of repeating three messages in every meeting, conference, or press conference that I attend. The first message is that leprosy is curable. The second is that free treatment is available everywhere around the world. And the third message is that discrimination against people affected by leprosy has no place,” Sasakawa affirms.

    “These messages are very easy to understand. But the third one, the message that discrimination has no place, is extremely difficult to put into practice. The habits of a lifetime and ingrained unconscious attitudes are not easily dispelled.”

    Similarly, these messages will reverberate throughout the two-day conference to spread the message that today, leprosy is treatable with multidrug therapy (MDT), but if treatment is delayed, leprosy can cause progressive impairment and result in lifelong disability.

    Delayed treatment and consequent disability have largely contributed to the persistent stigma surrounding the disease and the discrimination that persons affected by leprosy and their families continue to face. Discrimination is also a barrier to new case detection, discouraging people from seeking treatment.

    Through sustained concerted efforts, many countries and international organizations, led by the WHO, are now aiming for zero leprosy—zero disease, zero disability, and zero discrimination.

    Achieving this goal will require stakeholders to cooperate closely. To this end, the conference will bring together key leprosy stakeholders from around the world for two days of discussions focused on three pillars: medical, social, and historical.

    Notable dignitaries scheduled to deliver messages at the event include Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General, WHO Volker Türk, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and Ingvild Kjerkol, Minister of Health and Care Services, Norway.

    Keynote speakers include Professor Paul Fine of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Dr Alice Cruz, the UN Special Rapporteur on the elimination of discrimination against persons affected by leprosy and their family members.

    The conference is part of the “Don’t Forget Leprosy/Don’t Forget Hansen’s Disease” campaign launched by the Sasakawa Leprosy (Hansen’s Disease) Initiative in 2021. It follows the 2022 Global Forum of People’s Organizations on Hansen’s Disease held in Hyderabad, India, the 2023 International Symposium at the Vatican on Hansen’s Disease incorporating the Global Appeal 2023 to End Stigma and Discrimination against Persons Affected by Leprosy, and 150-anniversary events.

    IPS UN Bureau Report


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    © Inter Press Service (2023) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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  • Healthy Homes – A Right of Rural Families in Peru

    Healthy Homes – A Right of Rural Families in Peru

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    Martina Santa Cruz, a peasant farmer from the village of Sacllo in the southern Peruvian Andes highlands department of Cuzco, is pleased with her remodeled kitchen where a skylight was created to let in sunlight and a chimney has been installed to extract smoke from the stove where she cooks most of the family meals. She is disappointed because a wall was stained black when she recently left something on the fire for too long. But her husband is about to paint it, because they like to keep everything clean and tidy. CREDIT: Janet Nina/IPS
    • by Mariela Jara (cuzco, peru)
    • Inter Press Service

    CUZCO, Peru, Jun 15 (IPS) – Adopting a “healthy housing” approach is improving the living conditions of rural Peruvian women like Martina Santa Cruz, a 34-year-old farmer who lives with her husband and two children in the village of Sacllo, 2,959 meters above sea level in the Andes highlands municipality of Calca.

    “I used to have a wood-burning stove without a chimney, and the smoke filled the house. We coughed a lot and our eyes stung and it bothered us a lot,” she told IPS during a long telephone conversation from her village.

    Santa Cruz, her husband, their 13-year-old daughter and their four-year-old son are among the 100 families who live in Sacllo, part of the Calca district and province, one of the 13 provinces that make up the southern Andes department of Cuzco, whose capital of the same name is known worldwide for the cultural and archaeological heritage of the Inca empire.

    With an estimated population of more than 1,380,000 inhabitants, according to 2022 data from the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics, four percent of the national population of 33 million, Cuzco faces numerous challenges to fostering human development, especially in rural areas where social inequality is at its height.

    According to official figures from May, 41 percent of Peru’s rural population currently lives in poverty, and in Calca, where 55 percent of families are rural, there are high rates of childhood malnutrition and anemia.

    One way Santa Cruz found to improve her family’s health and carve out new opportunities to boost their income was to get involved in the project for healthy housing.

    In 2019, she took part in a contest organized by the municipality of Calca, which enabled her to start remodeling their house, making it healthier and more comfortable.

    Her husband, Manuel Figueroa, is a civil construction worker in the city of Cuzco, about 50 kilometers away by road. She stays home all day in charge of the household, their children, the chores, and productive activities such as tending the crops in their garden and feeding the animals.

    “When I only cooked on the woodstove, I also had to get an arroba (11.5 kg) of firewood a day to be able to keep the fire lit all day long to cook the corn and beans, and the meals in general,” she said.

    In addition to cooking food, the stove provided them with heat, especially in the wintertime when temperatures usually drop to below zero and have become colder due to climate change.

    In the small village of Sacllo, in the Peruvian municipality of Calca, Martina Santa Cruz poses with her two children, proud of having a healthy home that has improved the family's living conditions. The house has been plastered with clay and has two stoves and a wooden balcony on the second floor where the bedrooms are located. CREDIT: Janet Nina/IPS
    In the small village of Sacllo, in the Peruvian municipality of Calca, Martina Santa Cruz (L) poses with her two children, proud of having a healthy home that has improved the family’s living conditions. The house has been plastered with clay and has two stoves and a wooden balcony on the second floor where the bedrooms are located. CREDIT: Janet Nina/IPS

    Healthy rural homes and communities

    Jhabel Guzmán, an agronomist with extensive experience in healthy housing projects in different areas of Calca province, told IPS that the sustainability of the initiative lies in the fact that it incorporates the aspect of generating income.

    “It is not enough to propose changing or upgrading stoves, improving order in the home or providing hygiene services; rural families need means to combat poverty,” he said.

    Of the projects he has been involved in, the ones that have proven to be sustainable in time are those in which, together with improvements in relation to health, the transformation of the homes contributed to generating income through activities such as gardens, coops and sheds for small livestock, and experiential tourism, expanding the impact to the broader community.

    The case of Santa Cruz and her family is heading in that direction. Their original home was built by her husband in 2013 with the support of a master builder and some neighbors, a total of eight people, who finished it in a month. They used local materials such as stones, earth, adobe and wooden poles.

    But the two-story home was not plastered, which made it colder. In addition, it was not well-designed: the small livestock were in cramped pens, the bedrooms were crowded together on the ground floor, the stove had no chimney and the house was very dark.

    Their participation in the healthy homes initiative marked the start of many changes.

    Peruvian peasant farmer Martina Santa Cruz (R) sits with her mother (2nd-L) and her two children in the brightly lit kitchen-dining room where she cooks with gas. CREDIT: Courtesy of Martina Santa Cruz
    Peruvian peasant farmer Martina Santa Cruz (R) sits with her mother (2nd-L) and her two children in the brightly lit kitchen-dining room where she cooks with gas. CREDIT: Courtesy of Martina Santa Cruz

    “We plastered the house with clay, it turned out smooth and nice, and we painted a sun and a hummingbird (on the wall outside). In the kitchen I installed a wooden cabinet, we made a skylight in the roof and covered it with transparent roofing sheets to let the sunlight in, and we made a chimney for the smoke from the stove and fireplace,” said Santa Cruz.

    “It feels good. There is no smoke anymore, I can keep things tidier, there is more light, the clay makes the house warmer, and my small animals, who live next door, are growing in number,” she said..

    She also created a space for a gas cylinder stove and a dining room that she uses when there are guests and she needs more cooking power than just the woodstove, to prepare the food in less time.

    Due to traditional gender roles, Peruvian women are still responsible for caretaking and housework, which take more time in rural areas due to precarious housing conditions and less access to water, among other factors, reducing their chances for studying, recreation, or community organization activities, for example.

    Building large coops with small covered sheds with divisions for her guinea pigs and chickens made it easier for Santa Cruz to clean and feed them, therefore saving her time, which she aims to use for future gastronomic activities: cooking food for a small restaurant that she plans to build on her property.

    She explained that she has 150 guinea pigs, rodents that are highly prized in the Andes highlands diet, which provide her family with nutritious meat as well as a source of extra income that she uses to buy fruit and other food.

    A typical, unhealthy house in rural Peru where cooking is done using firewood in a closed room without a chimney, which causes smoke to spread throughout the house and damages the health of the families. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS
    A typical, unhealthy house in rural Peru where cooking is done using firewood in a closed room without a chimney, which causes smoke to spread throughout the house and damages the health of the families. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

    Improving quality of life

    Agronomist Berta Tito, from the Cuzco-based non-governmental organization Center for the Development of the Ayllu Peoples (Cedep Ayllu, which means community in the Quechua language), highlighted the importance of healthy housing in rural areas, such as Sacllo and others in the province of Calca, in a conversation with IPS.

    She said they prevent lung diseases among family members, particularly women who inhale carbon dioxide by being in direct contact with the woodstove, while reducing pollution and improving mental health, especially of children.

    “Rural families have the right to decent housing that provides them with quality of life and guarantees their health, safety, recreation and the means to feed themselves,” Tito said.

    Berta Tito (C) stands in a greenhouse garden during a work day with peasant farmers from highland areas of Cuzco in Peru’s southern Andes. The agronomist from Cuzco stressed the importance of rural families accessing healthy homes as part of their rights. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS
    Berta Tito (C) stands in a greenhouse garden during a work day with peasant farmers from highland areas of Cuzco in Peru’s southern Andes. The agronomist from Cuzco stressed the importance of rural families accessing healthy homes as part of their rights. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

    She said the project requires property planning, in which families commit to a vision of what they want to achieve in the future and in what timeframe. “And viewed holistically, this includes access to renewable energy,” she added.

    In Santa Cruz’s house, the different areas are now well-organized: the ground floor is for cooking and other activities and the four bedrooms, one for each member of the family, are located on the second floor and are all lined with a beautiful wooden veranda.

    At the moment she is frustrated that she left something on the woodstove too long, which stained the nearest wall black. But she and her husband have plans to paint it again soon, because the family enjoys having clean walls.

    In addition to her two cooking areas, with the woodstove and the gas cylinder, she has a garden on the land next to her house, where she grows vegetables like onions, carrots, peas and zucchini, which she uses in their daily diet. And she is pleased because she can be certain of their quality, since the family fertilizes the land with the manure from their guinea pigs and chickens “which eat a completely natural diet.”

    Future plans include fencing the yard and expanding an area to build a small restaurant. “That is my future project, to dedicate myself to gastronomy, cooking dishes based on the livestock I raise. I have the kitchen and the woodstove and oven and I can serve more people. But I will get there little by little,” she said confidently.

    © Inter Press Service (2023) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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  • A Climate Finance Goal That Works for Developing Countries

    A Climate Finance Goal That Works for Developing Countries

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    • Opinion by Richard Kozul Wright (geneva)
    • Inter Press Service

    GENEVA, Jun 15 (IPS) – After years of failing to meet climate finance commitments, the new climate finance goal under discussion this week in Bonn is critical, but without supporting reforms of the global financial architecture we risk repeating past mistakes.

    As cities across North America are covered with clouds of smoke caused by wildfires in Canada, negotiations on the New Collective Quantified Goal for climate finance continue in Bonn.

    This goal will replace the climate finance commitment set in 2009, which aimed to mobilize $100 billion per year for developing countries by 2020. The $100 billion commitment, which in any case has not been met, will expire in 2025.

    $100 billion is a fraction of what is needed

    It’s commonly understood that the $100 billion goal is a fraction of what is needed to support developing countries to achieve climate goals in accordance with the Paris Agreement.

    In the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) recent analysis of financing needs, developing countries require at least $6 trillion by 2030 to meet less than half of their existing Nationally Determined Contributions.

    By comparison, official data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) assessed total climate finance flows from developed to developing countries at $83.3 billion in 2020, and Oxfam estimates that the real value is about one third of that, around $21 billion to $24.5 billion.

    Furthermore, climate finance continues to be predominantly delivered as loans, including a large share of non-concessional financing, exacerbating sovereign debt issues that have been growing across regions and income groups.

    New goal must respond to demonstrated needs

    Instead of being based on arbitrary targets, the new goal must rigorously quantify and respond to countries’ demonstrated needs and be tracked based on an agreed methodology that can prevent the double-counting and significant overestimations of the past.

    Developing countries face the double challenge of simultaneously investing in development and in climate mitigation and adaptation, while addressing the costs of loss and damage.

    The scale of this challenge is staggering when close to 900 million people in the world don’t have access to electricity, and more than 4 billion people don’t have a social safety net they can rely on.

    But advancing green industrialization and diversification, raising public investment and social protection, and preparing and responding to multiplying climate disasters all depend on increasing access to finance.

    UNCTAD’s estimate in 2019 was that delivering both climate and development goals demanded $2.5 trillion of annual financing for developing countries, a number that will have risen since then due to the pandemic and ongoing economic and financial shocks.

    Financing options that are fair, sufficient and politically feasible are achievable and UNCTAD has recommended reforms to the global financial architecture that would help deliver climate and development finance at the appropriate scale.

    Four priorities for climate finance

    UNCTAD outlined four priorities at an event entitled “Options for Scaling Climate Finance” co-hosted with the German development agency GIZ and The Energy and Resources Institute at the Bonn Conference on 6 June.

    The first and most urgent priority is debt distress: 60% of low-income countries are in, or on the edge of, debt distress and are spending an estimated five times more on debt servicing than on climate adaptation every year, undermining future resilience and growth prospects.

    Debt-creating instruments are not a sustainable climate finance option in the current context. Instead, these countries need urgent debt relief. A longer-term goal should be to establish a multilateral debt workout process that can help countries break the vicious debt and climate cycle.

    This also implies increasing grant-based sources of financing, however both Official Development Assistance and climate finance flows have been decreasing in real terms. As well as reversing these trends, multilateral sources of financing must be scaled up.

    A second priority should be to consider innovative ways to deploy the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) to maximize their climate and development impact while retaining their benefits as a conditionality-free, debt-free source of liquidity.

    This could include rechanneling SDRs to multilateral development banks (MDBs), addressing allocation issues to ensure SDRs go to where they are needed most, or considering more ambitious approaches such as new SDR asset classes with specific purposes such as climate resilience.

    Another source of additional financing is the global network of hundreds of government-backed development banks at all levels – multilateral, regional and national – as the most direct way to increase the availability of development finance.

    These banks have a long-term horizon and counter the pro-cyclical tendencies of private finance, as well as local knowledge and expertise to forge solutions across countries and regions. Climate finance from MDBs cannot only target the technical part of transitions, but also support communities with managing the social and economic costs of a green transition.

    Developed countries can use their shareholder power to increase the capitalization of their MDBs, while MDBs and regional development banks could seek new members to get additional capital, following the example of the New Development Bank (NDB), to support more green investments.

    The fourth consideration is how to mobilize private finance towards climate goals. As well as using incentives, there needs to be discipline in the form of regulatory measures to drive productive investment and alignment of private finance flows with the Paris Agreement.

    While new climate-related instruments such as environmental, social and governance financing, green bonds and climate-debt-swaps may signal recognition of climate change, they continue to be far smaller in scale than required.

    Also, there is a clear and evidenced risk of greenwashing that necessitates increased regulatory oversight, otherwise these tools will become distractions that exacerbate financing challenges.

    As UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in response to the North American wildfires, “we’re running out of time to make peace with nature, but we cannot give up.”

    The financing options outlined here offer a starting point to ensure that a new goal for climate finance can meet the challenge of the moment, supporting all developing countries to achieve their climate goals.

    Richard Kozul-Wright is Director of the Globalization and Development Strategies Division, UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Geneva.

    IPS UN Bureau


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  • No Peace Until Peace For All

    No Peace Until Peace For All

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    • Opinion by Yasmine Sherif (new york)
    • Inter Press Service

    NEW YORK, Jun 14 (IPS) – As we head into June, we will commemorate a number of important international days that call for much-needed support to protect refugees, end child labour, stop sexual violence in conflict and ensure human rights for the innocent children victims of aggression.

    Together, this work will propel our efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. To deliver on these commitments, we urgently appeal for substantial, sustained increases in public and private sector funding support for quality education – especially for the more than 222 million crisis-impacted girls and boys who desperately need it.

    These include refugee girls and boys fleeing conflict in Sudan. In May, ECW made important new commitments to keep Sudan’s children, wherever they are, in school – as outlined in the joint Op-Ed by The Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown and I in The Times.

    During my mission with UNHCR and UNICEF to the border region of Chad with Sudan just two weeks ago, we announced a fast-acting emergency response to UNHCR and civil society with total funding in Chad now topping US$41 million. Here, I would like to appeal for additional funding to UNICEF who stands ready to deliver urgently needed education to host-communities already living in abject poverty along the borders in Chad.

    Together with governments, donors and civil society partners, we are working to expand our support in response to the refugee arrivals in other neighbouring countries as we unite in our efforts to respond to the enormous, urgent needs accounted for in the Regional Refugee Response Plan.

    At the May 2023 G7 Summit in Hiroshima, under the leadership of the Government of Japan, global leaders committed to “ensuring continued support to the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), Education Cannot Wait (ECW) and UN agencies, including UNESCO and UNICEF, as key partners in helping countries to build stronger education systems for the most marginalized children.” As outlined in the G7 Hiroshima Leaders’ Communique, this is an investment in “resilient, just and prospering societies.”

    We must now turn these commitments into actions. This means every nation in the G7 must step up their support. As we lead into ECW’s four-year 2023-2026 Strategic Plan, we will welcome much needed substantial and new commitments from G7 leaders for the ECW strategic period.

    The private sector will also play a key role in our resource mobilization plans. Our teams are working across the globe to develop new and innovative public-private partnerships, such as our recently announced agreement with the Zurich Cantonal Bank and the Government of Switzerland. Without the private sector and entrepreneurial spirit, we cannot meet the rapidly growing needs. In other words, abnormal problems require extraordinary solutions.

    We will also work with Arab States, Nordic States and G20 nations to create new models for funding that crowd-in resources and know-how to deliver the depth, speed and agility needed to ensure quality education and holistic supports in places like Sudan, Ukraine and beyond.

    Colombia has emerged as a model of this cross-sectorial approach. In this month’s high-level interview, we speak with Mireia Villar Forner, the United Nations Colombia Resident Coordinator/Humanitarian, who highlights the power of education in building sustainable development pathways. This is done through coordinated joint programmes through the United Nations coordination mechanisms. This is indeed one of the chief reasons that have allowed ECW to deliver with development depth and humanitarian speed.

    Through ECW’s Multi-Year Resilience Programmes, we are providing transformative education investments in the humanitarian-development-peace nexus. This is good for business, good for government and good for the world. It also provides an optimized investment opportunity for Overseas Development Assistance, corporate social responsibility and philanthropic giving. By investing in education, we are investing in all of the SDGs. Without education, how can any of them be achieved?

    The month of May was also Mental Health Awareness Month, and we announced an ambitious new target to have at least 10% of resources go to mental health and psychosocial services. We do so because we firmly believe that mental health is essential, if not also existential, to children and adolescents who having survived the most painful forms of violence and disasters.

    I have no doubt that 2023 will go down as a landmark year in global funding support for education. ECW and our strategic partners will not stop until our work is done. There can be no peace, until there is peace for all, to cite Dag Hammarskjold. Indeed, there can be no peace without education. We will leave no child behind.

    Yasmine Sherif is Director of Education Cannot Wait.

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  • Food Insecurity Fears as Pakistan Faces Cyclone, Monsoon Season

    Food Insecurity Fears as Pakistan Faces Cyclone, Monsoon Season

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    Temporary medical camps are still the norm in some areas of Pakistan as the country struggles to recover from last year’s flooding. Now areas of the country are facing Cyclone Biparjoy and a monsoon season, and warnings are that food insecurity may increase. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS
    • by Ashfaq Yusufzai (peshawar)
    • Inter Press Service

    PESHAWAR, Jun 13 (IPS) – A warning by the UN that Pakistan may face acute food insecurity in the coming months should serve as a wake-up call for the government to focus on the flood-hit areas where the people still live without shelter, medication, and proper food, analysts say.

    The warning comes as the National Forecasting Centre in Islamabad warned of an extremely severe cyclonic storm Biparjoy that is expected to make landfall in the country in the coming days.

    A mass evacuation of about 80,000 people from its path in Sindh province and India’s Gujarat state is underway in areas where severe storms and high winds are expected.

    Ahead of the storm and the expected monsoon season, a recent United Nations report warned that acute food insecurity in Pakistan is likely to be further exacerbated in coming months if the economic and political crisis further worsens, compounding the effects of the 2022 floods – which the country is yet to recover from.

    The report titled “Hunger Hotspots” was jointly published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP), is a stark reminder to the government, which is yet to cater to the needs of the population hit by severe floods in June-July last year. The two UN agencies have further warned that acute food insecurity will likely deteriorate further in 81 hunger spots — comprising 22 countries, including Pakistan, during the outlook period from June to November 2023.

    Projected path of Cyclone Biparjoy which is expected to result in the evacuation of about 80,000 people. Credit: India Meteorological Department
    The projected path of Cyclone Biparjoy is expected to result in the evacuation of about 80,000 people. Credit: India Meteorological Department

    According to the report, Pakistan, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Kenya, Congo, and Syria are hotspots with great concern, and the warning is also extended to Myanmar.

    Pakistan’s Federal Minister for National Food Security and Research, Tariq Bashir Cheema, disputed the report regarding possible “acute food insecurity” in Pakistan and termed it “an effort to spread sensationalism and declare the country a hunger hotspot like African countries.”

    He alleged that the two UN agencies wanted to declare Pakistan a “hotspot” for famine like African countries.

    “Pakistan had a bumper wheat crop this year, and 28.5 million tonnes of wheat production had been recorded, along with the carry-over stock of the previous year,” he told IPS.

    However, analysts and NGOs working in the field said the report was accurate and urged the government to take strong measures for food security before the new wave of flooding.

    Almost one year after unprecedented floods ravaged Pakistan, more than 10 million people living in flood-affected areas remain deprived of safe drinking water, leaving families with no alternative to use potentially disease-ridden water, Muhammad Zaheer, an economist, told IPS.

    In January, donors pledged more than USD10.7 billion for Pakistan’s flood-stricken population in Geneva against an estimated USD16.3 billion recovery bill.

    “All the amount pledged at the conference are loans which will be sent to the government from time to time. However, the flood-stricken people are yet to benefit,” he said.

    Zaheer said that affected people in Sindh, Balochistan, and parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa need support due to the fear of more rains.

    According to the report, over 8.5 million people were likely to experience high levels of acute food insecurity.

    The situation has been compounded by last year’s floods which caused damage and economic losses of Rs30bn to the agriculture sector.

    According to the UN Development Programme (UNDP), a?Post-Disaster Needs Assessment?(PDNA) estimated flood damages to exceed USD 14.9 billion, economic losses over USD 15.2 billion, and reconstruction need over $16.3 billion.

    The food insecurity and malnutrition situation will likely worsen in the outlook period, as economic and political crises are reducing households’ purchasing power and ability to buy food and other essential goods, it notes.

    A UNICEF report said that an estimated 20.6 million people, including 9.6 million children, need humanitarian assistance in hard-hit districts with high malnutrition, poor access to water and sanitation, and low school enrollment.

    “Frail, hungry children are fighting a losing battle against severe acute malnutrition, diarrhea, malaria, dengue fever, typhoid, acute respiratory infections, and painful skin conditions. As well as physical ailments, the longer the crisis continues, the greater the risk to children’s mental health,” it said.

    UNICEF will continue to respond to urgent humanitarian needs while also restoring and rehabilitating existing health, water, sanitation, and education facilities for families returning home. An estimated 3.5 million children, especially girls, are at high risk of permanently dropping out of school.

    “But much more support is needed to ensure we can reach all families displaced by floods and help them overcome this climate disaster. It will take months, if not years, for families to recover from the sheer scale of the devastation,” it said.

    The floods affected 33 million people, while more than 1,700 lives were lost, and more than 2.2 million houses were damaged or destroyed. The floods damaged most of the water systems in affected areas, forcing more than 5.4 million people, including 2.5 million children, to rely solely on contaminated water from ponds and wells.

    Sultana Bibi, who lost her home and a few cattle in the flood in Swat district, said there was no government assistance so far.

    “We have received some foodstuff from the local NGO in the early days, but we need financial assistance to rebuild our homes. Many people still live with their relatives,” Bibi, 50, told IPS.

    Representatives of Al-Khidmat Foundation, a national NGO, which is on the ground in Swat and other areas to help the people, said the situation is yet to improve.

    “Unsafe water and poor sanitation are key underlying causes of malnutrition. The associated diseases, such as diarrhea, prevent children from getting the vital nutrients they need. Malnourished children are also more susceptible to waterborne diseases due to already weakened immune systems, which perpetuates a vicious cycle of malnutrition and infection,” he said.

    “We fear more flood as June has begun. Last year, we faced severe floods during this month. The government is required to help the people,” analyst Abdul Hakim said.

    Hakim, a university lecturer in environmental sciences in Swat district, told IPS that the people would be worst-hit in case of floods this year, and the people haven’t recovered from the last year’s devastating rainwaters.

    Pakistan Medical Association’s Dr Abdul Ghafoor said that people still rely on medical camps organized by NGOs as health facilities destroyed by floods haven’t been operational.

    “We want the government to take the FAO/WFP report seriously and safeguard the affected people against water and food-borne ailments,” he told IPS.

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  • Transforming Food Systems through Conscious, Mindful Practices

    Transforming Food Systems through Conscious, Mindful Practices

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    Conscious Food Systems Alliance (CoFSA) promotes consciousness as a key evidence-based practice to support systemic change – reframing how people think about food to unlock food systems transformation, nourishing all people, and regenerating planet Earth. Pictured here a farmer in Katfoura village on the Tristao Islands in Guinea benefits from opportunities to generate income and improve community life. Credit: UN Women/Joe Saade
    • by Joyce Chimbi (nairobi)
    • Inter Press Service

    NAIROBI, Jun 12 (IPS) – Deep in the Egyptian desert, the SEKEM community celebrates its first wheat crop – grown to alleviate shortages and price increases caused by the war in Ukraine, and the latest crop in a 46-year history of regenerative development, which has effectively made the desert bloom. On another continent, a consumer who buys acai collected and produced by the Yawanawá in Brazil helps protect 200,000 acres of land.

    Food connects people, cultures, and planet Earth. But rather than nourishing global health and well-being, food systems remain at the heart of the global community’s social and environmental crises today.

    Massive investment and efforts to transform food systems and existing policy and technical solutions are not delivering the desired impact. In the face of the global food systems crises manifested in food insecurity, unsustainable agricultural practices, and climate change, re-examining the origins of ongoing crises and barriers to transformation is critical.

    Reframing How People Think About Food

    Against this backdrop, the Conscious Food Systems Alliance (CoFSA) promotes consciousness as a key evidence-based practice to support systemic change. The alliance is built on the premise that reframing how people think about food is the key to unlocking food systems transformation, nourishing all people, and regenerating planet Earth.

    “We know our food systems are in a critical state and sit at the core of the regeneration process this world greatly needs, and we believe this can only happen with a change of mindsets and heart-sets, with different values and worldviews,” says Thomas Legrand, CoFSA Lead Technical Advisor.

    Convened by UNDP, CoFSA is a movement of food, agriculture, and consciousness practitioners united around a common goal: to support people from across food and agriculture systems to cultivate the inner capacities that activate systemic change and regeneration.

    The alliance aims to leverage “the power of consciousness and inner transformation, including proven approaches such as mindfulness, compassion, systems leadership, indigenous and feminine wisdoms, to support systemic change towards sustainability and human flourishing in the food and agriculture sector.”

    CoFSA Challenge Fund to Support Regenerative Food System Projects

    The CoFSA Challenge Fund, which is about to be launched, intends to support the development of strategic, innovative ideas and solutions to scale up and accelerate progress toward the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development through the transformation of food systems, which is critical to achieving the UN’s SDGs.

    The Challenge Fund focuses on cultivating inner capacities for regenerative food systems. This constitutes a new field of practice that requires testing and innovation to identify, develop and nurture potentially transformative solutions.

    In this first round of calls for proposals, UNDP will support approximately four pilot projects of up to USD 20,000.

    COFSA Manifesto Video

    Conscious Food System Links Supply Chain

    A conscious food system is a holistic approach to the well-being of people and ecosystems, and where there is a connection and awareness between stakeholders across the whole supply chain, says Helmy Abouleish, SEKEM’s CEO. He heads the holistic, sustainable development community established in 1977 by his father, Dr Ibrahim Abouleish, in the Egyptian desert.

    According to UNDP, to transform the systems that harm people and the planet and how food is produced and consumed, “We need to look beyond the problems’ symptoms and even systems’ patterns and structures, at what fundamentally drives the systems.”

    Consciousness and mental models, or regenerative mindsets and cultures, are increasingly recognized as the key to unlocking systems change in food and agriculture. To this end, CoFSA applies consciousness approaches to technical solutions to support the cultivation and consideration of inner capacities based on the premise that sustainable change comes from within.

    Christine Wamsler, Professor of Sustainability Science at LUND University, emphasizes that there is “increasing scientific consensus that creating sustainable, regenerative systems do not only require a change in our external worlds. Instead, it has to go hand-in-hand with a fundamental shift in our relationships — in the way we think about ourselves, each other, and life as a whole.”

    Graphic representation of the Conscious Food Systems Alliance (CoFSA) concept. Credit: UNDP/CoFSA
    Graphic representation of the Conscious Food Systems Alliance (CoFSA) concept. Credit: UNDP/CoFSA

    Similarly, senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Otto Scharmer, stresses, “You cannot change a system unless you change the mindsets or the consciousness of the people who are enacting that system.”

    At the heart of it, mindful eating and activating transformation from the inside is a recognition that changing behavior is, at times, more about identity, emotions, and connections than data and analyses in the same way elections are campaigned and won against a backdrop of long-held beliefs and opinions.

    Question Impact of Consumer Choices

    “I think today, whatever you eat, however you dress, you need to ask yourself where they come from, what kind of impact they are giving back to the Mother Earth, cultural, economic, and spiritual environment,” says Tashka Yawanawá, Chief of the Yawanawá that has survived for centuries in the Brazilian rainforests.

    Awareness of the people and processes in food and agriculture systems aligns with indigenous wisdom and is at the heart of the approach taken by the Yawanawá people. For instance, Tashka Yawanawá says: “When somebody drinks the acai collected and produced by the Yawanawá, they’re helping protect 200,000 acres of land.”

    “They are also supporting the preservation of our language, our culture, our cultural and spiritual manifestation. Making that link gives value to where you source these products from … when you buy acai made by Yawanawá, you have an awareness that you’re supporting conscious food.”

    UNDP stresses that farmers’ lives depend on being seen as human beings, not just economic agents, and says it is “Time to build safe, reflective and connecting spaces to engage in the deep conversations we need for right relationships to replace market rules.”

    In the world of conscious thinking and mindful eating, everyone has a role.

    A marker trader at a vegetable stall in the village of El-Maadi near Cairo with heaps of fresh vegetables. CoFSA aims to renew lost ties between producers, the foods they grow, cooks, and consumers. Credit: Gavin Bell/Climate Visuals
    A marker trader at a vegetable stall in the village of El-Maadi near Cairo with heaps of fresh vegetables. CoFSA aims to renew lost ties between producers, the foods they grow, cooks, and consumers. Credit: Gavin Bell

    Teresa Corção, founder of Instituto Maniva, a non-profit in Brazil that values ??traditional food knowledge and renews the ties lost between producers, the foods they grow, cooks, and consumers, says chefs have a critical role in listening more to the people who grow the food.

    “I think we all see now more and more we need other ways of both changing ourselves and helping others change the way they think in order for us to have the right mindsets to make choices that are more sustainable,” says Andrew Bovarnick, UNDP’s Food, and Agricultural Commodity Systems, Global Head.

    CoFSA is built on bringing consciousness to food systems to support the transition to a holistic, bio-regional approach and creating productive landscapes of regeneration.

    That consciousness can help restore the balance in food systems between food production, conservation, and well-being, support the uptake of agroecological practices which regenerate the soil, and strengthen the capacity of food to distribute wealth and well-being in communities.

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  • Conflict & Hunger Deeply Embedded in War-Ravaged Yemen

    Conflict & Hunger Deeply Embedded in War-Ravaged Yemen

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    Abdulwasea Mohammed addressing UN Member States, UN agencies, fellow NGOs during Protection of Civilians Week last month. Credit: Oxfam
    • Opinion by Abdulwasea Mohammed (sana’a, yemen)
    • Inter Press Service

    SANA’A, Yemen, Jun 06 (IPS) – During the week of May 21, the UN held its annual week dedicated to the Protection of Civilians. The themes of the week’s events, particularly the side events, I had the honor of participating in, mirrored many of the pressing issues in Yemen, as conflict continues.

    While there is some hope as peace negotiations are underway, millions of Yemenis are still feeling the acute impacts of war. I had the opportunity to address some of the representatives of UN member states, UN agencies and fellow NGOs, who are taking a leading role on these issues, including Conflict and Hunger and Community-Led Approaches of Civilian Protection.

    I also was able to share many of these key messages with members of US Congress and UN missions during my time in the US. As we look ahead, we need to see the conversations from the week put into action.

    Conflict and hunger are deeply intertwined in Yemen, just as they are around the world – Conflict continues to be the top driver of extreme hunger. The humanitarian response including food, cash, clean water, is saving lives every day, but without clear signs for lasting peace, hunger and other potentially deadly challenges that cannot be ended in Yemen.

    And in our case, the same can be said about economic factors – many continue to overlook the impact the shattered economy has had on pushing food insecurity to catastrophic levels. We need both inclusive peace and large-scale economic action to help Yemenis continue to survive and recover.

    Restrictions on imports over the years, continued financial shocks and economic deterioration as well as increased prices of fuel and food commodities, and disruptions to livelihoods and services, have driven millions to hunger.

    The World Bank has estimated that around half the 233,000 deaths in Yemen since 2015 are attributable to the indirect impact of the war – from lack of food, healthcare and infrastructure. What is even more painful is, in many areas, there is plenty of food in markets, but most Yemenis are not able to afford it.

    The indirect impacts are overwhelming but this is also in addition, unfortunately, to very direct impacts on food production and essential infrastructure due to fighting. At Oxfam, we have documented farms being targeted, fishing boats being fired at, and unexploded ordnance, cluster munitions and landmines—all of them putting agricultural areas out of use.

    To address all of these threats and their devastating impacts, we need community-based and community-led action. At the UN I spoke specifically about hunger and community-led protection, but this approach can be applied across humanitarian response and steps toward early recovery.

    In times of crisis, community leaders, local organizations, and neighbors are the true first responders, arriving first and staying long after larger groups may have to leave. They are more effective in some ways, and have the knowledge to support the most vulnerable members of society. These groups need more resources to do their work effectively.

    This is a concrete way for the aid community to make a difference in Yemen now and going forward – to reframe and revise support to community-based protection and funding to local organizations, with a focus on building trust over long-term relationships.

    Donors should provide longer timeframes for organizations to accomplish the goals in a project and provide more flexible funding and support to truly build on the success of community-level work.

    Yemen, just like all humanitarian responses, is a complicated place to work, and sometimes time runs out on funding, before a project even begins after dealing with security, logistical and bureaucratic challenges.

    Of course, local groups alone cannot tackle one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises, and organizations like Oxfam should listen to their priorities, assess how to best support the work underway, and fill in the gaps to provide a complementary response.

    Taking all of these risks and approaches into account, it is key that policies and programs addressing conflict-induced hunger address the specific needs and experiences of the most vulnerable, including women and displaced people.

    All of these groups should be able to weigh in on issues impacting them as part of this an inclusive and effective humanitarian response, economic recovery, and sustainable peace.

    Targeted programs to support their economic empowerment, such as providing access to finance, technical assistance, and market opportunities; and improving access to education all would make a massive difference for these groups, and for Yemen as a whole.

    Above all, we have to address the root causes of the conflict and its impacts in a holistic way. For there to be progress, we must ensure that any negotiated peaceful resolution includes these same voices of women and other marginalized groups and addresses the underlying issues such as political and economic inequality that have contributed to the conflict and ensure no one is left behind.

    I hope the Protection of Civilians Week was a point of reflection and a renewed call to action for those that gathered, as it was for me. Each context is unique, but there is much to learn from each other. I spoke at events alongside experts from the Lake Chad Basin, South Sudan, and more – and we all had something to learn from our successes, failures, and recommendations.

    With more resources in the right hands alongside a recommitment to peace, Yemenis – along with those caught in similar spirals of hunger and insecurity – can have a hopeful way forward.

    Abdulwasea Mohammed is Yemen Advocacy, Campaigns Media Manager at Oxfam.

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  • Of the Sahel and the Merchants of Death

    Of the Sahel and the Merchants of Death

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    Fake or substandard antimalarial medicines kill as many as 267,000 sub-Saharan Africans every year. Credit: Mercedes Sayagues/IPS
    • by Baher Kamal (madrid)
    • Inter Press Service

    MADRID, Jun 02 (IPS) – There is a tangled trafficking web that has been woven across the Sahel, which spans almost 6.000 kilometres from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, and is home to more than 300 million people in 10 countries: Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, The Gambia, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, and Senegal.

    This is how several international specialised bodies, mainly the United Nations, depict the aggravated situation in this already highly fragile African region, which the UN describes as a region in crisis, as those living there are prey to “chronic insecurity, climate shocks, conflict, coups, and the rise of criminal and terrorist networks.”

    The Sahel criminal web deals with an unimaginable range of ‘commodities’, from chilli peppers and fake medicine, to fuel, gold, and guns, through humans and more which are being trafficked via millennia-old trade routes crisscrossing the Sahel, according to a 20 May 2023 report.

    The US-led military intervention

    Security has long been an issue in the region, “but the situation markedly degraded in 2011, following the NATO-led military intervention in Libya, which led to the ongoing destabilisation of the country,” explains the United Nations.

    On 19 March 2011, a US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization coalition (31 Western member-countries) launched a military intervention in Libya, with coordinated naval and air forces attacks mainly by the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Canada, among others.

    Since then the big oil producer Libya has been the stage of growing instability and chaos, let alone a hub of human trafficking, smuggling and slavery.

    Humans, weapons, oil…

    Such “ensuing chaos, and porous borders stymied efforts to stem illicit flows, and traffickers transporting looted Libyan firearms rode into the Sahel on the coattails of insurgency and the spread of terrorism,” reports the UN.

    Fuel is another commodity trafficked by the main players – terrorist groups, criminal networks, and local militias.

    “Armed groups now control swathes of Libya, which has become a trafficking hub.”

    In fact, in addition to massive human trafficking and migrant smuggling, markets across the Sahel can be found openly selling a wide range of contraband goods, from fake medicines to AK-style assault rifles.

    … And medicines that kill

    A UN News series exploring the fight against trafficking in the Sahel, on 27 May 2023 focussed on the illegal trade in substandard and fake medicines.

    “From ineffective hand sanitiser to fake antimalarial pills, an illicit trade that grew during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 is being meticulously dismantled by the UN and partner countries in Africa’s Sahel region.”

    Substandard or fake medicines, like contraband baby cough syrup, are killing almost half a million sub-Saharan Africans every year, according to a threat assessment report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

    Trafficking medication is often deadly; in just one case, 70 Gambian children died in 2022 after ingesting smuggled cough syrup.

    Desperate demand

    According to the UN, health care is scarce in the region, which has among the world’s highest incidences of malaria and where infectious diseases are one of the leading causes of death.

    “This disparity between the supply of and demand for medical care is at least partly filled by medicines supplied from the illegal market to treat self-diagnosed diseases or symptoms,” the report says.

    It further explains that street markets and unauthorised sellers, especially in rural or conflict-affected areas, are sometimes the only sources of medicines and pharmaceutical products.

    Fatal results

    The study shows that the cost of the illegal medicine trade is high, in terms of health care and human lives.

    “Fake or substandard antimalarial medicines kill as many as 267,000 sub-Saharan Africans every year. Nearly 170,000 sub-Saharan African children die every year from unauthorised antibiotics used to treat severe pneumonia.”

    In the summer of 2022, 70 Gambian babies and young children died from kidney failure after ingesting cough syrup spooned out by their caregivers.

    The World Health Organization (WHO) issued a global alert that four tainted paediatric products had originated in India, as local health authorities continue to investigate how this tragedy unfolded.

    Caring for people who have used falsified or substandard medical products for malaria treatment in sub-Saharan Africa costs up to 44.7 million US dollars every year, according to World Health Organization (WHO) estimates.

    Corruption

    Corruption is one of the main reasons the trade is allowed to flourish.

    About 40% of substandard and falsified medical products reported in Sahelian countries between 2013 and 2021 land in the regulated supply chain, the report showed.

    “Products diverted from the legal supply chain typically come from such exporting nations as Belgium, China, France, and India. Some end up on pharmacy shelves.”

    The perpetrators

    “The perpetrators are employees of pharmaceutical companies, public officials, law enforcement officers, health agency workers and street vendors, all motivated by potential financial gain,” the report found.

    Traffickers are finding ever more sophisticated routes, from working with pharmacists to taking their crimes online, according to a UNODC research brief on the issue.

    While terrorist groups and non-State armed groups are commonly associated with trafficking in medical products in the Sahel, this mainly revolves around consuming medicines or levying “taxes” on shipments in areas under their control.

    Far beyond the Sahel and Africa

    Fighting organised crime is a central pillar in the wider battle to deal with the security crisis in the region, which UN Secretary-General, António Guterres says, poses a global threat.

    “If nothing is done, the effects of terrorism, violent extremism, and organised crime will be felt far beyond the region and the African continent,” Guterres already warned in 2022.

    Apart from repeated proposals for action and solution, evidence shows that very little has been done, if anything, to halt those merchants of death. Who benefits from such a horrid destabilisation of 10 African countries which already rank among the poorest ones on Earth?

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  • Rocky Point Fishers Await Sanctuary To Ease Environmental Issues, Low Fish Catch

    Rocky Point Fishers Await Sanctuary To Ease Environmental Issues, Low Fish Catch

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    Ephraim Walters in his fishing shed. The father of nine has been a fisherman for 59 years. Credit: Zadie Neufville/IPS
    • by Zadie Neufville (rocky point, jamaica)
    • Inter Press Service

    ROCKY POINT, Jamaica, Jun 02 (IPS) – Long before the COVID-19 Pandemic, fishers at the Rocky Point fishing beach in Clarendon were forced to venture farther out to sea to make a living or find alternatives to make ends meet.

    This once-prime fishing village attracted fishers from up and down the coast. Men like Ephraim Walters, travelled from his hometown in Belmont, 100 or so kilometres (62 miles), up the coast, to Rocky Point, some 30 years ago, and never left.

    Rocky Point is Jamaica’s largest fishing community and was once a destination for south coast fishers. But decades of environmental neglect, mismanagement, and poor fishing practices are taking their toll, pushing fishermen into destitution.

    In the old days, Walters recalls, fishermen went to sea every day and made enough to build homes, support their families, and school their children. Back then, one needn’t go too far because the 24-kilometre sea shelf at Rocky was the place to be: “We could drop the net in the bay, and we would pull it together with a whole lot of fish, but these days we have to go further out to sea for far less”.

    “Sometimes you go out, and you don’t catch a thing, and you can’t buy back the gas you use to go out,” he says.

    With too many fishers chasing too few fish, he now travels the 96.5 kilometres (60 miles) to the offshore fishing station at Pedro Banks, using hundreds of gallons of fuel and spending between three and five days to get a good catch. But even then, he says, the value of the catch may not cover the cost of the trip.

    The challenges in Rocky Point are a snapshot of the Jamaican fisheries sector, where too many fishers chase too few fish. Former University of the West Indies lecturer Karl Aitken says Rocky’s problem began as many as 30 years ago. As a master’s student in the 1980s, he says he had been recording declining catch numbers even then.

    Data from the National Fisheries Authority (NFA) show that only 26,000 of the estimated 40,000 fishermen on the island are registered. Marine catch data between 1986 and 1995 shows a downturn in catch rates from 9,100 metric tonnes to 4,200 metric tonnes per year. There are expansions of the commercial conch fishery that began in 1991 and the lobster fishery.

    The consensus is that Jamaica’s fishing problems began with a series of natural and man-made events in the 1980s and 1990s, which resulted in the death of 85 per cent of the island’s reefs and a drastic decline in fish catches. As inshore areas became less productive, pressure mounted on the offshore resources at Pedro Cays.

    The 2017 State of the  Environment report points to the growing numbers of fishers as a threat to the  environment, noting that the island’s nearshore artisanal fin-fish and lobster fisheries are potentially environmentally deleterious and associated with overfishing and harvesting.

    “The greatest potential for environmental impact is in the fisheries sub-sector is associated with the marine fin-fish sector which continues to grow to supply domestic markets,” the report says.

    Walters long for the promised fish sanctuary which he believes will minimise destructive behaviours and save the livelihoods of Rocky Point’s fishermen. Not only are fish stocks collapsing, but the high-value fisheries like conch and lobster are also vulnerable as more people go after the resource. Since 2000, the government has shuttered the conch fishery twice first, when a row over quota resulted in a lawsuit and again in 2018 after a collapse of the resource.

    Former director of Fisheries Andre Kong explains that in both cases stocks were low. But in 2018, the fishery was on the verge of collapse. There are those who believe that the conch and lobster fisheries should remain closed for another few years, but fishermen believe that without proper protection, the resources would be plundered by poachers as happened during the Pandemic.

    Fishing beaches around Rocky Point have already established sanctuaries which local fishers say have helped to boost their catch rates and the size of the fish they catch. In the neighbouring Portland Bight, three marine protected areas have been established across the parishes of St Catherine and Clarendon.

    In the 73-year-old Walker’s birth parish of Westmoreland, the Bluefields Fisherman’s Friendly Society led by Wolde Christos, established one of the largest of the island’s 18 fish sanctuaries in 2009 to boost the falling catch rates, protect local marine life such as the hawksbill sea turtles that nest there, and reduce high levels of poaching.

    The sanctuary covers more than 1,300 hectares (3,200 acres). It is working, Christos explains, noting that a government grant helps the fishermen who have been licensed as fish and or game wardens run a tight ship, keeping illegal fishers out.

    The pandemic made things worse for many fishers due to the loss of markets. In a report to parliament last year, Minister Pearnel Charles Jr. said that the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has caused disruption in fish production and value chains with the losses of markets locally and overseas, and higher input costs, resulting in significant increases in operational expenses. An estimated USD23 million in losses was sustained in the fisheries sector during 2020 alone.

    On the beach, some fishers are doing anything they can to survive. Some are part-time boat builders/ repairmen, electricians, or even mechanics; others now clean fish for buyers to make ends meet. And if the whispers are correct, many have turned to illegal fishing.

    Complicating the issue is the fact that aside from regulated fisheries of conch and lobsters, Jamaica has no limit on the amount or size of fish that can be taken. There is almost no data available for analysis, and mesh and net sizes have more or less no effect on the reaping of juvenile fish.

    In keeping with commitments and international agreements, in 2018, the government unveiled a new Fisheries Act. It established the National Fisheries Authority to replace the Fisheries Division of the Ministry of Agriculture to strengthen the management and legislative framework of the sector. The act is expected to increase compliance in registration, increase opportunities for aquaculture and increase fines and prison terms for breaches.

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  • Perus Agro-Export Boom Has not Boosted Human Development

    Perus Agro-Export Boom Has not Boosted Human Development

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    Her hands loaded with crates, Susan Quintanilla, a union leader of agro-export workers in the department of Ica in southwestern Peru, gets ready to collect different vegetables and fruits for foreign markets. She has witnessed many injustices, saying the companies “made you feel like they were doing you a favor by giving you work, they wanted you to keep your head down.” CREDIT: Courtesy of Susan Quintanilla
    • by Mariela Jara (lima)
    • Inter Press Service

    LIMA, May 31 (IPS) – Peru’s agro-export industry is growing steadily and reached record levels in 2022. But this has not had a favorable impact on human development in this South American country, where high levels of inequality, poverty, childhood anemia and malnutrition persist, as well as complaints about the poor quality of employment in the sector.

    Exports of agricultural products such as blueberries, grapes, tangerines, artichokes and asparagus generated 9.8 billion dollars in revenue in 2022 – 12 percent higher than the 2021 total, as reported in February by the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Tourism.

    Agricultural exports represent four percent of GDP in this Andean nation, where mining and fishing are the main economic activities.

    “The increase in revenue from agricultural exports has not brought human development: anemia and tuberculosis are at worrying levels and now dengue fever is skyrocketing,” Rosario Huallanca, a representative of the non-governmental Ica Human Rights Commission (Codeh Ica), which has worked for 41 years in that department of southwestern Peru, told IPS.

    Ica and two other departments along the country’s Pacific coast, La Libertad and Piura, are leaders in the sector, accounting for nearly 50 percent of agricultural exports in this country of 33 million people, which despite this boom remains plagued by inequality, reflected by high levels of poverty and informality and precariousness in employment.

    Monetary poverty affected 27.5 percent of the country’s 33 million inhabitants in 2022, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics. This is a seven percentage point increase over the pre-pandemic period. The number of poor people was estimated at 9,184,000 last year, 600,000 more than in 2021.

    Ica, which has a total of 850,765 inhabitants, is one of the departments with the lowest monetary poverty rates, five percent, because it has full employment, largely due to the agro-export boom of the last two decades.

    Huallanca said the number of agro-export companies is estimated at 320, with a total of 120,000 employees, who come from different parts of the country.

    What stands out, she said, is that 70 percent of the total number of workers in the sector are women, who are valued for their fine motor skills in handling fruits and vegetables.

    Although a portion of the workers of some companies are in the informal sector, there are no clear numbers, the expert pointed out.

    But there are alarming figures available: more than six percent of children under five suffer from chronic malnutrition, and anemia affects 33 percent of children between six and 35 months of age.

    “With the type of job we have, we cannot take our children to their growth checkups, we can’t miss work because they don’t pay you if you don’t show up, we cry in silence because of our anxiety,” 42-year-old Yanina Huamán, who has worked in the agro-export sector for 20 years to support her three children, told IPS.

    The two oldest are in middle and higher education and her youngest is still in primary school. “I am both mother and father to my children. With my work I am giving them an education and I have manged to secure a home of my own, but it’s precarious, the bedrooms don’t have roofs yet, for example,” she said.

    Huamán is secretary for women’s affairs in the union of the company where she works, a position she was appointed to in November 2022. From that post, she hopes to help bring about improvements in access to healthcare for female workers, who either postpone going to the doctor when they need to, or receive poor medical attention in the social security health system “where they only give us pills.”

    Ica currently has the highest number of deaths from dengue fever, a viral disease that led the government of Dina Boluarte to declare a 90-day health emergency in 13 of the country’s 24 departments a couple of weeks ago.

    Not only that, it has the history of being the department with the highest level of deaths from Covid-19: 901 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, exceeding the national average of 630 per 100,000. “The health system here does not work,” trade unionist Huamán said bluntly.

    Yanina Huamán, a worker in the agro-export sector in the department of Ica in southwestern Peru, explains at a meeting in Lima the problems that affect labor rights in the sector, particularly for women who make up 70 percent of the workers. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS
    Yanina Huamán, a worker in the agro-export sector in the department of Ica in southwestern Peru, explains at a meeting in Lima the problems that affect labor rights in the sector, particularly for women who make up 70 percent of the workers. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

    Working conditions more difficult for women

    The lack of quality employment and the deficient recognition of labor rights, exacerbated by the pandemic, prompted a strike in November 2020 that began in Ica and spread to the northern coastal area of ??La Libertad and Piura.

    Their demands included a minimum living wage of 70 soles (19 dollars) a day, social benefits such as compensation and raises for length of service, and recognition of the right to form unions.

    Grouped together in the recently created Ica Workers’ Union Agro-exports Struggle Committee, which represents casual and seasonal workers, they went to Congress in Lima to demand changes in the current legislation.

    Susan Quintanilla, 39, originally from the central Andean department of Ayacucho, is the general secretary of the union. She arrived in Ica in 2014 after separating from her husband. She came with her two children, a girl and a boy, for whom she hoped for a future with better opportunities.

    After working as a harvester in the fields, and cleaning and packing fruit at the plant, she decided to work on a piecework basis, because that way she could earn more and save up for times when the companies needed less labor.

    “It was incredibly hard,” she told IPS. “I would leave home at 10 in the morning and leave work at three or four in the wee hours of the next morning to be there to get my kids ready for school. I was 29 or 30 years old, I was young, but I saw older women with pain in their bodies, their arms and their feet due to the postures we had at work, but they continued because they had no other option.

    “I saw many injustices in the agro-export companies,” she added. “They made you feel that they were doing you a favor by giving you work, they wanted you to keep your head down, they shouted at and humiliated people, they made them feel miserable. I protested, raised my voice, and they didn’t fire me because I was a high performance worker and they needed me. The situation has changed a little because of our struggles, but it hasn’t come for free.”

    The late 2020 protests led to the approval on Dec. 31 of that year of Law No. 31110 on agricultural labor and incentives for the agricultural and irrigation sector, aimed at guaranteeing the rights of workers in the agro-export and agroindustrial sectors.

    But in Quintanilla’s view, the law discriminates against non-permanent workers who make up the largest part of the workforce in the sector, since the preferential right to hiring established in the fourth article of the law is not respected.

    “Nor have they recognized the differentiated payment of our social benefits and they include them in the daily wage that is calculated at 54 soles (a little more than 14 dollars): it’s not fair,” she complained.

    At the same time, she stressed that the agro-export work is harder on women because they are the ones responsible for raising their children. “We live in a sexist society that burdens us with all of the care work,” Quintanilla said.

    She also explained that because several of the companies are so far away, it takes workers longer to get to work, which means they are away from home for up to twelve hours a day. “We go to work with the anxiety that we are leaving our children at risk of the dangers of life, we cannot be with them as we would like, which damages us emotionally.”

    Added to this, she said, are the terrible working conditions, such as the fact that the toilets are far from the areas where they work, as much as three blocks away, or in unsanitary conditions, which leads women to avoid using them, to the detriment of their health.

    Workers sort avocados for export in Peru. Agro-exports account for four percent of the country's GDP, but the prosperity of the sector has not translated into better human development for its workers, and diseases such as anemia and tuberculosis are alarmingly prevalent in agroindustrial areas. CREDIT: Comexperu
    Workers sort avocados for export in Peru. Agro-exports account for four percent of the country’s GDP, but the prosperity of the sector has not translated into better human development for its workers, and diseases such as anemia and tuberculosis are alarmingly prevalent in agroindustrial areas. CREDIT: Comexperu

    Agro-export companies and human rights

    Huallanca said that Codeh Ica was promoting the creation of a space of diverse stakeholders so that the National Business and Human Rights Plan, a public policy aimed at ensuring that economic activities improve people’s quality of life, is fulfilled in the department. Five unions from Ica and the Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Tourism participate in this initiative.

    “We have made an enormous effort and we hope that on Jun. 16 it will be formally created by the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, the governing body for this policy,” she said.

    In the meantime, she added, “we have helped bring together women involved in the agro-export sector, who have developed a rights agenda that has been given shape in this multi-stakeholder space and we hope it will be taken into account.”

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  • Kenyan Scientists Trend-Setting Research into Health Benefits of Snails

    Kenyan Scientists Trend-Setting Research into Health Benefits of Snails

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    Dr Paul Kinoti at the JKUAT snail farm, where he is researching the potential of snail slime cough syrup. Credit: Wilson Odhiambo/IPS
    • by Wilson Odhiambo (nairobi)
    • Inter Press Service

    NAIROBI, May 29 (IPS) – Snails and slime are usually followed by the thought ‘EEW!’ from most people … some might even scream at seeing a snail near them.

    For Dr Paul Kinoti, however, these slimy creatures could earn him international recognition because his research on snails landed his institution, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT), a Ksh. 127 million (USD 1 million) grant.

    The grant, awarded by the Cherasco Institute of Snail Breeding, Italy, is expected to fund a two-phase research project to produce cough syrup meant for children under five.

    As a lecturer at JKUAT’s Horticulture and Food Security department, Kinoti has specialized in non-conventional farming systems for over a decade.

    Non-conventional farming is a system that employs modified/unique farming methods in crop and animal production. Kinoti has been researching insects and worms (vermiculture), concentrating on how they add value to supplement crop and livestock production.

    According to Kinoti, snails are already associated with a wide variety of products, including animal feeds, skin care products, pharmaceuticals, and fertilizer.

    “My research focuses on unique farming methods that farmers are not used to, including rearing insects and worms as a source of livestock feed and fertilizer for plants. I keep black soldier flies and worms which are a major source of proteins for livestock, especially for poultry and fish,” Kinoti explained to IPS.

    And as a food security specialist, one of his goals is to encourage people to include snails in their diet, given that it is rich in proteins and iron.

    “Lack of awareness is the main reason why Kenyans do not see snails as a source of food for themselves, and getting them to accept it will be a difficult task. This is why we are using a simpler approach by encouraging farmers to take up snail farming to get used to the idea of having snails around them,” he told IPS.

    Across the globe, majorly in Asia, parts of Europe, and West Africa, snails are a known delicacy.

    The snail products are currently being manufactured within JKUAT, where, through training, they have engaged local farmers to supply them with snail slime (mucin). The institution offers these farmers short, three-day courses on how to rear snails and extract their slime, which they later sell to the institution for profit.

    “We are grateful to the institution for opening our minds to an opportunity that has become quite lucrative. Most of the people in Kiambu County are either full-time farmers or have a piece of land somewhere that they have put aside for farming activities, making this a good source of extra income. Snail farming is new to us. Most would never even have considered practicing it due to the culture that we have grown up with,” said Antony Njoroge, one of the local farmers who now farms snails.

    During his PhD studies in Austria, Kinoti was introduced to snail farming by his host, a snail farmer.

    “When I came back, I realized that snail farming was still alien to Kenya, and rather than just focus on rearing the snails, I decided to research their value addition for farming. It is from this that I was able to come up with different products such as fertilizer, animal feeds, and skin care products,” Kinoti told IPS. The products have been certified by the Kenya Bureau of Standards (KEBS) and are already in the market.

    The idea for the cough syrup did not come about until 2019, when Kinoti conducted field research on snails in Kumasi, Ghana. His visit happened to be during the flu season, where he was surprised at the strange concoctions that parents were using as remedy for their children who were coughing.

    “I noticed that rather than being given ginger or lemon tea that most of us are used to when someone gets the flu, their parents were collecting snail slime and mixing it with some bit of honey which they gave the children as a remedy,” Kinoti explained to IPS. This idea stuck in my mind, and when I came back, I decided to do more research on it.

    The project’s first phase, which is meant to take two years, will involve identifying the best snail species for production and research on snail slime while encouraging farmers to breed them. The second phase will be manufacturing and producing the cough syrup once it has been approved by the Kenya Food and Drug Authority (KFDA).

    The snail species commonly used for slime production is the African giant land snail (Achatina Fulica), which produces up to 4 milliliters of slime per snail. It takes about 250 of these giant snails to make a liter of slime, extracted once weekly.

    The Achatina Fulica is native to East Africa, where its origin can be traced to Kenya and Tanzania. Across the globe, it is regarded as an invasive species due to its ability to produce colonies from a single female. It feeds in large quantities and is a carrier for plant pathogens, making it a pest to farmers when it invades their farms. It has spread across the globe through exportation to Europe and Asia as a delicacy, being bought into those areas as a pet or by accidental transportation when it latches on to something.

    The project involves a number of experts (mainly within the university) from different departments to help oversee its success. These experts include animal scientists, food scientists, health scientists, and other technical staff who help run the snail farm.

    It also works in conjunction with other major institutions such as the Kenya National Museum, whose work is to help them identify the best type of snails for slime production, and the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), which is the main stakeholder and body that provides them with the license they need to carry out snail farming in Kenya.

    As a conservation measure, the snails are not supposed to be harmed during the slime extraction, which makes it a delicate process that involves using citric acid, and the extraction is only done once a week.

    Once successful, the cough syrup is expected to help lower the cost of importation since everything will be manufactured locally, thus helping save a lot of money. The farmers are also excited that they no longer have to rely on expensive fertilizer and animal feeds from the government, which has always made their input expensive while giving them little returns.

    As a delicacy, snails are primarily spotted in high-end hotels that are mostly visited by foreigners and tourists.

    “Growing up, the one memory I had about snails from my biology lessons was that they caused bilharzia, which made me dislike them. Today, I am one of the suppliers of snail meat to some big hotels in Nairobi and Mombasa,” says Brian Wandera, a local businessman from Nairobi. “It is amazing what knowledge can do.”

    “I buy the snails from the farmers in Kiambu and sell them to the hotels at a profit. Locally, Kenyans are yet to adopt snail meat as a source of food,” he added.

    The grant is also expected to help empower women and the youth by providing them with employment opportunities through training on snail farming, according to Kinoti, an investment of Ksh. 20,000 (USD 190) can earn a snail farmer between Ksh. 50,000 (USD 450) and 100,000 (USD 950) monthly once the snails start to produce their slime, usually at four months. The slime is categorized into three grades which are sold at different prices.

    “We buy the slime from the farmers at a fee of Ksh. 1200 (USD 11) per liter for grade A slime, Ksh. 850 (USD 8) per liter for grade B slime and Ksh. 650 (USD 6) for grade C slime,” Kinoti concluded.

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  • Climate Carnage: Things Can Only Get Worse

    Climate Carnage: Things Can Only Get Worse

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    The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction has now reported on the “Staggering’ rise in climate emergencies in the last 20 years.’ Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS
    • by Baher Kamal (rome)
    • Inter Press Service

    ROME, May 29 (IPS) – Please stop repeating all this softened wording, such as climate change, climate-related hazards, climate crisis, or extreme weather events… And just call it what it really is: climate carnage.

    Indeed, several scientific findings, released ahead of the 2023 World Environment Day (5 June), staggeringly indicate that the world-spread climate carnage is predicted to hit all-time records.

    See: global temperatures are set to break records during the next five years, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) on 17 May 2023 alerted.

    Warmest year ever

    “There is a 98% likelihood that at least one of the next five years, and the five-year period, will be the warmest on record.”

    The world-leading meteorological body then informs that such a rise is fuelled by heat-trapping greenhouse gases and a naturally occurring El Niño weather pattern.

    El Niño is a naturally occurring climate pattern associated with the warming of the ocean surface temperatures in the Central and Eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. It occurs on average every two to seven years, and episodes usually last nine to 12 months.

    El Niño steers weather patterns around the world, WMO further explains, “can aggravate extreme weather events,” and its events are typically associated with increased rainfall in parts of southern South America, the Southern United States, the Horn of Africa and Central Asia.

    “This year is already predicted to be hotter than 2022 and the fifth or sixth hottest year on record. 2024 could be even hotter as the impact of the weather phenomenon sets in.”

    ‘Staggering rise…’

    Mind you: This WMO report is just an update that would be logically expected. Indeed, it actually adds to earlier reiterated findings about the worse to come.

    For instance, the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) has now reported on the “Staggering’ rise in climate emergencies in the last 20 years.’

    According to its report, there has already been an 80% increase in the number of people affected by disasters since 2015.

    Out of control

    “However, many of the lessons from past disasters have been ignored.”

    The consequences are that now a steadily increasing number of people are being affected by larger, ever more complex and more expensive disasters because decision-makers are failing to put people first and prevent risks from becoming disasters.

    “Many of these disasters are climate-related, and in light of the latest warnings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), countries are likely to face even worse disasters if global temperatures continue to rise.”

    “Brutally unequal”

    The impacts are “brutally unequal,” with developing countries hit the hardest, as highlighted by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR).

    Its report multi-country review points to the rapid accumulation of risk that is building up, intersecting with the risks of breaching planetary boundaries, biodiversity and ecosystem limits – which is spiralling out of control.

    Not so new, anyway. Indeed the UNDRR chief, Mami Mizutori, reminded already at the end of 2020 that the international community pledged in Paris in 2015 to reduce global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

    ‘Uninhabitable hell…’

    However, she added, “It was “baffling” that nations were continuing knowingly “to sow the seeds of our own destruction, despite the science and evidence that we are turning our only home into an uninhabitable hell for millions of people”.

    One doesn’t have to look hard to find examples of how disasters are becoming worse, said Mami Mizutori. “The sad fact is that many of these disasters are preventable because they are caused by human decisions.”

    The point is that already a year ago, the UNDRR warned that “by deliberately ignoring risk, the World is bankrolling its own destruction.”

    But this should not be surprising: many fingers have been pointing to the responsibility of the short-sighted politicians, who are too often influenced by the powerful money-making business, that they end up turning a blind eye on such mass destruction.

    Drought, heat “100 times more likely”

    On 5 May 2023, the World Meteorological Organization reported that climate ‘change’ made both the devastating drought in the Horn of Africa and the record April temperatures in the Western Mediterranean at least 100 times more likely.

    Regarding the Horn of Africa, it said that the drought was made much more severe because of the low rainfall and increased evaporation caused by higher temperatures in a world which is now nearly 1.2°C warmer than pre-industrial times.

    Mediterranean heatwave

    In late April, parts of Southwestern Europe and North Africa experienced a massive heatwave that brought extremely high temperatures never previously recorded in the region at this time of the year, with temperatures reaching 36.9 – 41 °C in the four countries.

    “The event broke temperature records by a large margin, against the backdrop of an intense drought.”

    “The intense heat wave came on top of a preexisting multi-year drought, exacerbating the lack of water in Western Mediterranean regions and threatening the 2023 crop yield.”

    Spreading everywhere

    Across the world, climate change has made heat waves more common, longer and hotter, reports WMO based on researchers’ analysis that looked at the average of the maximum temperature for three consecutive days in April across southern Spain and Portugal, most of Morocco and the northwest part of Algeria.

    Crops under threat

    As other analyses of extreme heat in Europe have found, “extreme temperatures are increasing faster in the region than climate models have predicted,” said the researchers.

    Until overall greenhouse gas emissions are halted, global temperatures will continue to increase and events like these will become more frequent and severe.

    “The intense heat wave came on top of a preexisting multi-year drought, exacerbating the lack of water in Western Mediterranean regions and threatening the 2023 crop yield.”

    And the carnage goes on

    In short, the ongoing climate carnage is expected to move from the worst to the worst.

    And anyway, the term ‘carnage’ should not sound at all new.

    Indeed, it was already spelt out by the United Nations’ top chief, António Guterres, in September 2022, following his field visit to the vast Pakistan’s regions impacted by unprecedented devastating floods.

    The people of Pakistan are the victims of “a grim calculus of climate injustice”, said Guterres, reminding that while the country was responsible for less than 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, it is paying a “supersized price for man-made climate change”.

    The UN chief stated that he saw in those regions “a level of climate carnage beyond imagination.”

    By the way, do you expect that the coming COP28 in Dubai (November 30th-December 12th, 2023) will come out with anything different from the usual ‘politically correct,” “radical chic” statements?

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  • Menstrual Health and Hygiene Is Unaffordable for Poor Girls and Women in Latin America

    Menstrual Health and Hygiene Is Unaffordable for Poor Girls and Women in Latin America

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    Young women from the Brazilian state of Bahia attend an informational campaign which also hands out menstrual hygiene products. Poverty and the lack of adequate information on this subject affect millions of girls, adolescents and adult women. CREDIT: Government of Bahia
    • by Humberto Marquez (caracas)
    • Inter Press Service

    CARACAS, May 26 (IPS) – This article is part of IPS coverage of Menstrual Hygiene Day celebrated on May 28.Menstrual hygiene management is elusive for millions of poor women and girls in Latin America, who suffer because their living conditions make it difficult or impossible for them to access resources and services that could make menstruation a simple normal part of life.

    “When my period comes, I miss class for three or four days. My family can’t afford to buy the sanitary napkins that my sister and I need. We use cloths for the blood, although they give me an uncomfortable rash,” says Omaira*, a 15-year-old high school student.

    From her low-income neighborhood of Brisas del Sur, in Ciudad Guayana, 500 kilometers southeast of Caracas, she speaks to IPS by phone: “We can’t buy pills to relieve our pain either. And my period is irregular, it doesn’t come every month, but there are no medical services here for me to go and treat that.”

    In Venezuela, “one in four women does not have menstrual hygiene products and they improvise unhygienic alternatives, such as old clothes, cloths, cardboard or toilet paper to make pads that function as sanitary napkins,” activist Natasha Saturno, with the Solidarity Action NGO, tells IPS.

    “The big problem with these improvised products is that they can cause, at best, discomfort and embarrassment, and at worst, infections that compromise their health,” says Saturno, director of enforceability of rights at the NGO that conducts health assistance and documentation programs and surveys.

    Campaigns that adult and young women have carried out in Mexico and Colombia demanding the right to menstrual health managed to get the authorities to eliminate the value added tax on essential feminine hygiene products. CREDIT: Nora Hinojo/UN Mexico
    Campaigns that adult and young women have carried out in Mexico and Colombia demanding the right to menstrual health managed to get the authorities to eliminate the value added tax on essential feminine hygiene products. CREDIT: Nora Hinojo/UN Mexico

    Universal problem, comprehensive approach

    Is this a local, focalized problem? Not at all: “On any given day, more than 300 million women worldwide are menstruating.  In total, an estimated 500 million lack access to menstrual products and adequate facilities for menstrual hygiene management (MHM),” states a World Bankstudy.

    “Today more than ever we need to bring visibility to the situation of women and girls who do not have access to and education about menstrual hygiene. Communication makes the difference,” said Hugo González, representative of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in Peru.

    UNFPA says there is broad agreement on what girls and women need for good menstrual health, and argues that comprehensive approaches that combine education with infrastructure and with products and efforts to combat stigma are most successful in achieving good menstrual health and hygiene.

    The essential elements are: safe, acceptable, and reliable supplies to manage menstruation; privacy for changing the materials; safe and private washing facilities; and information to make appropriate decisions.

    UNFPA’s theme this year for international Menstrual Hygiene Day, which is celebrated every May 28, is “Making menstruation a normal fact of life by 2030”, the target date for compliance with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the international community at the United Nations.

    United Nations Population Fund workers prepare packages of menstrual hygiene items for women from poor communities in Central America. The cost of some of these products makes them unaffordable for many families. CREDIT: UNFPA
    United Nations Population Fund workers prepare packages of menstrual hygiene items for women from poor communities in Central America. The cost of some of these products makes them unaffordable for many families. CREDIT: UNFPA

    The pink tax

    Nine out of 31 countries in the region consider menstrual hygiene products essential, which makes them exempt from value added tax or reduced VAT, according to the study “Sexist Taxes in Latin America” ??by Germany’s Friedrich Ebert Foundation.

    After a “Tax-free Menstruation” campaign, in 2018 Colombia became the first country in the Americas to eliminate VAT – 16 percent – on menstrual hygiene products. Its neighbor Venezuela still charges 16 percent VAT, and Argentina, Chile, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay charge VAT between 18 and 22 percent on such products.

    Colombia was joined by Ecuador, Guyana, Jamaica, Mexico – where street demonstrations were held against charging VAT on menstrual products – Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago. Other countries have reduced VAT, such as Costa Rica, Panama, Paraguay and Peru, while in Brazil VAT differs between states and averages 7 percent.

    The so-called “pink tax” obviously affects the price of menstrual hygiene products such as disposable and reusable sanitary pads and menstrual cups, which becomes especially burdensome in countries with high inflation and depreciated currencies, such as Argentina and Venezuela.

    According to the average price of the cheapest brands, ten disposable sanitary pads can cost just under a dollar in Mexico, 1.50 dollar in Argentina or Brazil, 1.60 dollar in Colombia, Peru or Venezuela, and almost two dollars in Costa Rica.

    “It’s an important problem,” Saturno points out, “in a country like Venezuela, where the majority of the population lives in poverty and the minimum wage – although it has been increased with some stipends – is still just five dollars a month.”

    Adult women, young women and girls participate in a session to share information and experiences organized by the Colombian association Menstruating Princesses, which emphasizes the importance of education to combat taboos and make menstruation a normal, stress-free experience. CREDIT: Menstruating Princesses
    Adult women, young women and girls participate in a session to share information and experiences organized by the Colombian association Menstruating Princesses, which emphasizes the importance of education to combat taboos and make menstruation a normal, stress-free experience. CREDIT: Menstruating Princesses

    Hostile environment, scarce education

    “If you often can’t buy sanitary pads, that’s the smallest problem. The worst thing is the shame you feel if you go to work and the cloth fails to keep your clothes free of blood, or if you catch an infection,” Nancy *, who at the age of 45 has been an informal sector worker in numerous occupations and trades in Caracas, told IPS.

    The mother of four young people lives in Gramoven, a poor neighborhood in the northwest of the capital. Her two unmarried daughters, ages 18 and 22, have had experiences similar to Nancy’s on their way to school, in the neighborhood, on the bus, and on the subway.

    “The thing is, the period is not seen as something natural, boys and men see it as something dirty, at work they sometimes do not understand that if you are in pain you have to stay at home,” said Nancy. “And when you work for yourself, you have to go out no matter what, because if you don’t go out, no money comes in.”

    Saturno says that “poverty causes women and adolescent girls to miss days of secondary school or work because they do not have the supplies they need when they menstruate.”

    “It becomes a vicious circle, because their academic or work performance is affected, hindering their chances of developing their full potential and earning a better income,” she adds.

    But the problem “goes far beyond materials, it does not end just because someone obtains the products; it includes education and decent working conditions for women,” psychologist Carolina Ramírez, who runs the educational NGO Menstruating Princesses in the Colombian city of Medellín, tells IPS.

    For this reason, “we do not use the term ‘menstrual poverty’ and speak instead of menstrual dignity, vindicating the need for society, schools, workplaces and States to promote education about menstruation and combat illiteracy in that area,” says Ramírez.

    To illustrate, she mentions the widespread rejection of using tampons and cups “because of the old taboo that the vulva shouldn’t be touched, that the vagina shouldn’t be looked at,” in addition to the fact that many areas and communities in Latin American countries not only lack spaces or tools to sterilize products but often do not have clean water.

    A concern raised by both Saturno and Ramírez is the great vulnerability of migrant women in the region – which has received a flood of six million people from Venezuela over the last 10 years, for example – in terms of menstrual and general health, as well as safety.

    Another worrying issue is women in most Latin American prisons, which are unable to provide adequate menstrual hygiene, since they do not have access to disposable products or the possibility to sterilize reusable supplies.

    Throughout the region, “greater efforts are required to break down taboos that violate fundamental rights to health, education, work, and freedom of movement, so that menstruation can be a stress-free human experience,” Ramírez says.

    *Names have been changed to protect the privacy of the interviewees.

    © Inter Press Service (2023) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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  • How Farmer Producer Organisations Benefit Small Scale Farmers in India

    How Farmer Producer Organisations Benefit Small Scale Farmers in India

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    Jaggery making on a sugarcane farm in Mandla. Small-scale farmers in India are benefitting from a scheme where they are able to diversify their farms and get support through Farmer Producer Organisations. Credit: Rina Mukherji/IPS
    • by Rina Mukherji (mandla, jhargram & ahmednagar, india)
    • Inter Press Service

    MANDLA, JHARGRAM & AHMEDNAGAR, INDIA, May 26 (IPS) – Until a decade ago, marginal farmers Gangotri Chandrol and Sunitabai lacked livelihood options in the post-monsoon season.

    With farm holdings of just 2-6 acres in Katangatola village in the tribal-majority Mandla district of Madhya Pradesh, they could only grow wheat, paddy, and sugarcane in the wet season for a living.

    “Our earnings depended on price fluctuations in the market and the little paddy and wheat procured by the government.”

    But now, they can sell their produce at higher than the prevailing market price to their farmers’ collective set up by Ekgaon Technologies, using existing women’s microfinance self-help groups (SHGs).

    Furthermore, value-added products like flavoured jaggery obtained from sugarcane ensure a good income.  Farmers like Gangotri and Sunitabai, who were organised into clusters, and trained to form collective bargaining as buyers of agricultural inputs and suppliers of produce, are better off as a result.

    While agriculture is India’s primary employment source, agricultural productivity has remained low. This is because the average size of an agricultural plot is less than 2 hectares (4.942 acres) (as per 2001 figures), with a quarter of rural holdings as low as 0.4 hectares (0.988 acres).

    Furthermore, poverty and illiteracy make it difficult for most farmers to apply modern scientific inputs to enhance yield. Climate change has further added to the problem, with erratic weather, unseasonal rains, and frequent storms taking their toll on standing crops.

    Realising this, India’s National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) developed its Producer Organisation Promoting Institution (POPI) scheme in 2015. This saw several Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) flourish around 2015, and farmers were inducted into registered companies, holding a certain number of shares, each priced at a nominal sum.

    Women farmers in West Bengal buying inputs for their Farmer Producer Organisation. Credit: Rina Mukherji/IPS

    Ekgaon and its mission in Mandla

    Once a single crop with migration-prone villages, Mandla district has seen a facelift ever since Ekgaon Technologies brought together its rural women and organised them into a Farmer Producers Organisation (FPO). Encouraged to buy seeds and fertilizer to distribute within their organisation, the women emerged as small-time entrepreneurs.

    Traditionally, paddy cultivators, the farmers here, were trained to move to multi-cropping using natural organic farming methods. Local farmers now grow a mix of paddy, wheat, lentils (Masur), pigeon pea (arhar/tur), green gram (mung), and sugarcane on their marginal farms, using improved techniques and inexpensive homemade organic fertilizers.

    Vidhi Patel, a widow and marginal farmer with a one-acre farm, tells IPS, “We were using 40 kg of seeds on our one-acre farm to grow paddy, besides spending on urea, which cost us upwards of Rs 1000. Under the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) method, we now use only 25 kg of seeds, which has halved costs.”

    Gangotri Chandrol, Sunitabai Chandrol, and Devki Uikey have not just learned to make optimum use of their marginal 2-6 acre farms to grow a variety of traditional crops such as wheat, paddy, sugarcane pigeon pea, masur (lentils), mung (green legumes), and millets, but have now ventured into cash crops like arrowroot, flaxseed, nigerseed, and marigold, which fetch them good returns.

    Similarly, Laxmibai and Devki Uikey of the neighbouring Khari village grow sugarcane on one acre of their 3-acre farm and paddy, wheat, marigold and beetroot on the rest.  Besides operating as a small-time entrepreneur, selling agricultural inputs to other members of her FPO, Devki Uikey made organic yellow and maroon colours for the Holi (spring) festival out of beetroot and marigold with some other members of her collective.

    “We procured 25 kg of marigold at Rs 40 per 250 g and 10 kg of beetroot at Rs 160 per kg. After making and selling the colours, we earned Rs 2300-Rs 2500 per member,” Devki Uikey told IPS

    Besides selling premium varieties of rice such as Chindi Kapur and Jeera Shankar that are native to Mandla but not available elsewhere, Ekgaon has developed value-added products such as millet-ginger-raisin nutribars, millet noodles, amla ( gooseberry) candy, which it markets alongside ( collected) forest products like medicinal herbs, beeswax, and honey, on its e-commerce platform.

    Since sugarcane is a major crop in the district and jaggery-making is an important enterprise, Ekgaon has developed ginger and tulsi (basil) flavoured jaggery cubes to brew flavoured tea.  Being part of the FPO has other benefits too. Farmers can access government funds for rainwater harvesters and borewells easily.

    A tie-up with Rajdhani Besan, which markets gram flour, helped farmers who cultivate gram, while a tie-up with Lays saw the entire produce of white peas bought over in bulk for (Lays) chips and wafers. The FPO is also grading and procuring wheat for the government, earning the women farmers a small sum.

    Consequently, marginal farmers who earned around Rs 50,000 (USD 608) per acre in the past are easily making Rs 3,00,000  (USD 3647) per acre now. Migration has stopped in most villages, and the literacy level has improved.

    PRADAN’s initiatives in Jhargram and Bankura

    Professional Assistance for Development Action (PRADAN) has also converted existing women’s microfinance self-help groups (SHGs) into FPOs in the resource-poor, tribal-majority Bankura and Jhargram districts of West Bengal.

    Despite good monsoon rains, water scarcity is the norm in these paddy-growing districts, owing to rocky terrain. Of late, erratic rains have made matters worse, spurring out migration. To withstand the vagaries of the weather, the women farmer-shareholders of the Amon Mahila Chashi Producers Company Limited (Amon Women Farmers Producers Company Limited) and other FPOs now grow hardy, traditional paddy varieties using homemade organic fertilizers.

    Sumita Mahato, whose family lives off a one-bigha (0.625 acres) farm, and  Swarnaprabha Mahato, whose three-bigha (1.875 acres) farm must provide for an eight-member family, told IPS: “Chemical fertilizers cost Rs 5000 per 0.625 acres, while homemade organic fertilizer costs us only Rs 80-90 for the same per bigha.”

    It has helped them get organic certification for their produce, comprising traditional rice varieties like Malliphul, Satthiya  (red rice), and Kalabhat (black rice), earning them Rs 35 per kg (as against  Rs 12 per kg that rice grown with chemical inputs).  Rainwater harvesters accessed as members of the FPO, under the state government’s scheme for the region, have helped, too, increasing productivity from 25-30 quintals per acre to 40-45 quintals per acre.

    As multi-cropping is impossible here owing to limited moisture in the rocky soil, the farmers grow turmeric as a cash crop on the village commons. In Jhargram, Sonajhuri (Acacia auriculiformis) and Cashew are grown for timber and nuts, while in Bankura, farms along the Kankabati River grow watermelons for collective profit.

    Traditionally, women in these regions made plates from sal (Shorea robusta) leaves collected from the jungles. They now process and mould plates for urban markets using moulding machines, selling them with their other products online on IndiaMart, earning ample profits to lead well-settled lives.

    Watermelon crop in Bankura. Credit: Rina Mukherji/IPS
    Watermelon crop in Bankura. Credit: Rina Mukherji/IPS

    WOTR’s Efforts in Maharashtra

    In Parner taluka (sub-division) of Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra, the community-led Ankur Farmer Producers Organisation (FPO), facilitated by the Watershed Trust (WOTR), comprises 762 farmer-shareholders from the villages of Hiwrekorda, Bhangadevadi, and Dawalpuri, with farm holdings of 3-15 acres range, who supplement their incomes through dairy farming.

    Being a rain-shadow, the drought-prone region with limited water resources, farming was always rainfed here, with large tracts of land lying barren.

    Once Ankur was formed, the farmers could avail of Rs 80 lakh from the State Government (of Maharashtra) contributing the rest to lay a 7.5 km pipeline to bring water from the Kalu river and fill up a lined farm pond, and set up a pump-house for collective benefit.

    This enabled them to bring 100 acres of farmland under cultivation to grow onions, marigolds, chrysanthemums, and other crops for the market. Their rainfed single-crop lands also grow two crops with the additional moisture available.

    The farmers have opted for organic inputs like vermicompost, which they prepare and sell, both within and outside their FPO, although, as farmers Somnath Palwe and Chandrakant Gawde say, “Our members use both organic and improved seeds, as per preference.”

    From growing a single crop of bajra (pearl millet), jowar (sorghum), and pulses, the farmers now grow maize, green gram, marigold, chrysanthemum, and onions, besides cauliflower and tomato. Incomes have grown from as low as Rs 50,000 ( USD 61) for an acre of cultivable land to as high as Rs 5 00,000 (USD 731).

    Ankur sells its products online to Ninjacart and offline-in wholesale markets. In both cases, the sale is direct and without middlemen. Farmer Ashok Phalke, tells me. “Onions used to fetch us Rs 10 per kg, while the market price was Rs 12 per kg. We would lose Rs 2 per kg. Now that we sell directly in markets as a group, we earn more. The same goes for tomatoes and flowers.”

    Besides promoting organic farming, the FPOs stress natural multi-cropping methods to control pests, such as growing horse gram in combination with maize or sorghum. This attracts birds, which, in turn, help control harmful pests naturally. Kitchen gardens are encouraged as they counter nutritional deficiencies in farming families.

    Government Encouragement of FPOs

    The Indian government intends to set up 10,000 FPOs all over India for Rs 6865 crore. Under this scheme, FPOs are to receive financial assistance of up to Rs 18 lakh for three years, with each farmer-member being eligible for an equity grant and credit guarantee facility. However, not all existing FPOs have been co-opted into the government scheme.

    Since millets are hardy and impervious to erratic weather patterns, the government has been pushing for their cultivation in regions where they were traditionally grown. But the government’s dictum of “one District, one Product” has invited criticism, especially from grassroots organisations, who see multi-cropping as the only guarantor against natural disasters such as hailstorms and cyclones.

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  • Climate Change Gets Its Day in Court

    Climate Change Gets Its Day in Court

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    • Opinion by Ines M Pousadela (montevideo, uruguay)
    • Inter Press Service

    MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, May 25 (IPS) – As a matter of global justice, the climate crisis has rightfully made its way to the world’s highest court.

    On 29 March 2023, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) unanimously adopted a resolution asking the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to issue an advisory opinion on the obligations of states on climate change. The initiative was led by the Pacific Island state of Vanuatu, one of several at risk of disappearing under rising sea levels. It was co-sponsored by 132 states and actively supported by networks of grassroots youth groups from the Pacific and around the world.

    Civil society’s campaign

    In 2019, a group of law students from the University of the South Pacific formed Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change (PISFCC), a regional organisation with national chapters in Fiji, the Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu. PISFCC advocated with the Pacific Island Forum – the key regional body – to put the call for an ICJ opinion on its agenda. The government of Vanuatu announced it would seek this in September 2021, and Pacific civil society organisations (CSOs) formed an alliance – the Alliance for a Climate Justice Advisory Opinion – that has since grown to include CSOs and many others from around the world, including UN Special Rapporteurs and global experts.

    The campaign made heavy use of social media, with people sharing their stories on the impacts of climate change and emphasising the importance of an ICJ opinion to help support calls for climate action, including climate litigation. It organised globally, sharing a toolkit used by activists around the world, and took to the streets locally. In Vanuatu, where it all started, children demonstrated in September 2022 to call attention to the impacts of climate change as their country’s single greatest development threat and express support for the call for an ICJ opinion.

    In the run-up to the UNGA session that adopted the historic resolution, thousands of CSOs from around the world supported a letter calling for governments to back the vote.

    The ICJ’s role

    The ICJ is made up of 15 judges elected by the UNGA and UN Security Council. It settles legal disputes between states and provides advisory opinions on legal questions referred to it by other parts of the UN system.

    The questions posed to the ICJ aim to clarify the obligations of states under international law to protect the climate system and environment from human-induced greenhouse gas emissions. They also ask about the legal responsibilities of states that have caused significant environmental harm towards other states, particularly small islands, and towards current and future generations.

    To provide its advisory opinion, the ICJ will have to interpret states’ obligations as outlined in the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the 2015 Paris Agreement as well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a variety of international covenants and treaties. It may consider previous UNGA resolutions on climate change, such as the recent one recognising access to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment as a universal human right, and other resolutions by the UN Human Rights Council and reports by the Office of the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights and its independent human rights experts. It may also take into account decisions by UN treaty bodies and its own jurisprudence on climate and environmental matters.

    Next steps

    According to its statute, the ICJ can seek written statements from states or international organisations likely to have relevant information on the issue at hand. On 20 April, it communicated its decision to treat the UN and all its member states as ‘likely to be able to furnish information on the questions submitted to the Court’ and gave them six months to submit written statements, after which they will have three months to make written comments on statements made by other states or organisations.

    Civil society doesn’t have any right to submit formal statements, so climate activists are urging as many people as possible to advocate towards their governments to make strong submissions that will lead to a progressive ICJ opinion. After submissions close, the ICJ is likely to take several months to deliberate, so its opinion may be expected at some point in 2024, likely towards the end of the year.

    Advisory opinions aren’t binding. They don’t impose obligations on states. But they shape the global understanding of states’ obligations under international law and can motivate states to show their compliance with rising standards. An ICJ opinion could positively influence climate negotiations, pushing forward long-delayed initiatives on funding for loss and damage. It could encourage states to make more ambitious pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions. It might also help raise awareness of the particular risks faced by small island states and provide arguments in favour of stronger climate action, helping climate advocates gain ground within governments.

    A progressive advisory opinion could also help support domestic climate litigation: research shows that domestic courts are increasingly inclined to cite ICJ opinions and other sources of international law, including when it comes to determining climate issues.

    The risk can’t be ruled out of a disappointing ICJ opinion merely reiterating the content of existing climate treaties without making any progress on states’ obligations. But climate activists find reasons to expect much more: many see this as a unique opportunity, brought about by their own persistent efforts, to advance climate justice and push for action that meets the scale of the crisis.

    Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

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  • Population Denialism is Reminiscent of Climate Denialism

    Population Denialism is Reminiscent of Climate Denialism

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    • Opinion by Kirsten Stade (st paul, minnesota, usa)
    • Inter Press Service

    ST PAUL, Minnesota, USA, May 25 (IPS) – A new study estimates that global heating will push billions of people outside the comfortable range of temperature and weather in which we have evolved.

    While coverage of the study notes that rapid emissions cuts could greatly reduce the number of people forced to live amid unprecedented extremes, it fails to mention the obvious: that reducing our population would have the same effect.

    Not long ago, the idea that human population growth drives both human suffering and environmental decline was considered common sense. That changed in the 1990s in the wake of several egregious population control programs, ranging from China’s one-child policy to forced sterilizations in China, India, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere.

    Today, the mere mention of population growth in connection with environmental protection or human well-being gets demonized as “neo-Malthusian” or “eugenicist” – notwithstanding the fact that the vast majority of efforts to lower fertility, whether to alleviate poverty or to reduce pressure on resources, have been rights-based and voluntary.

    What is most troubling about this mischaracterization is that it deflects attention from the enormous violations of reproductive rights that occur in the name of increasing reproduction.

    Pronatalism — the social pressures, religious doctrine, and government policies designed to induce people to have more children – has long been the most prevalent form of reproductive coercion.

    Impressed upon people by family members, religious leaders, and politicians pursuing racist, nationalist, military, and/or economic agendas, pronatalism shows up through abortion bans and alarmist messaging that promotes childbirth for certain ethnic groups. The common thread is treating people as reproductive vessels for external agendas.

    Over 218 million women worldwide who want to avoid pregnancy have an unmet need for contraception. This troubling reality is the result of both simple unavailability of contraceptives, and of deep-seated pronatalist attitudes–often held by husbands and other family members- that make it impossible for women to use them.

    When women are expected to produce large families regardless of their own wants, pronatalism not only denies their reproductive autonomy; it also worsens poverty and damages the environment. A new study by the Swedish Research Council debunks the stubborn misconception that population growth has a negligible effect on climate change since it’s concentrated in low-consumption countries.

    In fact, the study finds, population growth is the biggest driver of carbon emissions and is canceling out emissions reductions made through renewables and efficiency. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), population growth is one of the “strongest drivers of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion in the last decade.”

    Population growth and resultant agricultural expansion drive water scarcity, soil depletion, deforestation, land degradation, and damage to ecosystems that humans depend on. The connection between population growth and environmental impacts is clear, yet frequently denied, and this denial has real consequences.

    Since addressing population growth fell out of favor in the 1990s, international funding for family planning declined 35 percent and falls far short of meeting global need.

    Population denialism is reminiscent of climate denialism in its disregard for science and its failure to acknowledge the suffering of millions. Population deniers invoke Malthus and Margaret Sanger to invalidate population concerns by associating them with infamous sources, while ignoring unimpeachable ones like the IPCC.

    While Malthus’ doomism and Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb failed to foresee new agricultural technologies that averted the famine and population crash they predicted, population denialists make the opposite mistake.

    They adhere to a cornucopian faith that technology will magically solve our problems, and assume that new low-carbon energy sources and unproven interventions like carbon capture will fix everything.

    They won’t.

    In fact green tech raises serious environmental and social problems of its own. Solar and wind energy and the infrastructure for transmitting the power they generate requires far more land area than fossil fuel plants, with consequences for wildlife and its habitat. Lithium-ion batteries in electric cars and e-bikes use cobalt mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by low-wage workers subjected to toxic dumping and en masse displacement.

    Population deniers are rightly concerned with equitable development of the world’s impoverished regions, but development will mean more emissions, more water use, more habitat destruction.

    If current trends continue, the global middle class is projected to reach 5 billion by 2030. To enable all people to attain a reasonable standard of living without further straining natural systems, we must make access to family planning for all people a matter of urgent international concern.

    The good news is that doing so reaps rewards not only for the planet but for human well-being. In every culture where fertility rates have declined, even staggering government investment in pronatalist incentives is insufficient to compel women to go back to the high birth rates they have left behind – an indication that women have a latent wish for low fertility.

    This suggests that the path forward lies in acknowledging both the human and environmental toll of high birth rates and resultant population growth, and giving women the universal, free access to contraceptives and abortion care that will enable them to realize their reproductive wishes.

    Kirsten Stade is a conservation biologist and communications manager of the NGO Population Balance

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  • World Hunger Day: Renewing Our Commitment to Elevating Women as Change Agents for Ending Hunger

    World Hunger Day: Renewing Our Commitment to Elevating Women as Change Agents for Ending Hunger

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    Manou Gounou, a volunteer trainer for food security, stands with a moringa plant at Gbegourou Epicenter in Benin in 2021. The moringa plant is highly nutritious and The Hunger Project is a strong advocate for its use in communities throughout Africa.
    • Opinion by Elodie Iko (porto-novo, benin)
    • Inter Press Service

    PORTO-NOVO, Benin, May 24 (IPS) – This upcoming weekend, on May 28, we are commemorating World Hunger Day. The day serves as a reminder that more than 800 million people around the world are living with hunger and malnutrition. That number is staggering, but there is hope.

    World Hunger Day also celebrates the fact that hunger can end. We can create sustainable food systems, to ensure that everyone has access to nutritious and affordable food, both now and in the future.

    I see it every day in my role as the Country Director of The Hunger Project-Benin.

    So, what does it take? In my experience, the single greatest change that a community can make to end hunger and improve nutrition is a shift in mindset around gender equality.

    In Benin, in West Africa, the government has put in place many policies to improve access to drinking water and sanitation, improve healthcare and increase access to nutritious food.

    Yet high child mortality and morbidity rates reveal the existence of important underlying factors that catalyze malnutrition, but are generally minimized in policymaking. One of these factors is gender inequality.

    When looking at the distribution of resources and responsibilities in the household, particularly between men and women, the negative influence of gender inequality on household nutrition becomes quite evident.

    In our patriarchal society, men are seen as the heads of households. They have the social responsibility of making resources available to the household to provide meals. It is expected that women then use these resources to ensure household nutrition.

    In today’s world, where the price of food and agriculture inputs has skyrocketed, feeding a family is becoming challenging for many. It is often falling to women to find extra sources of income to guarantee their family has food, though many face barriers like a lack of education, lack of resources and little time due to household tasks, like childcare, fetching water, and tending to livestock.

    Though she may be the one closing the gap and ensuring the family has food on the table, in the service of the meal, both in quantity and in quality, priority is given to men. Women usually ensure that others have eaten first.

    They then eat what is left, which often does not meet their daily nutritional needs, particularly for women who are pregnant or breastfeeding. Undernutrition and hidden hunger have specific consequences for the health and safety of women and girls, as they increase the risk of life-threatening complications during pregnancy and childbirth, weaken their immunity to infections, and reduce their learning potential. This is how malnutrition becomes multi-generational.

    These are the challenges we face in our work to end hunger. They are deeply entrenched societal norms but they can change.

    At The Hunger Project, we work with women and men, girls and boys to identify these mindsets and shift them. A proven way to overcome many systematic barriers to a woman’s success has been increased participation by women in local, regional and national legislation as empowered change agents.

    So, we work with women to take on leadership roles in the community and raise their voices in public settings to demand change and accountability. Over 38,600 women and 28,000 men in 22 communities in Benin have undergone training in Women’s Empowerment.

    Over 3,000 community leaders (about 50/50 women to men) have been trained to conduct THP’s Women’s Empowerment workshops in their communities, guaranteeing that the work to shift mindsets can continue even after The Hunger Project leaves a community.

    We also facilitate women’s entrepreneurship and literacy courses, so that women have the agency and confidence to start and manage a business. Since 2008, over 32,500 women have gone through THP training on income generation in Benin. Through these trainings, women are able to increase their incomes to purchase nutritious foods for themselves and their families.

    We are working with these local leaders to re-envision the local food system to make it work for the millions of women living with chronic hunger and malnutrition, so that they can break the cycle of malnutrition among women and girls.

    This includes working with communities to plant diverse household gardens with nutritious staple foods, investments in infrastructure to process these foods adequately to preserve their nutritional value, and strong local distribution channels that ensure availability of nutritious foods throughout the year.

    Women are key to ending hunger and breaking the cycle of malnutrition. To do so, they need an enabling environment around them and a belief in themselves that they can create a future for themselves and their families.

    Elodie Iko became the Country Manager for The Hunger Project-Benin, in 2022. She has over 15 years of professional experience in the field of development and management of projects and human resources, with a specific focus on gender and women’s empowerment. Elodie joins the team having worked for Plan International Benin as a Gender and Inclusion Advisor. Prior to that, Elodie worked for The Hunger Project-Benin from 2013 to 2020, first as a gender program officer, then adding inclusive finance, the coordination of the ‘’Her Choice’’ program against child marriage and ”leadership and governance in the epicenters of THP-Benin” program to her responsibilities. Her creativity and collaboration on these and other projects have worked to improve the status and position of women/girls, and thereby, strengthen gender inclusion and equality across Benin.

    Founded in 1977, The Hunger Project is a global non-profit organization whose mission is to end hunger and poverty by pioneering sustainable, community-led, women-centered strategies and advocating for their widespread adoption in countries throughout the globe. The Hunger Project is active in 23 countries, with global headquarters based in New York City.

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  • Governments Are Changing Fisheries Management for the Better, but More Action Is Still Needed

    Governments Are Changing Fisheries Management for the Better, but More Action Is Still Needed

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    Yellowfin tuna diving.
    • Opinion by Grantly Galland (washington dc)
    • Inter Press Service

    WASHINGTON DC, May 23 (IPS) – Global fisheries are worth more than US$140 billion each year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. But this hefty sum does not capture the true value of fish to ocean health, and to the food security and cultures of communities around the world.

    Unfortunately, many important populations were allowed to be overfished for decades by the same regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs) charged with their conservation and sustainable use, and in some regions, this continues.

    At the same time, the demand for fish continues to grow— from consumers of high-end bluefin tuna sushi to coastal communities who depend on seafood as their primary source of protein. So, RFMOs and governments must do more to ensure sustainable fishing and long-term ocean health.

    More than 20 years ago, the United Nations Fish Stocks Agreement (UNFSA) entered into force as the only global, binding instrument holding governments accountable for managing the shared fish stocks of the high seas.

    Under the agreement, fish should be managed sustainably and consistent with the best available science. Governments that are party to this treaty—and to RFMOs—are supposed to follow its management obligations, and work towards greater sustainability of the transboundary species, including tunas and sharks, vital to the ocean and economies.

    Five of those RFMOs focus specifically on tuna management, one each in the Atlantic, eastern Pacific, western and central Pacific, Indian, and Southern oceans. They operate autonomously and, although there is some overlap among their constituent members, each sets its own rules for tuna fishing in its waters.

    This makes UNFSA critical to successful management of tuna fisheries. And because the tuna RFMOs manage some of the world’s most iconic species, they often set the tone for how other similar bodies operate.

    All of this is pertinent now because UNFSA member governments are meeting in New York May 22-26 to evaluate whether RFMOs are performing consistent with their commitments. A similar review was conducted in 2016, and although management has improved over time, some areas require more work, especially when it comes to ending overfishing and considering the health and biodiversity of the entire ecosystem.

    Since 2016, the share of highly migratory stocks that are overfished increased from 36% to 40%, making it all the more urgent for governments to act quickly.

    UNFSA calls on RFMOs to be precautionary in how they regulate fishing, although that guidance is not always followed. There are several examples of extensive overfishing of target species, such as bluefin tuna in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans; yellowfin tuna in the Indian Ocean; and mako, oceanic whitetip sharks and other species that are caught unintentionally.

    Although the RFMOs that manage these fisheries have stopped the overfishing in some cases, in others they have not. But there are signs of progress. Over the past decade, a new precautionary management approach known as harvest strategies has gained traction among RFMOs.

    These strategies (or management procedures) are science-based rules that automatically adjust catch limits based on several factors, such as population status. If widely implemented, they should end overfishing and prevent it from threatening these populations again.

    Harvest strategies have already been successful, particularly in the Southern and Atlantic oceans, where they’ve been adopted for several species, including bluefin tuna and cod, fish stocks for which precautionary management has historically been difficult, or even controversial.

    While this progress is important, UNFSA members are still falling short in an area they have agreed is critically important: taking an ecosystem approach to management. For generations, fisheries managers focused on individual fish stocks—adopting catch limits and other measures with little thought to the broader ecosystem.

    Science shows that maintaining ecosystem health is critical to sustainable fishing. Yet, to date, RFMOs largely have not consistently assessed or addressed the wider impacts of fishing on ecosystems, including predator-prey relationships, habitat for target and non-target species, and other factors.

    Instead, most action has been limited to reducing the impact of bycatch on individual shark species. Better data collection and sharing, and more monitoring of fishing activities, could help integrate stronger ecosystem considerations into management. The more RFMOs can build the whole ecosystem into their decisions, the better it will be for their fisheries.

    For example, in the western and central Pacific, the $10 billion skipjack tuna fishery is an enormous economic driver for island nations that are threatened by climate change. But the harvest strategy in place there is nonbinding and unimplemented.

    For a fishery facing changes in stock distribution due to warming waters, as well as increased market pressures, delayed action on implementation—and a lack of an ecosystem approach—may make matters worse.

    At this week’s UNFSA meeting, RFMOs should be commended for the work they have done in the seven years since the last review. Good progress has been made, including improvements to compliance efforts, and monitoring and enforcement to fight illegal fishing.

    But many of the legal obligations of the treaty remain unfulfilled. As such, sustainability is still out of reach for some critically important stocks, and almost no ecosystem-based protections are in place.

    As governments convene this week, they should look to the lessons of the past—when poor decision-making threatened the future of some fisheries—and seize the opportunity to modernize management and adhere to the promises they have made on conservation. The biodiversity in the world’s ocean shouldn’t have to wait another seven years for action.

    Grantly Galland leads policy work related to regional fisheries management organizations for The Pew Charitable Trusts’ international fisheries project.

    IPS UN Bureau


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    © Inter Press Service (2023) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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  • Rainwater Harvesting Brings Hope for Central Americas Dry Corridor – Video

    Rainwater Harvesting Brings Hope for Central Americas Dry Corridor – Video

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    One of the rainwater harvesting systems installed in rural settlements in eastern El Salvador, in the Central American Dry Corridor. It is based on a system of pipes and gutters, which run from the rooftop to a polyethylene bag in a rectangular hole dug in the yard. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS
    • by Edgardo Ayala (san salvador)
    • Inter Press Service

    SAN SALVADOR, May 22 (IPS) – Chronic water shortages make life increasingly difficult for the more than 10.5 million people who live in the Central American Dry Corridor, an arid strip that covers 35 percent of that region.

    In the Dry Corridor, the lack of water complicates not only basic hygiene and household activities like bathing, washing clothes or dishes, but also agriculture and food production.

    “This is a very difficult place to live, due to the lack of water,” said Marlene Carballo, a 23-year-old Salvadoran farmer from the Jocote Dulce canton, a rural settlement in the Chinameca municipality, in the eastern El Salvador department of San Miguel.

    The municipality is one of the 144 in the country that is located in the Dry Corridor, where more than 73 percent of the rural population lives in poverty and 7.1 million suffer from severe food insecurity, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

    But poor rural settlements have not stood idly by.

    The scarcity of water has prompted community leaders, especially women, who suffer the brunt of the shortage, to organize themselves in rural associations to promote water projects.

    In the various villages in Jocote Dulce, rainwater harvesting projects, reforestation and support for the development of small poultry farms have arrived, with the backing of local and international organizations, and funding from European countries.

    Rainwater harvesting is based on systems such as the one installed in Carballo’s house: when it rains, the water that falls on the roof runs through a pipe to a huge waterproof bag in the yard, which functions as a catchment tank that can hold up to 80,000 liters.

    Other mechanisms also include plastic-lined rectangular-shaped holes dug in the ground.

    The harvested water is used to irrigate family gardens, provide water to livestock used in food production such as cows, oxen and horses, and even for aquaculture.

    Similar projects have been carried out in the rest of the Central American countries that form part of the Dry Corridor.

    In Guatemala, for example, FAO and other organizations have benefited 5,416 families in 80 rural settlements in two departments of the country.

    © Inter Press Service (2023) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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