Opinion by Jomo Kwame Sundaram (kuala lumpur, malaysia)
Inter Press Service
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Aug 24 (IPS) – International governance arrangements are in trouble. Condemned as ‘dysfunctional’ by some, multilateral agreements have been discarded or ignored by the powerful except when useful to protect their interests or provide legitimacy.
Economic multilateralism under siege
Undoubtedly, many multilateral arrangements have become less appropriate. At their heart is the United Nations (UN) system, conceived in the last year of US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency and World War Two.
Jomo Kwame SundaramThe 1944 UN conference at Bretton Woods sought to build the foundations for the post-war economic order. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) would create conditions for lasting growth and stability, with the World Bank financing post-war reconstruction and post-colonial development.
The Bretton Woods agreement allowed the US Federal Reserve Bank (Fed) to issue dollars, as if backed by gold. In 1971, President Richard Nixon repudiated the US’s Bretton Woods obligations. With US military and ‘soft’ power, widespread acceptance of the dollar since has effectively extended the Fed’s ‘exorbitant privilege’.
This unilateral repudiation of US commitments has been a precursor of the fate of some other multilateral arrangements. Most were US-designed, some in consultation with allies. Most key privileges of the global North – especially the US – continue, while duties and obligations are ignored if deemed inconvenient.
The International Trade Organization (ITO) was to be the third leg of the post-war multilateral economic order, later reaffirmed by the 1948 Havana Charter. Despite post-war world hegemony, the ITO was rejected by the protectionist US Congress.
The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) became the compromise substitute. Recognizing the diversity of national economic capacities and capabilities, GATT did not impose a ‘one-size-fits-all’ requirement on all participants.
But lessons from such successful flexible precedents were ignored in creating the World Trade Organization (WTO) from 1995. The WTO has imposed onerous new obligations such as the all-or-nothing ‘single commitment’ requirement and the Agreement on Trade-related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).
Overcoming marginalization
In September 2021, the UN Secretary-General (SG) issued Our Common Agenda, with new international governance proposals. Besides its new status quo bias, the proposals fall short of what is needed in terms of both scope and ambition.
Problematically, it legitimizes and seeks to consolidate already diffuse institutional responsibilities, further weakening UN inter-governmental leadership. This would legitimize international governance infiltration by multi-stakeholder partnerships run by private business interests.
The last six decades have seen often glacially slow changes to improve UN-led gradual – mainly due to the recalcitrance of the privileged and powerful. These have changed Member State and civil society participation, with mixed effects.
Fairer institutions and arrangements – agreed to after inclusive inter-governmental negotiations – have been replaced by multi-stakeholder processes. These are typically not accountable to Member States, let alone their publics.
Such biases and other problems of ostensibly multilateral processes and practices have eroded public trust and confidence in multilateralism, especially the UN system.
Multi-stakeholder processes – involving transnational corporate interests – may expedite decision-making, even implementation. But the most authoritative study so far found little evidence of net improvements, especially for the already marginalized.
New multi-stakeholder governance – without meaningful prior approval by relevant inter-governmental bodies – undoubtedly strengthens executive authority and autonomy. But such initiatives have also undermined legitimacy and public trust, with few net gains.
All too often, new multi-stakeholder arrangements with private parties have been made without Member State approval, even if retrospectively due to exigencies.
Unsurprisingly, many in developing countries have become alienated from and suspicious of those acting in the name of multilateral institutions and processes.
Hence, many in the global South have been disinclined to cooperate with the SG’s efforts to resuscitate, reinvent and repurpose undoubtedly defunct inter-governmental institutions and processes.
Way forward?
But the SG report has also made some important proposals deserving careful consideration. It is correct in recognizing the long overdue need to reform existing governance arrangements to adapt the multilateral system to current and future needs and requirements.
This reform opportunity is now at risk due to the lack of Member State support, participation and legitimacy. Inclusive consultative processes – involving state and non-state actors – must strive for broadly acceptable pragmatic solutions. These should be adopted and implemented via inter-governmental processes.
Undoubtedly, multilateralism and the UN system have experienced growing marginalization after the first Cold War ended. The UN has been slowly, but surely superseded by NATO and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), led by the G7 group of the biggest rich economies.
The UN’s second SG, Dag Hammarskjold – who had worked for the OECD’s predecessor – warned the international community, especially developing countries, of the dangers posed by the rich nations’ club. This became evident when the rich blocked and pre-empted the UN from leading on international tax cooperation.
Seeking quick fixes, ‘clever’ advisers or consultants may have persuaded the SG to embrace corporate-dominated multi-stakeholder partnerships contravening UN norms. More recent SG initiatives may suggest his frustration with the failure of that approach.
After the problematic and controversial record of such processes and events in recent years, the SG can still rise to contemporary challenges and strengthen multilateralism by changing course. By restoring the effectiveness and legitimacy of multilateralism, the UN will not only be fit, but also essential for humanity’s future.
TOKYO, Japan, Aug 23 (IPS) – At this year’s G7 summit in Japan, global leaders emphasized the importance of unity as the world navigates grave threats to multilateralism. The message was clear – trusted global platforms for dialogue and solutions are extremely crucial in current times.
They are right. More than ever before, effective multilateralism is needed to tackle the polycrisis and to create the world we want: one in which there is prosperity for all.
Thirty years ago, The Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD), was launched as a multi-stakeholder forum for Japan and Africa to deepen collaboration, with the facilitation of partners like the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
UNDP is proud to be associated with TICAD – not least for it unique in its ability to tackle a wide – range of key issues of critical interest to Africa – like investment, skills training and technology transfer.
Since inception, TICAD’s investments in both aid and investment to Africa extend over the $100 billion mark. In the last three years alone, Japan has implemented 69 projects across Africa.
Ahunna EziakonwaCOVID -19 delivered a heavy setback to hard-won development gains, pushing millions back into poverty. Before the pandemic, Africa had seen important progress in human development, with living standards improving for a good part of the population. Six of the ten fastest – growing countries in the world were in Africa.
Today, we see regression – with COVID, growing conflict in some parts of Africa, and a cost-of-living crisis triggered by the impact of the war in Ukraine.
The challenges Africa faces today affect global prospects for attaining the SDGs, and put into sharp focus the criticality of effective partnerships. If we are to rescue the SDGs in Africa, we need to invest in opportunities that are foundational to accelerating Africa’s development.
So what is smart investment in Africa today?
It is all about investing in people. In less than ten years, 42 per cent of the world’s youth will live in Africa – and if the continent invests smartly, its young teeming innovators can create technology – led solutions to drive socioeconomic progress.
To secure a bright and prosperous future in Africa, Japan and UNDP are working together to invest in Africa’s people. This breadth stretches from support for inclusive governance, to ensuring women and youth are empowered, to social sectors like health and education.
In Nigeria, over 1000 young people in the conflict affected regions of the North-East and Middle Belt received an 8-week training on community – driven trade, and cash grants to help them set up new businesses. In Kenya and South Africa, young men and women participated in job skills training for car manufacturing in collaboration with Toyota Motor Corporation.
And in The Central African Republic, income generating activity groups were established, offering training in financial independence across sectors such as retail and animal husbandry. This initiative utilized the 5S-Kaizen methodology through a partnership with JICA. Japan’s support to UNDP’s Liptako Gourma Stabilization Facility has resulted in over 3000 women and youth benefitting from cross-border trade infrastructure and increased incomes for highly vulnerable borderland communities.
Literacy Training at Koudoukou Elementary School in the 3rd arrondissement of Bangui. Credit: UNDP Central African Republic, Arsène Christ NGOUMBANGO NZABE
Investing in green growth and trade
As the continent continues to chart its development pathway, with a strong vote for industrialization and diversification, the importance of advanced technological expertise is elevated. The new generation of development partnerships with Africa must frontload technology transfer including on a commercial basis – in areas of agriculture, health, education, energy transitions and smart cities.
A prime illustration is Japan’s Green Growth Initiative with Africa, which promotes green economics and support to just energy transitions with African ownership at the core.
Development of local industries and regional value chains will promote Africa’s industrialization – which both COVID 19 and the war in Ukraine have demonstrated – are key tenets of not just effective but also responsible partnerships.
A recent investment report by UNDP identified 157 SDG investment opportunities across 31 industries in Africa with significant financial and impact potential. The industries range from food and beverage to infrastructure, health care, renewable resources and alternative energy.
These investments now have an even larger network of markets – thanks to the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) – the world’s largest trade zone by number of participating countries and geographical coverage.
The Japan – UNDP partnership has proven its worth in stepping into areas of development acceleration. As Africa stands at a critical inflection point, a vital window of opportunity exists to unlock the continent’s full potential – making Africa’s resources work for its people’s development. Now is the time for to step up the partnership. Now is the time to unlock Africa’s promise.
Read more about UNDP’s Renewed Strategic Offer in Africa ( Africa’s promise) here.
Ahunna Eziakonwa is Assistant Secretary-General, Assistant Administrator and Director of the Regional Bureau for Africa, UNDP
Opinion by Enrique Hernandez Pando (madrid, spain)
Inter Press Service
MADRID, Spain, Aug 22 (IPS) – Enrique Hernández Pando is Executive Director, Commercial Development & Impact, GALVmedEl Castellar – For 33-year-old mother-of-seven and poultry farmer Helena Kindole in Chanya village in Tanzania, one of the main barriers to growing her chicken business is a lack of access to health services. But not for herself or her family – for her animals.
With smallholder poultry farming often a lifeline for millions of low-income and rural families – accounting for 80% of poultry production in the region – access to medicines and vaccines is just as important for livestock as it is for people. And yet, logistical, infrastructural, and supply challenges are hindering access to veterinary services across the African continent and therefore, holding back smallholder productivity.
Enrique Hernández PandoAt the same time, a rapidly industrialising poultry sector in many developed countries, and an increase in grain prices globally, coupled with cheap imports from more developed markets and low access to animal health care is driving inequality between small- and large-scale producers, threatening to squeeze out smallholder poultry farmers.
Thankfully, this is starting to change. Animal health initiatives are helping local hatcheries to vaccinate chicks against common and damaging diseases before selling them to small-scale farmers, who rear the chicks until they are six months old, eventually selling them to neighbours, restaurants, and other businesses nearby.
For women like Helena, who make up nearly half of the global agricultural workforce in developing countries and in sub-Saharan Africa, the poultry sector offers a crucial source of income and healthy animals are essential for decent livelihoods.
Equipping farmers with the right tools can help to set them up for success to compete alongside more industrialised production systems.
Introducing vaccinations at local hatcheries can strengthen small-scale producers’ sustainability and commercial clout. Supporting these hatcheries with the necessary vaccination equipment and expertise means they can provide customers with large numbers of chicks that are vaccinated against common poultry diseases, such as Newcastle disease and Infectious bronchitis, the former of which contributes to 60% of poultry mortalities in many African countries. This reduces the risk of bird loss, contributing to improved income and more successful businesses overall.
Small-scale chicken farmer in Tanzania/Arusha, 2015. Credit: Karel Prinsloo/GALVmed
But implementing vaccination measures alone is not enough, as a lack of technical support and knowledge on zoonoses and other infectious diseases that affect poultry can also hinder productivity. Training on animal health practices, market development opportunities, and advice on biosecurity, good management practices, and more are also crucial pieces of the puzzle. Providing this can help to level the playing field between large scale, industrial hatcheries and small-scale producers.
The PREVENT project (Promoting and Enabling Vaccination Efficiently, Now and Tomorrow) is one example of an initiative working to improve poultry production for Africa’s rapidly growing population. In just two years, this four-year initiative has administered 159 million vaccine doses and vaccinated 49 million hatchery chicks. It has also trained 100 field technicians who have conducted 2,600 farm visits and held over 1,400 farmer meetings across four countries in sub-Saharan Africa, to date.
A low-input but high-producing sector, raising chickens offers a reliable pathway out of poverty for many rural households. A small-scale producer can easily sell their chicks or chickens at the market as they are more affordable for the consumer than beef, for example, but also bring a myriad of other benefits. They add value to social structures, are high in protein, and, on top of this, can directly benefit women who in fact make up the majority of smallholder poultry farmers in the developing world.
Small-scale chicken farmer in Tanzania/Arusha, 2015. Credit: Karel Prinsloo/GALVmed
Against the backdrop of a global cost of living crisis, record-breaking temperatures, and ongoing conflicts, closing the inequality gap for smallholder farmers is critical to build a sustainable future for all. Supporting small-scale producers with training, animal health measures, and much more can help to level the playing field, one small-scale producer at a time, just like Helena.
LONDON, Aug 18 (IPS) – Civic space is deteriorating in Senegal ahead of next February’s presidential election. Recent protests have been met with lethal violence and internet and social media restrictions. Senegal’s democracy will soon face a key test, and whether it passes will depend largely on whether civic space is respected.
Political conflict
Recent protests have revolved around the populist opposition politician Ousmane Sonko. Sonko came third in the 2019 presidential election and has grown to be the biggest thorn in President Macky Sall’s side. He’s won support from many young people who see the political elite as corrupt, out of touch and unwilling to tackle major social and economic problems such as the country’s high youth unemployment. He’s also been the subject of a recent criminal conviction that his supporters insist is politically motivated.
On 1 June, Sonko was sentenced to two years in jail for ‘corrupting youth’. This resulted from his arrest on rape charges in March 2021. Although he was cleared of the most serious charges – something women’s rights advocates have expressed concern about – his conviction likely makes him ineligible to stand in the next presidential election.
Sonko’s arrest in March 2021 triggered protests in which 14 people died. His conviction set off a second wave of protests. Sonko was arrested again on 28 July on protest-related charges, including insurrection. A few days later, the government dissolved his party, Pastef. It’s the first such ban since Senegal achieved independence in 1960.
All of this gave fresh impetus to Sonko’s supporters, who accuse the government of instrumentalising the judiciary and criminal justice system to stop a credible political threat.
Repressive reaction
The latest wave of protests saw instances of violence, including stone-throwing, tyre burning and looting. The state responded with lethal force. According to civil society estimates, since March 2021 over 30 people have been killed, more than 600 injured and over 700 detained.
In response to the recent protests, the army was deployed in the capital, Dakar. Live ammunition was used and armed people dressed in civilian clothes, evidently embedded with security forces, violently attacked protesters.
Journalists were harassed and arrested while covering protests. Recent years have seen a rise in verbal and physical attacks on journalists, along with legal action to try to silence them. Several journalists were arrested in relation to their reporting on Sonko’s prosecution. Investigative journalist Pape Alé Niang has been jailed three times in less than one year.
The government also limited internet access and TV coverage. TV station Walf TV was suspended over its protest coverage. On 1 June, social media access was restricted and on 4 June mobile internet was shut down for several days. In August, TikTok access was blocked. Restrictions harmed both freedom of expression and livelihoods, since many small traders rely on mobile data for transactions.
?? Confirmed: Metrics show the restriction of social media and messaging platforms including Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and YouTube in #Senegal; the incident comes amid protests over the sentencing of opposition figure Ousmane Sonko
A major driver of protests and Sonko’s campaign was speculation that Sall might be tempted to seek a third presidential term. The constitution appeared to be clear on the two-term limit, but Sall’s supporters claimed constitutional amendments in 2016 had reset the count. Thousands mobilised in Dakar on 12 May, organised by a coalition of over 170 civil society groups and opposition parties, to demand that Sall respect the two-term limit.
On 3 July, Sall finally announced that he wasn’t running again. But it hasn’t ended suspicion that the ruling Alliance for the Republic (APR) party will go to any lengths stay in power, including using the state’s levers to weaken the opposition.
There’s precedent here: ahead of the Sall’s re-election in 2019, two prominent opposition politicians who might have presented a serious challenge were excluded. In both cases, barely weeks before the election the Constitutional Council ruled them ineligible due to prior convictions on corruption charges that were widely believed to have been politically motivated.
That Sonko and Pastef might have stood a chance in 2024 was suggested by the results of votes in 2022. In local elections, the APR lost control of Dakar and Sonko was elected mayor of Ziguinchor city. And then in parliamentary elections, the APR lost 43 of its 125 seats and Pastef finished second, claiming 56 seats, leaving no party with a majority.
Reputation on the line
Senegal long enjoyed an international reputation for being a relatively stable and democratic country in a region that’s experienced numerous democratic setbacks. With West African countries such as Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali and now Niger under military control, and others like Togo holding deeply flawed elections, Senegal stood out. It’s held several free elections with changes of power.
The country’s active and youthful civil society and relatively free media have played a huge part in sustaining democracy. When President Abdoulaye Wade sought an unconstitutional third term in 2012, social movements mobilised. The Y’en a marre (‘I’m fed up’) movement got out the youth vote to oust Wade in favour of Sall. Wade himself rode a similar youth wave in 2000. So Sall and his party are surely aware of the power of social movements and the youth vote.
A small step forward was taken recently when parliament voted to allow the two opposition candidates who’d been blocked in 2019 to stand in 2024. But the government needs to do much more to show its commitment to democratic rules.
Upholding protest rights would be a good start. The repeated use of violence and detention of protesters points to a systemic problem. No one has been held to account for killings and other rights violations. It’s high time for accountability.
Media freedoms need to be respected and people detained for exercising their civic freedoms must be released. For Senegal to live up to its reputation, Sall should strive to enter history as the president who kept democracy alive – not the one who buried it.
A South Sudanese soldier carries a machine gun. Credit: punghi/ Shutterstock
Opinion by Samuel Kofi Tetteh Baah, Christoph Lakner (washington dc)
Inter Press Service
WASHINGTON DC, Aug 17 (IPS) – In 1990, about half of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia and two-thirds in East Asia and the Pacific were living in extreme poverty (defined as living on less than what today amounts to around $2.15 per person per day).
In the three decades that followed, these three regions have followed quite different development paths. In 2019, 35 percent of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa were estimated to be living in extreme poverty, compared to 9 percent in South Asia or 1 percent in East Asia and the Pacific.
Why has Sub-Saharan Africa been left behind? What explains the sluggish progress in poverty reduction in the region?
The role of fragility, conflict, and violence in stifling development
Fragility, conflict, and violence, or, more generally, the lack of peace and security, is one of the key barriers to poverty reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The World Bank’s list of fragile, conflict-affected, and violent (FCV) countries in 1998, the year with the earliest available data, indicates that 13 of the 24 FCV countries worldwide were in Sub-Saharan Africa (54%, or slightly over a half).
By 2021, the year with the latest available data, the number of FCV countries in Sub-Saharan Africa had increased by six, and the region still accounted for roughly half of all FCV countries in the world (19 of the 37 FCV countries).
Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the world had already become more violent over the years, largely driven by increasing counts of FCV countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and North Africa.
These two regions do not only have the most cases of fragility, conflict, and violence, but also the worst trends in extreme poverty.
Thirty out of the 48 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (almost two-thirds) have been designated as a fragile, conflict-affected, or violent (FCV) country at least once since 1998; in the Middle East and North Africa, it is 7 out of 14 countries (or a half).
Extreme poverty has decreased at a slow pace in Sub-Saharan Africa and increasing in the Middle East and North Africa (though at lower levels of poverty and subject to greater uncertainty due to a lack of recent data for many countries in the Middle East).
Besides the severe impact on human life and happiness, conflicts worsen a country’s ability to promote its own development and eradicate poverty. They lead to the loss of lives (human capital) and property (physical capital), thereby stifling investment, growth, and poverty reduction.
All these factors are contrary to the values of freedom, peace, and stability necessary for poverty reduction.
Poverty and fragility: a vicious circle
The lack of peace increases the risk of poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa. All FCV countries in the region in 1998 were low-income countries, whereas the non-FCV countries were split between middle-income and low-income countries.
The Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, the Central Africa Republic, and Liberia are highly conflict-affected, and are the only countries that have remained FCV countries without interruptions since 1998.
These four low-income countries had an average extreme poverty rate as high as 73 percent in 1998, while the remaining FCV countries had an average rate of 44 percent compared with 56 percent for all non-FCV low-income countries.
In 2019, the abovementioned four countries still had a high extreme poverty rate of 58 percent, almost twice the extreme poverty rate in the remaining FCV countries or all non-FCV low-income countries (34 percent and 39 percent, respectively).
A negative relationship between income status and FCV status, supports the idea that poverty drives conflicts. On the other hand, it is important to stress that this is not an automatic mechanism: eight countries have always been low-income countries but were not FCV countries in 2019.
Also, two of them (Rwanda and Uganda) have never been FCV over the entire period for which data are available. Overall, poverty and fragility can re-inforce each other and create a vicious cycle or a trap.
There are other factors that might jointly explain the high levels of poverty and fragility in Sub-Saharan Africa, such as low schooling attainment, high inequality in educational outcomes, and the lack of decent jobs. Improving educational outcomes for all (i.e., SDG 4) and increasing job opportunities for all (i.e., SDG 8) would therefore be priority areas in Sub-Saharan Africa that could potentially break the poverty-fragility trap that the region seems to be stuck in.
A highly educated population is more likely to be tolerant, while education and employment opportunities offer the most likely route out of poverty. However, these policy actions are more long-term in perspective, and require peace and stability to be effective.
Samuel Kofi Tetteh Baah is Consultant, Poverty and Inequality Unit, Development Economics Research Group, World Bank; Christoph Lakner is Senior Economist, Development Data Group, World Bank.
The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the UK Government through the Data and Evidence for Tackling Extreme Poverty (DEEP) Research Program.
Overfishing is harming the informal traders who rely on it for income. CREDIT: Marko Phiri/IPS
by Marko Phiri (bulawayo, zimbabwe)
Inter Press Service
BULAWAYO, ZIMBABWE, Aug 10 (IPS) – Zimbabwe’s ballooning informal sector has, in recent years, spawned the over-exploitation of the country’s natural resources, with the fisheries taking some of the most felt battering.
Amidst challenges brought by economic hardships, fisheries—for long imagined to be an infinite resource by hawkers and fishermen—are providing women with livelihoods against odds brought by climate change and competition from male fishmongers who go into the water.
Selling fish has for years been a source of income for women, but with current unemployment levels, more and more women are trying their hand at anything that will provide income.
According to the International Labour Organisation, out of more than five million informal traders in Zimbabwe, 65 percent are women, throwing more women into sectors such as fisheries that offer hope for steady incomes.
However, comes with its own downside.
Demand for aquaculture produce has not slowed amid dwindling fish stocks in the country’s dams, according to the Ministry of Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water, Climate, and Rural Development.
Officials say because consumers have no idea about underwater resource sustainability and management, the more nets are cast into the country’s waters, the less efforts are done to conserve the country’s fisheries.
Long touted as a cheap source of nutrition, with the price of fish bought directly from dams cheaper than that sold in supermarkets and butcheries, this has resulted in unintended consequences.
Janet Dube is a frustrated single breadwinner in Bulawayo.
She makes a living visiting dams surrounding the city of Bulawayo and used to travel as far as the Zambezi to purchase fish stock but now says she has watched as a growing number of people, especially women try their luck buying and selling fish.
And with huge numbers entering the fish trade, it has meant diminishing returns as fish in the country’s waterways are not being repopulated fast enough.
“I don’t get as many fish I used from my suppliers even in dams around the city where you do not have to travel to faraway places such as Binga to buy fish for resale in Bulawayo,” Dube said.
Sitting on the pavement of Bulawayo’s central business district, in the country’s second city, Dube hawks fresh bream fish and laments that although her stock is low, she still must worry about the fish going bad because of electricity power cuts.
Zimbabwe is in the midst of a long-running energy deficit that has not spared anyone, with the fisheries sector feeling the strain.
“I only come to sell fish in the central business district late afternoon to avoid losses as fish goes bad pretty fast,” Dube told IPS.
However, for other fishmongers, selling dried bream and kapenta has become the answer to these challenges.
At another bustling city pavement, Gracious Maruziva sells dried kapenta sourced in the Zambezi Valley.
“I don’t go there myself but buy from some people who travel to Binga regularly, but they don’t supply as regularly as they used to,” Maruziva said.
The reason: Her suppliers are struggling to bring in the once-abundant delicacy.
“It’s increasingly becoming tough selling fish as they say they are also not getting enough from their suppliers in the Zambezi,” she added.
Local researchers and agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) have raised concerns about the lack of sustainability efforts in the country’s fisheries sector, that in recent years has experienced its own gold rush of sorts.
For years women in Bulawayo have travelled long distances to buy fish in bulk, creating long value chains along the way, but it is the current challenges that include low fish stocks in the dams and power outages that interrupt refrigeration that is exposing the risks that come with the fish business.
And with those challenges has been little success in sustainability and conservation of natural resources, experts say.
“We have seen it in the resource-rich communities through our trade justice work communities carry what is known as the ‘resource curse’,” said John Maketo, programmes manager at the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development.
“Instead of adequately benefiting from the availability of a natural resource around them, communities become overburdened with the negative consequences of having it,” Maketo said at a time artisanal fishermen and miners are blamed for anything stripping dams of fish and illegally exploiting gold claims across the country.
However, there are concerns that in the absence of robust conservation efforts, the country’s fisheries could adversely affect rural communities relying on natural resources.
The Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority (ZimParks) is on record lamenting the unregulated new entrants into the fisheries sector, a development that has further threatened already low fish stocks in the country’s dams.
According to FAO’s FISH4ACP, an initiative that seeks the economic and sustainability of fisheries in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific, Zimbabwe has over 12,000 dams, noting that despite this abundance, the sector continues to struggle.
To address this, FAO is “supporting an economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable fish farming sector” amid weak regulatory mechanisms and sound implementation of existing fishing quotas.
For women who find themselves hawking fish in the streets of Bulawayo, the consequence of that struggle is being felt in their daily takings.
“Fish is profitable, provided I get constant supplies. For now, I’m making do with what I can get,” said Dube.
Opinion by Jomo Kwame Sundaram (kuala lumpur, malaysia)
Inter Press Service
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Aug 09 (IPS) – The primary commodity price boom early this century has often been attributed to a commodity ‘super-cycle’, i.e., a price upsurge greater than what might be expected in ‘normal’ booms. This was largely due to some minerals as most agricultural commodity price increases were more modest.
This minerals boom improved many developing country growth records, not least in Africa. With growing pressures to act urgently in response to accelerating global warming, mitigation efforts have been stepped up, promising energy transitions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
These require major shifts from fossil fuel combustion to renewable energy and complementary (e.g., transport) technologies. This energy transition requires more of specific minerals like lithium, copper and cobalt. This increased demand for minerals offers resource-rich economies more opportunities for greater domestic resource mobilization for development.
The Intergovernmental Forum on Mining, Minerals, Metals and Sustainable Development (IGF) and the African Tax Administration Forum (ATAF) report, The Future of Resource Taxation: 10 policy ideas to mobilize mining revenues, reviews major problems faced by African and other governments trying to greatly increase revenue from mining.
Great expectations, little taxation
Colonial and neo-colonial mining arrangements have rarely delivered the revenue needed by post-colonial governments. Weak governance, overly generous tax incentives, poor fiscal policies, bad contracts, as well as tax avoidance and evasion have all eroded mineral revenues for developing countries.
Resource-rich countries have been rethinking how to benefit more from mining in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, worsening developing country debt crises, and increasingly uncertain government revenues and expenditures.
Mining royalties and taxation have remained largely unchanged for decades, while corporate income tax is hard to collect, vulnerable to profit shifting and often minimized with the aid of tax professionals and corrupt officials.
Improving taxation
Taxing transnational corporations has long posed major challenges. Poor laws and enforcement as well as limited funding and staff mean most developing countries are poorly equipped to apply complex international tax norms, such as the ‘arm’s-length principle’ and ‘double taxation treaties’.
Developing nations are especially vulnerable to tax base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS). International Monetary Fund staff estimate African countries have lost annual mining revenue up to $730 million annually due to BEPS.
Many developing countries identified ‘transfer pricing’ as the greatest challenge to taxing mining. The problem has been made worse by mining tax regimes and investment agreements favouring investors, especially from abroad.
Such agreements often contain fiscal incentives making mining revenue collection difficult. Worse, many governments believe generous tax incentives are necessary to attract mining investment. But these typically undermine effective tax administration, causing significant revenue losses.
Also, policy conditionalities typically ‘lock in’ poorly designed fiscal conditions and mining contracts, often required or recommended by the IMF or World Bank. These tend to benefit investors, potentially resulting in costly disputes for host governments.
Generating substantial government revenue from artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) is difficult. As ASM induces more local spending, rather than extraction or export taxes, indirect taxes and wealth taxes are probably better for such incomes.
Governments of resource-rich developing countries require finance and reliable personnel for successful implementation, to ensure accountability and curb corruption. Sufficient financial and technical assistance can greatly improve mining revenue collection, ensuring companies pay all royalties and taxes due.
Effective implementation needs to be well supported by international agreements and organizations, development partners, and civil society. Tax incentives undermining government policy objectives and legal systems should be avoided.
Taxing better not easy
More access to information and expertise can greatly improve mining tax administration. Information, particularly from other jurisdictions, is critical for tax administrations to better collect taxes due. Sadly, progress has been painfully slow in many developing countries.
Instruments designed to improve information exchange include bilateral investment and tax treaties, tax information exchange agreements, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters, and the ATAF Multilateral Agreement on Assistance in Tax Matters.
Mining revenue collection needs to be able to verify the quantity and quality of mineral reserves and extracts. Key challenges include enhancing tax audit capacity and getting up-to-date knowledge of mining, including implications of changes in mining techniques.
Better inter-agency cooperation is often necessary for better regulation and to avoid an incoherent, fragmented approach. Many mining revenue BEPS problems are due to capacity constraints, e.g., whether governments can effectively verify the costs of goods and services and mineral prices.
Many transactions also require tax auditors to have detailed knowledge of the mining value chain. Many aspects of mining operations allow inflating actual costs to evade taxes. Valuing intangibles, such as intellectual property, is also difficult. Many countries also lack regulations to tax the sale of offshore indirect mining assets, often losing much revenue as a consequence.
Too little too late?
Mineral-rich developing countries hope for more ‘resource rents’ from mining to significantly enhance government revenue. They hope mining taxation will collect much more revenue, subject to other policy goals. However, in most cases, mining has failed to deliver the expected revenues.
Inappropriate laws and investment agreements, overly generous tax incentives, as well as tax evasion and avoidance have contributed to this failure. Some authorities lack the expertise, information and means to more effectively tax mining. Corruption and poor revenue management also remain challenges.
Thankfully, mining revenue collection has improved, albeit modestly. Many countries are improving their mining tax regulations and strengthening their tax audit capacity.
Better international cooperation can address many problems, including information asymmetries. All countries implementing the Extractives Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) are now required to disclose mining, oil, and gas contracts. This can significantly improve transparency.
Although welcome, such improvements are still far from enough to meet the considerable domestic revenue mobilization needs of developing countries soon enough to adequately accelerate sustainable development after dismal progress for almost a decade.
LONDON, Aug 08 (IPS) – Last week the IMF offered a cautious estimate of positive global economic growth for this year, warning ‘we are on track, but not out of the woods’. But with the IMF and governments continuing to use gross domestic product (GDP) as the dominant measure of economic progress, a more appropriate warning might be that ‘we’ are failing to see the wood for the trees.
As multiple crises wreak havoc across the world, as inequality continues to rise inexorably, as we approach near irreversible climate breakdown, it strains credulity that governments remain fixated on a metric that is incapable of capturing these momentous changes and their profound consequences for our lives.
GDP was developed to measure the monetary value of the marketed goods and services produced in an economy but it rapidly became the predominant measure of national welfare. As such it is flawed.
We should recall the warning issued by Simon Kuznets, founding father of GDP, back in 1934: the welfare of a nation could not, and should not, be inferred from the measurement of its GDP.
GDP is blind to the distribution of the marketed goods and services it measures; it equates progress with growing wealth, even if that wealth is concentrated among a small minority of the world’s population.
It fails to distinguish between market activities that harm people and planet and those that are beneficial. It ignores the value of unpaid care. And it only recognizes natural resources when they can be exploited for profit.
Credit: UN Women/Zhanarbek Amankulov
As the feminist economist Marilyn Waring put it, GDP embodies an economic system that counts oil spills and wars as positive contributions to growth but deems the unpaid care of children and families as valueless.
Take the example of unpaid care work, overwhelmingly carried out by women across the world. According to data cited in an Oxfam paper this week, almost two-thirds of women’s weekly working hours – and forty-five percent of the total for all adults – do not enter estimates of GDP because they do not enter the market.
That means nearly 90 billion hours of unpaid care work, without which economic growth would come to a grinding halt, do not count as part of that growth!
History has shown us that fixation on GDP-oriented growth has led to government policies that directly harm women, particularly those at the intersection of multiple inequalities, such as race, class, caste and disability.
This is evident in the consequences of repeated and sustained austerity cuts to public services, here in the UK and elsewhere, including many countries in the Global South. These showed up clearly in the UK during the pandemic.
Cuts in welfare services on which many women depended in order to take up paid work meant that they had to compensate with increased unpaid labour. Cuts to jobs and pay in the public sector where women workers made up most of the work force meant higher rates of female unemployment.
And where public services were retained, as in the health sector, women from poor and minority households made up the majority of frontline workers, were those most exposed to infection.
There are alternative measures of wellbeing to GDP. Some are based on indigenous conceptualizations that stress harmony between people and planet. Others seek to build on common values found across the world: values that stress care and capabilities, culture and leisure, connections with nature and community and, very importantly, democratic participation and social justice.
What these measures all have in common is that GDP is no longer considered the primary goal of national efforts but just one of the means by which shared goals can be achieved.
This proliferation of concepts is indicative of the deep dissatisfaction with GDP on the part of many and the need to go beyond it. They include international organizations like the UN, the OECD and the EU, governments like New Zealand, Canada, Bhutan, Peru, Ecuador as well as numerous networks of activists and academics.
The fact that they have not arrived at an agreed alternative to GDP reflects at least two major challenges. The first is methodological but one that can be resolved through debate and deliberation. Do we want a single, multidimensional index to track how we are doing, more complex than GDP but closer to shared values?
Or should we opt for a dashboard of indicators that allow us to track where we are doing well and where we are falling behind? Should the alternative be nationally determined or internationally?
One argument in favour of an internationalist consensus is the need to factor in ‘the wellbeing elsewhere’ dimension: what we do within one country can have positive or negative repercussions for people in other countries.
The second challenge is political and harder to resolve, as economic elites have been able to capture political power. The richest 1% are not just the wealthiest, they have greatest political clout. They also have strong vested interest in defending a measure of progress that ensures they can legitimately capture the bulk of the wealth generated by markets.
Conversely, those who have most to gain from alternative measures of progress are dispersed and divided – in no small way through the efforts of the 1%. The second challenge therefore is to find a bridge across these divisions and dispersions so that we can collectively engage in the task of revolutionizing the way we think about ourselves in relation to each other and to our planet.
Professor Naila Kabeer is a feminist economist, Department of International Development, London School of Economics (LSE).
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Aug 04 (IPS) – The title shouldn’t fool you: Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen is one of the world’s longest-ruling autocrats. A political survivor, this former military commander had been bolted to his chair since 1985, presiding over what he turned into a de facto one-party system – and now apparently a dynastic regime.
On 23 July, running virtually unopposed, Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) took 82 per cent of the vote, winning almost all seats. The only party that could have offered a challenge, the Candlelight Party, had been banned on a technicality in May.
Following the proclamation of his ‘landslide victory‘, Hun Sen finally announced his retirement, handing over his position to his eldest son, Hun Manet. Manet had already been endorsed by the CPP. Winning a parliamentary seat, which he just did, was all he had to do to become eligible. To ensure dynastic succession faced no obstacle, a constitutional amendment passed in August 2022 allows the ruling party to appoint the prime minister without parliamentary approval.
Hun Sen isn’t going away: he’ll remain CPP chair and a member of parliament, be appointed to other positions and stay at the helm of his family’s extensive business empire.
A slippery slope towards autocracy
Hun Sen came to power in a world that no longer exists. He managed to cling onto power as everything around him changed.
He fought as a soldier in the Cambodian Civil War before defecting to Vietnam, taking several government positions under the 1980s Vietnamese government of occupation. He was appointed prime minister in 1985, and when 1993 elections resulted in a hung parliament, Hun Sen refused to concede defeat. Negotiations resulted in a coalition government in which he served as joint prime minister, until he orchestrated a coup to take sole control in 1997. At the head of the CPP, he has won every election since.
In 2013 his power was threatened. A new opposition party, the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), offered a credible challenge. The CPP got its lowest share of votes and seats since 1998. Despite obvious fraud, the CNRP came dangerously close to defeating Hun Sen.
In the years that followed, Hun Sen made sure no one would challenge him again. In 2015, the CNRP’s leader Sam Rainsy was summarily ousted from the National Assembly and stripped of parliamentary immunity. A warrant was issued for his arrest, pushing him into exile. He was then barred from returning to Cambodia, and in 2017 convicted for ‘defaming’ Hun Sen. His successor at the head of the CNRP, Kem Sokha, soon faced persecution too.
In November 2017, the Supreme Court ordered the dissolution of the CNRP and imposed a five-year political ban on 118 opposition members.
As a result, the only parties that eventually ran on a supposedly opposition platform in 2018 were small parties manufactured by government allies to give the impression of competition. In the run-up to the vote, the CPP-dominated National Election Committee (NEC) threatened to prosecute anybody who urged a boycott and warned voters that criticising the CPP wasn’t allowed. What resulted was a parliament without a single dissenting voice.
There was no let off after the election, with mass arrests and mass trials of former CNRP members and civil society activists becoming commonplace. Rainsy was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment, and Sokha was given 27 years for ‘treason’. At least 39 opposition politicians are behind bars, and many more have left Cambodia.
But as the CNRP faded, the torch passed to the Candlelight Party. In June 2022 local elections, Candlelight proved that Hun Sen was right to be afraid: in an extremely repressive context, it still took over 20 per cent of the vote. And sure enough, in May 2023 the NEC disqualified Candlelight from the July election.
The crackdown on independent media, underway since 2017, intensified in the run-up to the latest electoral farce. In March 2022, the government stripped three digital media outlets of their licences after they published stories on government corruption. In February 2023, Hun Sen ordered the closure of Voice of Democracy, one of the few remaining independent media outlets, after it published a story about Manet. Severe restrictions weigh on foreign media groups, some of which have been forced out of the country.
In contrast, government-owned and pro-government media organisations are able to operate freely. Major media groups are run by magnates close to the ruling family. One media conglomerate is headed by Hun Sen’s eldest daughter. As a result, most information available to Cambodians comes through the filter of power. Most media work to disseminate state-issued disinformation and discredit independent voices as agents of propaganda.
The right to protest is heavily restricted. Gatherings by banned opposition parties are prohibited and demonstrations by political groups, labour unions, social movements and essentially anyone mobilising on issues the government doesn’t want raised are routinely dispersed by security forces, often violently. Protesters are subjected to threats, intimidation, arbitrary arrests and detention, and further criminalisation.
As if leaving people with no choice wasn’t enough, Hun Sen also mounted a scare campaign to force them to vote, since a low turnout would undermine the credibility of the outcome. People were threatened with repercussions if they attempted to boycott the election or spoil ballot papers. The election law was hastily amended to make this a crime.
Experience gives little ground to hope that repression will let up rather than intensify following the election. There’s also no reason to expect that Manet, long groomed for succession, will take a different path from his still-powerful predecessor. The very least the international community should do is to call out the charade of an election for what it was and refuse to buy the Cambodian regime’s whitewashing attempt.
LONDON, Aug 01 (IPS) – When this Indian Ocean- island gained independence from Britain in 1948 after some 450 years of colonial rule under three western powers, it was simply named the “Dominion of Ceylon”.
This country which was granted universal franchise nearly two decades before independence was seen as one of Asia’s first democracies-if not the first.
Sadly, that reputation has fast faded.
Today, that right to vote is being denied with even elections to local bodies been halted for dubious reasons including the lack of state funds. The Supreme Court issued an interim order asking that funds be made available for the election. ruling.
That order was simply ignored. Instead, the ruling Sri Lanka People’s Front (SLPP) MPs threatened to summon the judges to parliament for allegedly violating their privileges
The most recent is a desperate move by one government MP to move a private member’s motion to have parliament vote to let the expired bodies continue in the absence of elections.
Fortunately, the Attorney-General informed the Speaker that such a move was unconstitutional and so would require a two-third majority vote and perhaps a referendum. That shut the door on this piece of frippery.
The government’s concern is understandable. It is led by a stand-in president of one party propped up in parliament by a majority from a one- time political enemy the SLPP, now living a symbiotic political existence.
Neither of them wants an election even at the lowest levels of governance for fear of what the results might signify. Negative results would sound alarm bells ahead of the presidential elections next year and parliamentary elections the year after, though the president could call parliamentary elections earlier.
Those who would look back at Sri Lankan political history since 1977 might well wonder whether current president Ranil Wickremesinghe, filling in until November next year for predecessor Gotabaya Rajapaksa who resigned after fleeing public wrath, has taken a page out of his uncle Junius Richard Jayewardene’s book of political Machiavellianism.
But if “Yankee Dicky”, as Jayewardene was called from his early days for his pro-American foreign policy views and his capitalist economic outlook, took a turn to the right when he came to power in 1977, his nephew has taken a sharper turn in that direction, his neoliberal views meshing with the IMF rescue programme intended to pull the country out of the economic mess that Gotabaya Rajapaksa created during his short presidency.
Yet Wickremesinghe’s path to economic resuscitation is strewn with political and working- class casualties against whom some of the most abrasive laws in the country’s statute books have been employed, such as the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA).
International conventions such as the ICCPR have been stood on its head to detain dissidents and clamped down on public protests and other rights guaranteed under the constitution that his uncle imposed on the country.
If the IMF agreement calls for the government to sell the family silver, as Wickremesinghe’s offer of even profit- making state- owned enterprises and other state assets to foreign and local investors suggest, this is bound to adversely affect employment adding to the amounting joblessness in recent years following the Covid pandemic and President Rajapaksa’s misguided economic policies.
Besides this, a new Labour law that would repeal some 28 existing laws granting workers’ rights won over the years through hard struggles by leftist trade unions and political parties, would be replaced by stringent new laws heavily weighted in favour of employers.
The proposed labour laws now been waved about by an over-enthusiastic Labour Minister hoping to please the president and the business community will, if not challenged before the Supreme Court, will jettison many long existing workers’ rights to create a comfortable environment for prospective foreign investors and the government’s business cronies.
A new anti-terrorism law, more abhorrent than the PTA, has drawn heavy flak both at home and internationally. An anti-corruption law has just been passed, more to satisfy the IMF than to catch the crooks, particularly politicians who fattened themselves over the years. Though Sri Lanka already has stringent laws not even a fistful of politicians have been prosecuted and convicted for bribery and corruption.
Meanwhile the country is facing a huge brain drain. Since 2022 some 700 or so doctors, specialists and medical staff have left for employment abroad. So have other professionals including engineers, IT specialists, airline pilots and technicians.
Education Minister Susil Premajayantha admitted in parliament the other day that 255 university academics and some 150-odd non- academic staff have vacated posts since last year.
Furthermore, UN reports have pinpointed the rise of poverty in the country with families and school children skipping meals because people cannot afford the high prices for domestic essentials like electricity.
The Agriculture Minister was warning the other day about the possibility of poor harvests in the coming season which, if sadly it does happen, could lead to food shortages
The seeming political stability with no queues and no demonstrators, should not be misconceived. While Wickremesinghe’s governing alliance in which fissures have been more conspicuous recently, prepares the ground to welcome foreign and local capitalist entrepreneurs, the same ground is being cut under the feet of the vast majority who survived all these years on their meagre earnings and now are struggling to survive.
In 1972, the then coalition government led by the world’s first woman prime minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike which came to power two years earlier, made the final constitutional break with Britain, dropping the British monarch as its head of state and declaring the country as the “Republic of Sri Lanka”. It maintained the Westminster-style parliamentary system it was accustomed to.
That government was roundly defeated at the 1977 general election. The right-wing United National Party (UNP) under its new leader Jayewardene, popularly called “JR”, won an unprecedented five-sixth majority in parliament driving Mrs Bandaranaike’s SLFP to a single digit presence.
Jayewardene decided the country needed a new constitution. But it was drafted without any public consultation whereas the 1972 constitution was drafted by parliament meeting separately as a constituent assembly.
Jayewardene named himself president and was sworn-in on 4th February 1978 under a new executive presidential system. The name of the country was changed into an ostentatious “Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka”.
Armed with enormous powers and a party with a five-sixth majority in parliament Jayewardene said the only thing he could not do was to change a man into a woman and vice versa.
The new name for Sri Lanka was a tragic misnomer. It did not take long for Jayewardene to show that he was neither democratic nor socialist. He set up a presidential commission which hauled up former prime minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike, her closest minister Felix Dias Bandaranaike and others before it for alleged corruption and abuse of power. They were stripped of their civic rights, eliminated from political activity for seven years.
The president was more concerned about preserving his huge majority in parliament fearing that a general election would see a resurrected opposition returning in larger numbers.
In a move unheard of in democratic governance, President Jayewardene obtained signed letters of resignation from parliament from all his 140 MPs. The one thing missing was the date which the president would fill in if required. That was Jayewardene’s Damocles-ean Sword suspended over his own MPs.
The biggest blot on Jayewardene’s escutcheon is the bloody events of July 1983 when minority Tamils in Colombo and around the country were physically attacked and some 3000, according to reports were killed, their houses burnt and the businesses destroyed and looted. Thousands were made refugees in their own country or abroad.
The immediate cause for this horrendous and tragic happening 40 years ago was said to be the killing of 13 soldiers by Tamil insurgents in the north.
But when the attacks on Tamils and their homes really unfolded on July 25, as I witnessed that day and later, there were clear signs of government involvement. The fact that neither the president nor any minister appeared on TV calling a halt to this ethnic convulsion spoke volumes.
When the government did finally speak about four days later, it claimed the attacks were the “spontaneous outburst of Sinhala wrath” at the killing of the soldiers.
But with international community critical at the government’s inaction to stop the carnage, Jayewardene swiftly changed tack. The government claimed there was a “Naxalite” conspiracy to assassinate government figures and overthrow the government. A foreign hand-unnamed- was involved, it said.
Jayewardene evoked the Public Security Act to round up opposition politicians he feared were growing in popularity and throw them in jail and sealed the Communist Party newspaper. I remember my friend John Elliot of the “Financial Times” calling it “a crude cover up” while other foreign journalists simply dismissed the story.
What does matter now is that right through these events of the Jayewardene years, Sri Lanka’s current President Ranil Wickremesinghe, Jayewardene’s nephew, was a faithful member of his uncle’s cabinet and possibly privy to what went on inside.
In fact, if I remember correctly, he made a speech in parliament on the so-called “Naxalite” plot.
There is one essential difference. JR served two terms as president. His nephew lost two presidential elections and yearns to be at elected president at least once.
Next March he will be 75. Would he then be at the door step of the Last Chance Saloon? If so how far would he go to make sure he becomes and elected president like his uncle before retires from politics.
The United National Party (UNP) that his uncle represented and he does now, was called the Uncle Nephew Party from its early days. We shall see before long, won’t we.
Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who held senior roles in Hong Kong at The Standard and worked in London for Gemini News Service. He has been a correspondent for the foreign media.
Opinion by Jomo Kwame Sundaram (kuala lumpur, malaysia)
Inter Press Service
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Jul 26 (IPS) – Currency values and foreign exchange rates change for many reasons, largely following market perceptions, regardless of fundamentals. Market speculation has worsened volatility, instability and fragility in most economies, especially of small, open, developing countries.
US Fed pushing up interest rates
For no analytical rhyme or reason, US Federal Reserve Bank (Fed) chairman Jerome Powell insists on raising interest rates until inflation is brought under 2% yearly. Obliged to follow the US Fed, most central banks have raised interest rates, especially since early 2022.
Jomo Kwame SundaramThe US dollar or greenback’s strengthening has been largely due to aggressive Fed interest rate hikes. Undoubtedly, inflation has been rising, especially since last year. But there are different types of inflation, with different implications, which should be differentiated by nature and cause.
Typically, inflationary episodes are due to either demand pull or supply push. With rentier behaviour better recognized, there is now more attention to asset price and profit-driven inflation, e.g., ‘sellers inflation’ due to price-fixing in monopolistic and oligopolistic conditions.
Recent international price increases are widely seen as due to new Cold War measures since Obama, Trump presidency initiatives, COVID-19 pandemic responses, as well as Ukraine War economic sanctions.
These are all supply-side constraints, rather than demand-side or other causes of inflation.
The Fed chair’s pretext for raising interest rates is to get inflation down to 2%. But bringing inflation under 2% – the fetishized, but nonetheless arbitrary Fed and almost universal central bank inflation target – only reduces demand, without addressing supply-side inflation.
But there is no analytical – theoretical or empirical – justification for this completely arbitrary 2% inflation limit fetish. Thus, raising interest rates to address supply-side inflation is akin to prescribing and taking the wrong medicine for an ailment.
Fed driving world to stagnation
Thus, raising interest rates to suppress demand cannot be expected to address such supply-side driven inflation. Instead, tighter credit is likely to further depress economic growth and employment, worsening living conditions.
Increasing interest rates is expected to reduce expenditure for consumption or investment. Thus, raising the costs of funds is supposed to reduce demand as well as ensuing price increases.
Earlier research – e.g., by then World Bank chief economist Michael Bruno, with William Easterly, and by Stan Fischer and Rudiger Dornbusch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – found even low double-digit inflation to be growth-enhancing.
The Milton Friedman-inspired notion of a ‘non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment’ (NAIRU) also implies Fed interest rate hikes inappropriate and unnecessarily contractionary when inflation is not accelerating. US consumer price increases have decelerated since mid-2022, meaning inflation has not been accelerating for over a year.
At least two conservative monetary economists with Nobel laureates have reminded the world how such Fed interventions triggered US contractions, abruptly ending economic recoveries. Although not discussed by them, the same Fed interventions also triggered international recessions.
Friedman showed how the Fed ended the US recovery from 1937 at the start of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s second presidential term. Recent US Fed chair Ben Bernanke and his colleagues also showed how similar Fed policies caused stagflation after the 1970s’ oil price hikes.
De-dollarization?
However, the US dollar has not been strengthening much in recent months. The greenback has been slipping since mid-2023 despite continuing Fed interest rate hikes a full year after consumer price increases stopped accelerating in mid-2022.
Many blame recent greenback depreciation on ‘de-dollarization’, ironically accelerated by US sanctions against its rivals. Such illegal sanctions have disrupted financial payments, investment flows, dispute settlement mechanisms and other longstanding economic processes and arrangements authorized by the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund and UN charters.
Even the ‘rule of law’ – long favouring the US, other rich countries and transnational corporate interests – has been ‘suspended’ for ‘reasons of state’ due to economic warfare which continues to escalate. Unilateral asset and technology expropriation has been justified as necessary to ‘de-risk’ for ‘national security’ and other such considerations.
Horns of currency dilemma
For many monetary authorities, the choice is between a weak currency and higher interest rates. With growing financialization over recent decades, big finance has become much more influential, typically demanding higher interest income and stronger currencies.
Central bank independence – from the political executive and legislative processes – has enabled financial lobbies to influence policymaking even more. For example, Malaysia’s household debt share of national output rose from 47% in 2000 to over four-fifths before the COVID-19 pandemic, and 81% in 2022.
There is little reason to believe recent exchange rates have been due to ‘economic fundamentals’. Currencies of countries with persistent trade and current account deficits have strengthened, while others with sustained surpluses have declined. Instead, relative interest rate changes recently appear to explain more.
Thus, both the Japanese yen and Chinese renminbi depreciated by at least six per cent against the US dollar, at least before its recent tumble. By contrast, British pound sterling has appreciated against the greenback despite the dismal state of its real economy.
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Jul 24 (IPS) – At a meeting with European and Latin American leaders in Brussels this July, Brazil’s President Lula da Silva reiterated the bold commitment he had made in his first international speech as president-elect, when he attended the COP27 climate summit in November 2022: bringing Amazon deforestation down to zero by 2030.
Lula’s presence at COP27 was a signal to the world that Brazil was willing to become the climate champion it needs to be. Following a request by the Brazilian Forum of NGOs and Social Movements for Environment and Development, Lula offered to host the 2025 climate summit in Brazil; it has now been confirmed that COP30 will be held in Belém, gateway to the Amazon River.
At COP27 Lula also said he intended to revive and modernise the 45-year old Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organisation, a body bringing together the eight Amazonian countries – Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela – to take concerted steps to protect the Amazon rainforest.
Four years of regression
In his four years in office, Lula’s far-right climate-denier predecessor Jair Bolsonaro dismantled environmental protections and paralysed key environmental agencies by cutting their funding and staff. He vilified civil society, criminalised activists and discredited the media. He allowed deforestation to proceed at an astonishing pace and emboldened businesses to grab land, clear it for agriculture by starting fires and carry out illegal logging and mining.
Under Bolsonaro, already embattled Indigenous communities and activists became even more vulnerable to attacks. By encouraging environmental plunder, including on protected and Indigenous land, the government enabled violence against environmental and Indigenous peoples’ rights defenders. A blatant example was the murder of Brazilian Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips in June 2022. The two were ambushed and killed on the orders of the head of an illegal transnational fishing network. Both the material and intellectual authors of the crimes have now been charged and await trial.
Reversing the regression
Having being elected on a promise to reverse environmental destruction, the new administration has sought to restructure and resource monitoring and enforcement institutions. It strengthened the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA), the federal agency in charge of enforcing environmental policy, and the National Foundation of Indigenous Peoples (FUNAI), which for the first time is now headed by an Indigenous person, Joenia Wapichana.
Bolsonaro had transferred FUNAI to the Ministry of Agriculture, run by a leader of the congressional agribusiness caucus. Instead of protecting Indigenous land, it enabled deforestation and the expansion of agribusiness.
In contrast, Lula’s first political gestures were to create a new ministry for Indigenous peoples’ affairs, appointing Indigenous leader Sonia Guajajara to lead it, and to make Marina Silva, a leader of the environmentalist party Rede Sustentabilidade, Minister for the Environment, a position she had held between 2003 and 2008.
Lula also restored the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Amazon, launched in 2004 and implemented until Bolsonaro took over. In February, the government set up a Permanent Inter-Ministerial Commission for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation and Fires in Brazil to coordinate actions across 19 ministries and develop zero deforestation policies.
The strategy establishes a permanent federal government presence in vulnerable areas with the aim of eliminating illegal activities, setting up bases and using intelligence and satellite imagery to track criminal activity.
The newly appointed Federal Police’s Director for the Amazon and the Environment, Humberto Freire, launched a campaign to rid protected Indigenous land of illegal miners. It appears to be paying off: in July he announced that around 90 per cent of miners operating in Yanomami territory, Brazil’s largest protected Indigenous land, had been expelled. According to police sources, there were 19 mine-related deforestation alerts in April 2023 – compared to 444 in April 2022.
But the fight isn’t over. There are still a couple of thousand miners active and the criminal enterprises employing them remain very much alive. The key task of recovering damaged land and rivers can only begin once they’re all driven away for good. And an issue that cries out for international cooperation remains unresolved: violence and environmental degradation continue unabated in Yanomami communities across the border in Venezuela, and will only increase as illegal miners jump jurisdictions.
Achieving the ambitious zero-deforestation goal will require efforts on a much bigger scale than those of the past. And such efforts will further antagonise very powerful people.
Obstacles ahead
With the environmental agenda back on track, the pace of Amazon deforestation slowed down in the first six months of 2023, falling by 34 per cent compared to the same period in 2022. However, numbers still remain high and reductions are uneven, with two states – Roraima and Tocantins – showing increases. Deforestation is also still rising in another important part of Brazil’s environment, the Cerrado, where preservation areas are few and most deforestation happens on private properties.
For the Amazon, a crucial test will come in the second half of the year, when temperatures are higher. A stronger El Niño phase, with warming waters in the Pacific Ocean, will make the weather even drier and hotter than usual, helping fires spread fast. Anticipating this, IBAMA has scaled up its recruitment of firefighters to expand brigades in Indigenous and Black communities and conduct inspections and impose fines and embargoes. To discourage people from starting fires to clear land for agriculture, the agency prevents them putting that land to agricultural use.
But in the meantime, Brazil’s Congress has gone on the offensive. In June, the Senate made radical amendments to the bill on ministries sent by Lula, diluting the powers of the Ministries of Indigenous Peoples and Environment and limiting demarcation of Indigenous lands to those already occupied by communities by 1998, when the current constitution was enacted.
Indigenous leaders have complained that many communities weren’t on their land in 1998 because they’d been expelled over the course of centuries, and particularly during the 1964-1985 military dictatorship. They denounced the new law as ‘legal genocide’ and urged the president to veto it. Civil society has taken to the streets and social media to support the government’s environmental policies.
They face a formidable enemy. A recent report by the Brazilian Intelligence Agency exposed the political connections of illegal mining companies. Two business leaders directly associated with this criminal activity are active congressional lobbyists and maintain strong links with local politicians. They also stand accused of financing an attempted insurrection on 8 January.
Against these shady elites, civil society wields the most effective weapon at its disposal, shining a light on their dealings and letting them know that Brazil and the world are watching, and will remain vigilant for as long as it takes. The stakes are too high to drop the guard.
Deer sanctuary at Nijhum Dwip – the island of tranquility.
Opinion by Ramiz Uddin, Mohammad Saiful Hassan (dhaka, bangladesh)
Inter Press Service
DHAKA, Bangladesh, Jul 24 (IPS) – Blue tourism, widely referred to as Coastal or Maritime tourism, is a distinct idea from traditional tourism, which capitalizes on a country’s ocean, sea, or coastal region.
Coastal tourism is the largest market segment in the world, accounting for 5% of GDP and contributing 6-7% of total employment. Furthermore, coastal and maritime tourism will employ 1.5 million additional people worldwide by 2030.
Though Blue Tourism is not a new concept, but off late Bangladesh has been realizing its importance as it can help earning a lot of foreign exchange contribute to its GDP and accelerate the pace of achieving SDGs by 2030.
Blue Tourism: A Potential Blue Economy Avenue for Bangladesh
According to Asian Development Bank (ADB), coastal and maritime tourism has immense potential in the blue economy and could become one of the largest sources of tourism revenue in Bangladesh. Ocean contributed $6.2 billion in 2015 in total value addition to the Bangladesh’s economy which implies 3 percent of GDP (Business Standard 2020).
Among different sectors of the Blue Economy, Blue Tourism is the most potential sector. Figure: Why blue tourism shall be nurtured
Potentials of Blue Tourism in Bangladesh
Maritime area of 207K sq. km, with 580 km of coastline, 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone, and 12 nautical mile territorial zones creates unprecedent opportunities for Bangladesh to accelerate the growth of blue economy.
Icing on the top are the 75 large and small islands in the coastal and maritime zone of Bangladesh, which are regarded as touristy sites for their rich biodiversity. Coral reefs, seagrass reefs, sandy beaches, sandbars, marshes, flood basins, estuaries, peninsulas, mangroves etc. are a few examples of the aquatic life.
Currently these zones are endowed with 17 fish sanctuaries, 5 national parks, and 10 wildlife sanctuaries, all of which can spur the tourism sector’s expansion. As a result of the discovery of numerous new sea beaches, the sector continues to expand and diversify.
Policies and interventions introduced to nurture the potential
The government of Bangladesh along with the vibrant private sector have introduced various initiatives to develop and promote blue tourism in Bangladesh.
Since 2015, the Government of Bangladesh (GoB) has been working to unleash the potentials of Blue-Economy. To ensure rapid implementation Government of Bangladesh (GoB) has highlighted major action points in the seventh five-year plan (7FYP) and eighth five -year plan (8FYP) of Bangladesh.
Additionally, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA), GoB, had formed the “Blue Economy Cell” in 2017 to coordinate the running blue economy related projects across sectoral ministries and departments. The government of Bangladesh has also laid emphasis on the BLUE tourism in different development plans including Perspective Plan-2041, and Delta Plan-2100.
In order to exploit the tourism potential, Sea cruises between Bangladesh and India have already been launched in March 2019. To encourage foreign visitors to Cox’s Bazar’s largest sea beach, the Bangladesh Economic Zone Authority (BEZA) has been establishing three exclusive tourism parks there. These parks include Naf Tourism Park, Sabrang Tourism Park, and Sonadia Eco-Tourism Park.
Bangladesh Tourism Board has formulated a Tourism Master Plan for 25 years (2023-2047) for the country. Primarily a total of 255 tourist sites under 11 tourist clusters have been identified.
These tourist sites are potential for Eco-Tourism, Beach & Island Tourism, Pilgrimage/Spiritual Tourism, Archaeological & Historical Tourism, Riverine Tourism, Adventure and Sports Tourism, Rural Tourism, Ethno-tourism, MICE Tourism and Cruise Tourism in this coastal and maritime region.
The tourism master plan includes 200+ potential interventions overall. The Bangladesh Tourism Master Plan calls for the immediate development of 13 islands altogether in the coastal region.
In the last quarter of 2022, Bangladesh Tourism Board (BTB) in collaboration with UNDP Accelerator Lab has conducted research on Blue Tourism in Bangladesh, especially in the coastal regions. The core objectives of the joint research comprise identifying the coastal and maritime tourism resources, facilities, and tourist activities in Bangladesh, mapping tourist minds, and identifying the sustainability of Blue Tourism in Bangladesh.
However, with the technical assistance of UNDP Bangladesh Accelerator Lab, Bangladesh Tourism Board (BTB) has begun to work on the execution of Bangladesh’s Tourism Master Plan.
Dr. Ramiz Uddin is Head of Experimentation, UNDP Accelerator Lab, Bangladesh; Mohammad Saiful Hassan is (Deputy Secretary), Deputy Director (Research and Planning), Bangladesh Tourism Board, Ministry of Civil Aviation and Tourism – Bangladesh.
Ligoria Felipe dos Santos poses for a photo on her agroecological farm that mixes corn, squash, fruits, vegetables and medicinal herbs. She is part of the women’s movement that is trying to prevent the installation of wind farms in the Borborema mountain range, in the northeastern Brazilian state of Paraíba. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
by Mario Osava (esperanÇa, brazil)
Inter Press Service
ESPERANÇA, Brazil, Jul 14 (IPS) – Zé Pequeno cried when he learned that the heirloom seeds he had inherited from his father were contaminated by the transgenic corn his neighbor had brought from the south. Fortunately, he was able to salvage the native seeds because he had shared them with other neighbors.
Euzébio Cavalcanti recalls this story from one of his colleagues to highlight the importance of “passion seeds” for family farming in Brazil’s semiarid low-rainfall ecoregion which extends over 1.1 million square kilometers, twice the size of France, in the northeastern interior of the country.
Saving heirloom seeds is a peasant tradition, but two decades ago the Brazilian Semiarid Articulation (ASA), a network of 3,000 social organizations that emerged in the 1990s, named those who practice it as individual and community guardians of seeds. By September 2021, it had registered 859 banks of native seeds in the region.
Cavalcanti, a 56-year-old farmer with multiple skills such as poet, musician and radio broadcaster, coordinates the network of these banks in the Polo de Borborema, a joint action area of 14 rural workers’ unions and 150 community organizations in central-eastern Paraíba, one of the nine states of the Brazilian Northeast.
“These are seeds adapted to the semiarid climate. They can withstand long droughts, without irrigation, that is why they are so important,” he explained. They also preserve the genetic heritage of many local crop species and family history; they have sentimental value.
“Don’t plant transgenics, don’t erase my history”, is a slogan of the movement that promotes agroecological practices and is opposed to the expansion of genetically modified organisms in local agriculture. “Corn free of transgenics and agrotoxins (agrochemicals)” is the goal of their campaign.
In Paraíba, the name “passion seeds” has been adopted, instead of native or heirloom seeds, since 2003, when the state government announced that it would provide seeds from a specialized company to family farmers.
“If the government offers these seeds, I don’t want them. I have family seeds and I have passion for them,” reacted a farmer in a meeting with the authorities.
“‘Passion seeds’ spread throughout Paraíba. In other states they’re called ‘seeds of resistance’,” Cavalcanti said.
Agroecology is one of the banners of the Polo de Borborema, as it is for ASA in the entire semiarid ecosystem that covers most of the Northeast region and a northern strip of the southeastern state of Minas Gerais.
“Passion seeds,” as heirloom seeds are known locally, ensure better harvests on semiarid lands, free of transgenics or “agricultural poisons,” according to Euzébio Cavalcanti, a small farmer, poet and musician who helped lead the struggle for agrarian reform and cares for the seeds in the highlands of Borborema, in northeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
Learning to coexist with semiarid conditions
This approach arose from a change in the development strategy adopted on the part of local society, especially ASA, since the 1990s. “Coexisting with semiarid conditions” replaced the traditional, failed focus on “fighting the drought”.
Large dams and reservoirs, which only benefit large landowners and do not help the majority of small farmers, gave way to more than 1.2 million tanks for collecting rainwater from household or school rooftops and various ways of storing water for crops and livestock.
It is a process of decolonization of agriculture, education and science, which prioritizes knowledge of the climate and the regional biome, the Caatinga, characterized by low, twisted, drought-resilient vegetation. It also includes the abandonment of monoculture, with the implementation of traditional local horticultural and family farming techniques.
The Northeast, home to 26.9 percent of the national population, or 54.6 million inhabitants according to the 2022 demographic census, concentrates 47.2 percent of the country’s family farmers, according to the 2017 agricultural census. There are 1.84 million small farms worked mainly by family labor.
Brazil’s semiarid region is one of the rainiest in the world for this type of climate, with 200 to 800 millimeters of rain per year on average, although there are drier areas in the process of desertification.
A stand at the ecological market in the municipality of Esperança, in northeastern Brazil, is a link between urban consumers and family farmers opposed to agrochemicals, monoculture and transgenic products. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
Borborema, the name of a high plateau that obstructs the humidity coming from the sea, making the territory to its west drier, is the scene of various peasant struggles, such as the mobilization for agrarian reform since the 1980s and for small-scale agriculture “without poisons” or agrochemicals, of which the “seeds of passion” are a symbol.
Cavalcanti is a living memory of local history, also as a founder of the local Landless Workers Movement (MST) and an activist in the occupations of unproductive land to create rural settlements, on one of which he gained his own small farm where he grows beans, corn and, vegetables and has two rainwater collection tanks.
Women help drive the expansion of agroecology
Women have played a key role in the drive towards agroecology. The March for Women’s Lives and Agroecology is an annual demonstration that since 2010 has defended family farming and the right to a healthy life.
This year, on Mar. 16, 5,000 women gathered in Montadas, a municipality of 5,800 inhabitants, to block the creation of wind farms that have already caused damage to the health of small farmers by being installed near their homes.
Borborema is “a territory of resistance,” say the women. About 15 years ago, they succeeded in abolishing the cultivation of tobacco.
The president of the Union of Rural Workers of the municipality of Esperança, Alexandre Lira (C) and other leaders pose in front of a poster declaring the union’s current goals: “Agroecological Borborema is no place for a wind farm,” he says about this area in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast region. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
When the citrus blackfly arrived, the government tried to combat it with pesticides, but “we resisted; we used natural products and solved the problem for our oranges and lemons,” said Ligoria Felipe dos Santos, a 54-year-old mother of three.
“That is agroecology, which is strengthened in the face of threats. Farmers are aware, they resort to alternative defenses, they know that it is imbalance that leads to pests,” she told IPS.
“Agroecology is a good banner for union activity,” said Lexandre Lira, 42, president of the Rural Workers Union of Esperança, a municipality of 31,000 people in the center of the Polo de Borborema.
It is also a factor in keeping farmers’ children on the farms, because it awakens the interest of young people in agriculture, said Edson Johny da Silva, 27, the union’s youth coordinator.
Maria das Graças Vicente and Givaldo Firmino dos Santos stand next to the machine they use for making pulp from native fruits little known outside Brazil, such as the umbu (Brazil plum), cajá (hog plum), acerola (Amazon or Barbados cherry), along with cashews, mangos, and guava. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
Pulp, added value
Maria das Graças Vicente, known as Nina, 51, along with her husband Givaldo Firmino dos Santos, 52, is an example of agroecological productivity. On 1.25 hectares of land they produce citrus fruits, passion fruit, acerola (Amazon or Barbados cherry), mango and other fruits, as well as sugar cane, corn, beans and other vegetables.
Grafted fruit tree seedlings are another of the products they use to expand their income, as IPS was shown during a visit to their farm.
Using their own harvest and fruit they buy from neighbors, they make pulp in a small shed separate from their home, with a small machine purchased with the support of the Advisory and Services to Projects in Alternative Agriculture (AS-PTA), a non-governmental organization that supports farmers in Borborema and other parts of Brazil.
“Luckily we have a microclimate in the valley, where it rains more than in the surrounding areas. Everything grows here,” Santos told IPS.
But the couple created three reservoirs to collect rainwater and withstand droughts: a 16,000-liter water tank for household use, another that collects water on the paved ground for irrigation, and a small lagoon dug in the lower part of the farm.
But in 2016 the lagoon dried up, because of the “great drought” that lasted from 2012 to 2017, Vicente said.
The fruit pulp factory has grown in recent years and now has seven small freezers to store fruit and pulp for sale to the town’s stores and restaurants. The couple decided to purchase a cold room with the capacity of 30 freezers.
“I work in the mornings on the land, in the afternoons I make pulp and my husband is in charge of the sales,” she said.
Hiring workers from outside the family to reduce the workload costs too much and “we try to save as much as possible on everything, to sell the pulp at a fair price,” Santos said.
Sofía Quispe, the president of Ecorecicladoras de La Paz, finds a good haul of paper and cardboard in a municipal dumpster at the end of Avenida 6 de Agosto in La Paz, in a nighttime job that the southern hemisphere winter makes more challenging. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS
by Franz Chavez (la paz)
Inter Press Service
LA PAZ, Jul 12 (IPS) – They haul many kilos of recyclable materials on their backs but receive little in return. These Bolivian women who help clean up the environment from dawn to dusk are fighting for recognition of their work and social and labor rights.
The inhabitants of La Paz, Bolivia’s political center, walk hurriedly and almost oblivious to the women of different ages silently opening heavy lids of municipal garbage dumpsters that are taller than the women themselves.
They use a homemade tool, a kind of hook with a long wooden handle, to dig through the unsorted waste, trying to avoid getting cut by broken glass, and in search of plastic containers, paper, cardboard or aluminum cans.
People walk by on the avenues and squares without looking at them, and sometimes actively avoiding them. The recyclers feel this indifference and even rejection, but they overcome it with the courage gained over years and generations, convincing themselves that they have a dignified vocation.
“People call us dirty pigs (cochinas), they humiliate us and we can never respond,” says Rosario Ramos, a 16-year-old who accompanies her mother, Valeriana Chacolla, 58, sorting through the trash for recyclable waste.
A study by the United Nations Joint Program on self-employed women workers in the country describes them generally as being “of indigenous origin, adults with primary school education. Seventy percent of them are also involved in activities related to commerce, while 16 percent work in the manufacturing industry.”
Of a population of 12.2 million projected by the National Institute of Statistics for the year 2022, 5.9 million are women. La Paz is home to 1.53 million people.
Of the total population of this Andean country, 41 percent defined themselves as indigenous in the last census, while according to the latest official data available, 26 percent of urban dwellers live in moderate poverty and 7.2 percent in extreme poverty, including most of the informal recyclers.
One of the groups of women of the Ecorecicladoras de La Paz association gather next to a municipal dumpster in a corner of Plaza Avaroa in Bolivia’s political capital, after finishing their nightly collection of reusable materials. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS
On this southern hemisphere wintertime July night in La Paz, the group of women are virtually invisible as they gather around the dumpsters located in a corner of the Plaza Avaroa, in the area of Sopocachi, where residential and public office buildings are interspersed with banks, supermarkets and other businesses.
It’s a good place for picking through the waste in the dumpsters, and the women find paper, newspapers, plastic and aluminum containers. Although the volume of waste is large, each one of the garbage pickers manages to collect no more than one or two kg on one of the days that IPS accompanied different groups of the women in their work.
The silence is broken on some occasions when salaried municipal cleaners show up and throw the women out of the place, because they also compete to obtain materials that they then sell to recyclers. This is a moment when it becomes especially clear that garbage has value.
That is one of several reasons that forced the informal garbage pickers to come together in an association called EcoRecicladoras de La Paz. “There is no work for us, and they only listen to us when we organize,” says María Martínez, 50, the recording secretary of the 45 members, who also include a few men.
In Bolivia, trash is not separated into reusable and non-reusable waste in homes or offices. This task is carried out by private recycling companies, who buy the raw materials from informal waste collectors such as EcoRecicladoras.
Leonor Colque Rodríguez, 78, wearily ends her night shift collecting recyclable waste in Sopocachi, an area in La Paz, Bolivia. She has been working for 40 years as a “grassroots recycler” and is the head of her household. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS
Martínez, with slightly graying hair, says she comes out every evening. “I was a domestic worker until I was 30 years old. When my daughter was born I couldn’t get a job. I collected plastic bottles, clothes and shoes and sold them to the factories, but the recycling companies who pay really low prices emerged,” she complains.
It takes about three months between the initial collection and the final sale of the recyclable materials. Martínez collects the materials, carries around seven kg on her back, walks about three kilometers and patiently stores them until she has enough to sell them to the wholesaler.
“One year I collected 200 kg of scrap metal and sold it for 150 bolivianos (about 20 dollars),” she recalls. The recycling companies want to buy by the ton, she explains, with a grin, because it is impossible for them to reach that volume.
She represents a second generation of garbage collectors. Her mother, Leonor Colque, is two years short of turning 80, and has been combing through garbage dumps and trash on the streets for 40 years. On her back she carries a cloth in which she hauls a number of pieces of paper and some plastic waste.
“They should stay in school because this job is not for young girls,” she recommends, sadly, because she could not achieve her goal of sending one of her daughters to a teacher training school.
At 58, Chacolla, like almost all women garbage pickers, is the head of her household. Her husband, a former public transport driver, lost his job due to health problems and occasionally works as a welder, door-maker or bricklayer.
When she goes out to sort through trash she is accompanied by her daughter, Rosario, who explains and expands on what her mother says, calling for a change in the public’s attitude towards them and respect for the work they do as dignified, emphasizing, as they all do, that they deal with recyclable waste, not garbage.
Vests like this one identify women “grassroots recyclers” in their work of sorting through waste in dumpsters installed by the municipal government of La Paz in different parts of the Bolivian city. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS
“I walk with the Lord in my heart, he always helps me,” says Angelica Yana, who at 63 years of age defies the dangers of the wee hours of the morning in the Achachicala area, on the outskirts of La Paz, five kilometers north of the city.
“Nothing has ever happened to me,” says Yana, who leaves her home at three in the morning to scrape up enough to support a son who offers fine finishing masonry services, and her sick husband.
At the age of 70, Alberta Caisana says that she was assaulted by municipal cleanup workers while she was scrounging for recyclable materials. She now carries a credential issued by the Environmental Prevention and Control Directorate of the Autonomous Municipal Government of La Paz, and wears a work vest donated by development aid agencies from the governments of Sweden and Switzerland.
She relies on her uniform and identification card as symbols of protection from the indifference of the people and aggression from local officials.
The mother of a daughter and the head of her household, Anahí Lovera, saw her wish to continue her university studies frustrated, and at the age of 32 she combines collecting plastic bottles with helping in different tasks in the construction of houses.
In the foreground, the secretary of Ecorecicladoras de La Paz, María Martínez (50), together with Carla Chávez (42) and her mother Leonarda Chávez (72) take a break from sorting through waste in the Sopocachi area of the Bolivian city of La Paz. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS
Others, they say, sell clothes and other recovered objects in street markets, such as the famous one in Villa 16 de Julio in the neighboring city of El Alto, where used and new objects are sold in an area covering two kilometers.
Lovera’s work appears to go smoothly, but she and her colleagues describe the moment of dealing with the buyers. They deliver an exact volume and weight of products and the buyers declare a lower weight in order to pay less.
“This sector isn’t noticed by society, especially because we work with waste, that is, with what society throws away; this work is ‘devalued’,” Bárbara Giavarini, coordinator of Redcicla Bolivia-Reciclaje Inclusivo, told IPS.
One sign of the public’s recognition of the “grassroots recyclers,” as they call themselves, could be the direct, sorted delivery of the waste, which would facilitate the women’s work, she said.
Redcicla, a platform that promotes the integrated treatment of waste, has been helping since 2017 to organize them and bring visibility to their work, while fostering the delivery of waste from citizens to “grassroots recyclers” and working for the recognition of their work as dignified.
The president of Ecorecicladoras de La Paz, Sofía Quispe, supports the idea of getting help from local residents in sorting materials and delivering them to their affiliates, instead of throwing them into dumpsters where they are mixed with products that prevent subsequent recycling.
The president of the women’s group Ecorecicladoras de La Paz, Sofia Quispe, walks along the central Arce Avenue in this Bolivian city in search of dumpsters where local residents throw their waste. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS
Quispe is a 42-year-old mother of three. Like most of her fellow recyclers, she walks about two kilometers on foot in search of dumpsters, dressed in the customary indigenous wide-brimmed hat and pollera or skirt.
On the night that IPS accompanied her, she did not find the dumpster that was usually on Avenida 6 de Agosto, probably because it had been removed and taken to another part of the city.
The impoverished garbage picker was once a skilled seamstress who worked in small family-owned factories in the Brazilian city of São Paulo. Upon her return due to an illness, she was unable to raise the money she needed to buy a machine and raw materials.
She was also discouraged by the lack of interest among local residents in buying garments made in Bolivia, as they preferred low-cost clothing smuggled into the country as contraband.
Leonarda Chávez, another 72-year-old head of household, who collects recyclable materials every day with her daughter Carla Chávez (42) and granddaughter Maya Muga Chávez (25), feels satisfied because she can see her dream come true.
This month, her granddaughter earned a diploma in Business Social Responsibility, with which she completed her university education, in addition to a degree in commercial engineering and business administration, in a country where higher studies do not always guarantee good jobs.
Among the darkness and the objects discarded by people, hope is also alive. Rosario Ramos took the lessons of hard work and created her own goal: “I will study advanced robotics and prosthetic assembly,” she says with a confidence that contrasts with the group’s sad stories.
STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Jul 12 (IPS) – The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Proverb of unknown originThe war in Ukraine continues unabated; young men are sacrificed on battlefields, towns laid waste by aerial attacks, the threat of nuclear disasters is looming. People within an often formerly friendly inclined Europe are now wondering if Vladimir Putin has gone insane. The war in Ukraine is generally called “Putin’s war” and in April 2021 Putin signed a legislation providing him the right to run for two more consecutive terms, thus he could stay in power till 2036.
Nazi Germany was equalled with Hitler, the Soviet Union with Stalin, Communist China with Mao, and now Russia with Putin. Another example of the identification of an entire nation with a totalitarian ruler was Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe. A president who apart from participating in the invasion of a neighbouring country led his nation into a bloody civil war.
When I in the year 2000 was working for the Swedish International Development Cooperation (Sida) it was questioned why the Swedish Government every year granted SEK 140 million (USD 15 million) in development aid to Zimbabwe, a country governed by a scorned Robert Mugabe. At that time, Zimbabwe’s GNI had in one year shrunk by 13 percent, among other things due to unbudgeted expenses for the country’s participation in a war in the DR Congo (from 1998 to 2003 Zimbabwe’s participation in this war cost USD 1 million a day). A badly managed land reform had drastically reduced agricultural production. Even before the crisis 75 percent of the population was unable to meet necessary needs of food, clothing, schooling, health care and housing. Unemployment was over 60 percent, while 25 percent of the adult population was infected with HIV/AIDS.
Misery was blamed on Mugabe’s misrule, but Swedish support to Zimbabwe continued during his reign. Since Swedish aid was initiated in the early1980s Zimbabwe had by the year 2000 received SEK 5 billion (approximately USD 460 million). Economic support currently amounts to USD 28 million per year.
Swedish relations with Robert Mugabe indicate difficulties opinion leaders face while analysing the power game of other nations. For fear of being seen as harbouring neo-colonial attitudes “experts” often withheld critical judgment and were apt to name various leaders as ”hopes for Africa”. Unfortunately personal benefits from supremacy may prove to be a fatal temptation , several heroes of yesterday have after their seizure of power turn into despots.
In the case of Zimbabwe (which at the time was “Rhodesia” governed by a white minority party, the Rhodesian Front) it was reasonable to oppose a regime that kept the majority of a nation’s population out of power because of the colour of their skin. Swedish debate has often been characterized by two different worldviews, either that the world consists of democracies and dictatorships, with the former being on the good side, or that an enduring conflict subsists between the “West” and the “Rest”, where “West” is seen as the villain. According to the latter understanding , it did not matter if Zanu (PF), the party of Robert Mugabe, actually pursued one-party rule, any opposition towards the “ancient colonial world order” was OK.
It was thus more justifiable to support an armed struggle than the democratic consensus policy proclaimed by another Zimbabwean liberation group, Zapu, headed by Joshua Nkomo. The influential Pierre Schori, international secretary of the Swedish Social Democratic Party and close assistant to Prime Minister Olof Palme, supported the “eloquent and radical” Mugabe:
I think that it had to do with personal contacts. In the case of Zimbabwe, we did not choose between Zapu and Zanu, but I think that when Joshua Nkomo came to Sweden it was often through the churches, while Robert Mugabe was more of a pure freedom fighter.
Mugabe spoke fluent English, with an “exquisite” Oxford accent. He liked “open conversations and intellectual debates”, and in spite of an aversion to English colonialism he was an admirer of “Anglophone culture” and a fan of cricket, attesting that it “civilizes people and creates good gentlemen.”
Mugabe had been arrested in 1963 and was after 1966 transferred to a cell he shared with Zanu’s leader Ndabaningi Sithole. Mugabe remained in custody for a further eight years, devoting his time to studies. He gained a masters in economics, a bachelor of administration, and two law degrees from the University of London. Amnesty International’s Swedish Group 34 had as its lot to support the imprisoned freedom fighter. One member of the group later stated;
– He took advantage of the opportunity to study in prison and asked us to get literature. So we members shared the expenses and sent books to him. At that time, Mugabe was considered as a good guy. He was very fond of children and always remembered all our children’s names and greeted them in his letters. In addition to the books, Mugabe also asked for help with items such as a pair of pyjamas and tubes of toothpaste. Before his release, I and Eva Moberg , who had started the group, went and bought a suitcase, which we sent to him with his wife Sally.
In 1958, Mugabe had moved to Ghana to gain a teacher’s certificate at the Achimota College where he met his first wife, Sally Hafton. During Mugabe’s imprisonment Sally first moved to London, where she taught at the Africa Centre. She also lived for several years in Sweden, mostly in the village of Heby, north of the university town of Uppsala. She kept close contact with the members of Amnesty Group 34. Mugabe appreciated that Sally was staying in Sweden, which he considered to be a “safe country”. Sally worked as a nanny, learned Swedish and campaigned for Zimbabwe’s freedom struggle, both in Sweden and England. In Sweden, she became a frequently seen and well-liked person.
Mugabe was released in 1974 and resolved to leave Rhodesia for Moçambique. However, Samora Machel, who in 1975 became Moçambique’s president, was suspicious of Mugabe, whom he considered to be immature and belligerent. Furthermore, Machel suspected that Mugabe’s quick rise to power was due to machinations to get rid of Sithole as head of Zanu, a “prison coup” that might have been supported by Rhodesia’s white leader, Ian Smith. Machel put Mugabe under house arrest in Quelimane, far from the Zimbabwean guerrilla camps. It was rumoured that Machel was jealous of Mugabe’s intellectual achievements, preferring more down-to-earth men, especially the Zimbabwean guerrilla commander Josiah Tongogara. Contrary to Machel, Mugabe had never been an active fighter. When Machel in 1980 attended Mugabe’s inauguration as Zimbabwe’s president, he was well aware of Mugabe’s intention to form a one-party government, giving his Shona supporters absolute power. Machel addressed Mugabe:
To ensure national unity, there must be no Shonas in Zimbabwe, there must be no Ndebeles in Zimbabwe, there must be Zimbabweans. Some people are proud of their tribalism. But we call tribalists reactionary agents of the enemy. Zimbabwe is the jewel of Africa. Don’t tarnish it!
Some of Mugabe’s Swedish acquaintances were suspicious of him:
He considered himself to be a superior teacher, a professor. He had six different degrees, he was a learned and well-read man. Therefore, he believed that he was right in everything, and if he was opposed, he went mad.
Politicians and journalists declared that Mugabe could be charming and nice, but it was also alleged that he was a loner; admittedly a hard-working man, a voracious reader and not much given to laughter, but above all – a single-minded and extremely complex person, not easily captured by conventional categories. Some even claimed they considered him to be devoid of ordinary warmth and humanity; emotionally immature, homophobic and xenophobic. The last time a Swedish friend met with him, Mugabe told him:
When we are elected presidents, we suddenly get enormous power in accordance with the constitution that we took over from the colonial power. We can fill positions for relatives, friends and party sympathizers. We live well and have a different life than the vast majority of our citizens. But when we leave the presidential palace, we have nothing, there are no presidential pensions.
Mugabe coveted absolute power and when he obtained it, he hold on to it. Zanu came to act as yesterday’s colonial rulers. Even if power relations had changed, perceptions of power were the same. The Swedish Government did not lack documentation warning about Mugabe’s ambitions, nevertheless its conclusion was that he was Zimbabwe’s strongest leader and moreover “pro-Sweden”, accordingly Swedish aid could not be terminated, and even had to be increased.
Already in 1977, Mugabe declared that “any man who maliciously plants contradictions within our ranks will be struck by the Zanu axe” and he was even more ruthless towards his former brothers in arms – Zapu, and its leader Joshua Nkomo.
Zanu’s power base was among the Shona people, while Zapu found its strongest support among the Ndebeles in Matabeleland. Furthermore, the Cold War was reflected in the two parties’ relations to the outside world. Zapu received Soviet support, while Zanu relied on China, which wanted to undermine Soviet influence in Africa.
In early 1983, the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade, a unit subordinated to the presidency, began a crackdown on dissidents in Matabeleland. Over the following two years, thousands of Ndebele and Kalanga were accused of being “Zapu-traitors”, detained, marched to “re-education camps”, tortured, raped and/or summarily executed. Although there are different estimates, the consensus of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) is that more than 20,000 people were killed.
Swedish aid workers were knowledgeable about these atrocities. Nevertheless, Swedish aid continued to be delivered to Zanu-controlled Zimbabwe. The former head of Sida’s aid office in Harare played down the events, declaring that “the civilian population in Matabeleland has been stuck between warring factions.” He advised against using aid as a means of pressure to get Mugabe to stop the mass killing.
After the 93 years old Mugabe finally was removed from power, Zimbabwe continued to spiral down the abyss, while Swedish support is uninterrupted. The country is now ruled by Emmerson Mnangagwa, who once was a close ally to Mugabe. A brutal man who in 1983 described Government opponents as “cockroaches and bugs requiring DDT to be removed.” In 1998, Mnangagwa was put in charge of Zimbabwe’s intervention in the DR Congo wars and accused of “swapping Zimbabwean soldiers’ lives for mining contracts.” Mnangagwa does not further human rights, instead his government has deepened Zimbabwe’s economic struggles, enabled endemic corruption, fuelled instability, and targeted human rights activists and journalists. It is estimated that Zimbabwe may lose up to half the value of its annual GDP of USD 21.4 billion due to corrupt economic activities. Money laundering is among the murky deals said to be carried out under Mnangagwa’s aegis. Under diplomatic cover, criminals send unaccounted cash in exchange of equivalent amounts in Zimbabwean gold, and then sell it for seemingly legitimate money.
Swedish support to Mugabe and his successor might be considered as an effort to alleviate the plight of Zimbabwe’s citizens, but it might also be interpreted as being based on simplifications of a complicated reality and furthermore relying on one man’s power. When Mugabe’s abuse of sovereignty led to massacres, they were minimalized by those of those who had bet on him and the misrule of his successor is hardly noticed.
The world is now wondering whether the majority of Russia’s population will continue to support its strong man. If Putin’s nation will be weaken or strengthened by such encouragement. The stakes are high and predictions are generally gloomy.
Main sources: Yap, Katri P. (2001). Uprooting the weeds: Power, ethnicity and violence in the Matabeleland conflict. Ph.D Thesis, Universiteit van Amsterdam and various Swedish newspaper articles.
A view of the Canoas Wind Farm, owned by Neoenergia, the Brazilian subsidiary of Spain’s Iberdrola. Several wind farms with hundreds of turbines have already been built in the mountains of the Seridó mountain range, which vertically cross the state of Paraíba, in the Northeast region of Brazil, and are continuing to expand. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
by Mario Osava (santa luzia, brazil)
Inter Press Service
SANTA LUZIA, Brazil, Jul 07 (IPS) – “Anxiety, insomnia and depression have become widespread. We don’t sleep well, I wake up three, four times a night,” complained Brazilian farmer Roselma de Melo Oliveira, 35, who has lived 160 meters from a wind turbine for eight years.
Her story illustrates the ordeal of at least 80 families who decided to hire a lawyer to demand compensation from the company that owns the Ventos de Santa Brigida wind farm complex in Caetés, a municipality of 28,000 inhabitants in the state of Pernambuco, in the Northeast region of Brazil.
Dozens of other families affected by the proximity of the wind towers have not joined the legal action, largely because they fear losing the rental income from part of their land where one or more wind turbines have been erected.
The company pays them about 290 dollars for each wind tower, which represents 1.5 percent of the electricity generated and sold, according to Oliveira. Those who were not offered or did not accept the lease are left with the damage and no profits.
Built in 2015 by the national company Casa dos Ventos and sold the following year to the British corporation Cubico Sustainable Investments, the set of seven wind farms, consisting of 107 wind turbines 80 meters high, has a total installed capacity of 182 megawatts, enough to supply 350,000 homes.
The wind energy boom has intensified in recent years in Brazil’s Northeast region, which accounts for more than 80 percent of the wind electricity generated in the whole country.
Severino Olegario, a small farmer impoverished by a plague that destroyed the local cotton crop, took advantage of the arrival of the wind towers on his family’s mountainous land to become the owner of an open-air restaurant, now a tourist attraction in the municipality of Santa Luzia, in the Northeastern Brazilian state of Paraíba. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
Wind power boom
This expansion will be accelerated by plans to produce green hydrogen, which requires a large amount of renewable energy for electrolysis, the technology of choice. The region’s enormous wind and solar potential, in addition to its relative proximity to Europe, the great consumer market of green hydrogen, puts the Northeast in a strong position as a supplier of the so-called fuel of the future.
As a result, large energy projects are proliferating in the region, which is mostly semiarid and almost always sunny. The giant parks have triggered local resistance, due to the social and environmental impacts, which are felt more intensely in the Northeast, where small rural properties are the norm.
Brazil currently has 191,702 megawatts of installed capacity, including 53.3 percent hydroelectric, 13.2 percent wind and 4.4 percent solar. The goal is for wind, solar and biomass to contribute 23 percent of the total by 2030, with the Northeast as the epicenter of the production of renewable sources.
“We are not against wind energy, but against the way these large projects are implemented, without studying or avoiding their impacts,” Oliveira said. Renewable sources are not always clean and sustainable, say activists, especially movements led by women in the Northeast.
“Because they are considered low-impact, wind and solar farms obtain permits for implementation and operation more quickly and at a low cost, without in-depth studies,” said José Aderivaldo, a sociologist and secondary school teacher in Santa Luzia, a municipality of 15,000 inhabitants in the semiarid zone of the Northeastern state of Paraíba.
The Neoenergia company’s Renewable Complex; in the background can be seen a small part of the solar panels and the wind farm. The synergy between the daytime sunshine and nighttime winds generates enough electricity for 1.3 million homes in the Northeast region of Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
“But solar energy has a greater impact, it is more invasive. A wind farm has little impact on livestock, which do lose a lot of space to solar, more extensive in terms of the land it occupies,” he told IPS.
His field of observation is the Neoenergía company’s Renewable Complex, a project that combines wind power, with 136 wind turbines in the Chafariz complex in the mountains, and 228,000 photovoltaic panels in the Luzia Park on the plains. The former generates more electricity at night, the latter during the day.
In total, they cover 8,700 hectares in Santa Luzia and three other neighboring municipalities and can generate up to 620.4 megawatts, most of it – 471.2 megawatts – coming from the wind in the mountains. They can supply electricity to 1.3 million housing units and avoid the emission of 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide gas, according to the company, a subsidiary of Spain’s Iberdrola.
One of the impacts was a reduction in the local capacity for the production of cheap protein from livestock farming adapted for centuries to the local ecosystem, in addition to extracting rocks for the construction of wind towers and damaging local roads with trucks for their transport, lamented João Telésforo, an engineer and retired professor from the public Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte.
“Neoenergía carried out all the socio-environmental impact studies rigorously in accordance with the country’s current legislation and global best practices. The distance between the homes and the wind turbines is in compliance with the law,” the company responded to IPS in writing, in response to questions about criticism of its activities.
Marizelda Duarte da Silva, vice-president of the Esperança Rural Workers Union, is one of the leaders of the women’s resistance to the installation of wind farms in the mountains of the Borborema Plateau, coveted for its strong, regular winds, in the state of Paraíba, in Brazil’s Northeast region. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
“In addition, it only leases the land, without purchasing it, which means people stay in their homes and in the countryside, and owners receive payments according to the contracts, with transparency, contributing to income distribution and local quality of life,” it added.
Local complaints
But Pedro Olegario, 73, laments that the remuneration has declined, explained by the company as a result of a drop in the energy generated. “The wind is still blowing the same,” he protested.
His wife, Maria José Gomes, 57, complains about the noise, even though the nearest wind turbine is about 500 meters away from their house. “Sometimes I can only fall asleep in the wee hours of the morning with the window tightly closed,” she said.
The couple lives on their share of a 265-hectare property, inherited and divided between the widow and 17 children of the previous owner, on one of the mountains of the Seridó range, part of Santa Luzia.
The 18 family members split the income from four wind towers installed on their land.
Not everyone is unhappy
On the other hand, Pedro’s brother Severino Olegario, 50, has a positive view of the Canoas Wind Farm, which also belongs to Neoenergia. The 2019 construction made it possible for him to open a restaurant to feed 40 technicians of the company who installed the mechanical components.
On the horizon can be seen one of the hills of the Borborema Plateua, whose occupation by wind turbines faces resistance from the Women’s Movement, which began holding annual marches for agroecology and in defense of the land in 2010. Nearly 5,000 women mobilized this year in opposition to wind farms in the Northeast region of Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
“I sleep despite the noise and the remuneration is low because we had to divide it among a very large family,” he said. He also improved the road, which brings tourists to his restaurant on Sundays, after the construction work ended, and slowed the local exodus of people from the region.
About 1,000 families used to live in the three communities up in the mountains, due to the high level of production of cotton. But the cotton boll weevil (Anthonomus grandis) plague in the 1990s destroyed the crop and the value of the land.
“Today there are less than a hundred families left,” said Severino, who continues to grow some of the food that he uses to serve meals at his restaurant.
His perspective differs from the picture described by Oliveira to IPS by telephone from her rural community, Sobradinho, in Caetés, the result of a wind farm authorized before the government’s Brazilian Environmental Institute issued new rules in 2014.
The state government’s wind map points out mountain ranges favorable for wind energy. In red are the areas of greatest potential. The longest is the Seridó mountain range, to the west, already covered by dozens of wind farms. About 100 kilometers to the east, the second largest area, Borborema, has a women’s movement that aims to keep it free of wind farms. CREDIT: Government of Paraíba
Damage and unfavorable contracts
“There are cases of allergies that we believe are caused by the dust from the wind turbine blades, which also contaminates the water we drink, as it falls on our roofs where we collect rainwater in tanks,” Oliveira complained.
The alternative would be to buy water from tanker trucks which “costs 300 reais (62 dollars ) – too expensive for a family with two children who only harvest beans and corn once a year,” she explained, adding that growing vegetables and medicinal herbs is impossible because of the polluted water.
In addition to the audible sound, vibrations, infrasound (considered inaudible), shadow flicker (the effect of rotating turbine blades causing varying brightness levels and blocking the sun’s rays) and microparticles cause symptoms of “wind turbine syndrome,” according to Wanessa Gomes, a professor at the public University of Pernambuco, who is researching the subject with colleagues from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Brazil’s leading academic public health institution.
Local families have also been living in fear since a blade broke and fell with a loud bang. Many take medication for sleep and mental illness, according to Oliveira, whose testimony aims to alert other communities to the risks posed by wind energy enterprises.
On Mar. 16, she took her complaints to the Women’s March for Life and Agroecology, organized by the Polo de Borborema in Montadas, a municipality of 5,800 people, about 280 kilometers north of Caetés.
The Polo is a group of rural workers’ unions in 13 municipalities in the Borborema highlands in the state of Paraíba, whose windy mountains are coveted by companies.
“Our struggle is to prevent these parks from being installed here. If many families refuse to sign the contracts with the companies, there will be no parks,” Marizelda Duarte da Silva, 50, vice-president of the Rural Workers Union of Esperança, a municipality of 31,000 inhabitants in the center of Borborema territory, told IPS.
“The contracts are draconian, up to 49 years and renewable by unilateral decision of the company,” said Claudionor Vital Pereira, a lawyer for the Polo union. “They demand unjustifiable confidentiality, charge fines for withdrawing and make variable payments for the lease depending on the amount and prices of energy generated, imposing on the lessor a risk that should only be assumed by the company.”
Even as they face their own challenges abroad, Zimbabweans living overseas say they can not consider heading back home to face the economic challenges – especially now with hyperinflation. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS
by Jeffrey Moyo (dordrecht, netherlands)
Inter Press Service
DORDRECHT, NETHERLANDS, Jul 05 (IPS) – They have high-paying jobs, a high standard of living, and almost everything they need, but for Zimbabweans abroad, all that glitters is not gold.
Twenty-eight-year-old Gift Gonye, based in Germany, is one such Zimbabwean, and he is apparently not satisfied with his life abroad.
Homesickness is one disease that has hit Zimbabweans like Gonye, but despite this, they are afraid to wade back into the suffering in the southern African nation.
“On my behalf and the behalf of other Zimbabweans in the diaspora, yes, we miss home, but even then, there is nothing we can do about it because there is suffering back home. We can’t go back home to face poverty,” Gonye told IPS.
“You just find yourself with no choice except to endure the challenges here in the diaspora in order to survive.”
Based on the latest figures from the Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency (Zimstats) in the 2022 national housing and population, less than one million Zimbabweans have left the country since 2012, looking for greener pastures abroad.
Records from Zimstats have indicated that 908,914 left the southern African country in the last decade, with South Africa, Botswana and the United Kingdom being the preferred destinations for Zimbabweans.
South Africa has accounted for 773,246, Botswana 74,928, Britain 23,166 and the USA 8,565.
Gonye and several other Zimbabweans that have fled from the economic hardships in their African country have had to endure some difficulties in their stay abroad.
“The life we live here is expensive. We pay high taxes. The tough life back home in Zimbabwe complicates our lives in the diaspora, for we have to support the people back home because people there look forward to our help, and this results in us here in the diaspora not investing in terms of our future and for ourselves at old age,” Gonye said, referring to a system often referred to as “black tax” where wealthier and more successful people are expected to assist their families.
While many Zimbabweans back home have high regard for diaspora nations, many like Gonye see otherwise, thanks to the daily pressure migrants endure to survive.
“I want to let people back home know we have no social life here. It’s not easy living here. The money we earn is enough for rent and food and other basics, and it ends there. It is hard for us in the diaspora,” said Gonye.
“If you see someone sending you some bit of money back in Zimbabwe—some 30 dollars or seventy dollars, that person would have endured saving that amount.”
As a result, Zimbabweans abroad live under pressure from their kith and kin back home and meet their needs as well.
Despite official government figures about people that have relocated overseas, about 4 to 5 million Zimbabweans are said to be abroad, largely forced abroad by a fractured national economy since 2000 when authorities seized white-owned commercial farms.
Ellen Mazorodze, based in Australia, as elections loom in Zimbabwe on August 23 this year, migrants like herself would like to have a chance to change things in their country. However, only those residents living in the country can vote, and she encouraged them to vote.
“If you want to choose a person to represent you, go and vote. Your vote will be counted. It will help you to have a person fulfilling your wishes get in office,” Mazorodze told IPS.
Privilege Kandira (30), living in Norway, says: “Diaspora life is a mixture of both good and bad.”
“On one side, I can testify that I have enjoyed the opportunity of coming to a better life here in the diaspora, but on the other side, let me hasten to say that I have met lots of challenges, amongst which is racial discrimination,” he told IPS.
Kandira is not alone in battling racial discrimination.
In the UK, many Zimbabweans, like 29-year-old Tariro Muungani, a professional social worker, have had to face racial discrimination.
“I will give an example of where I live here in England. It’s a place where there are few black people. When you walk the streets, white people look at you curiously. When you board a bus, for instance, and sit next to a white person, they may drift away from you because they don’t want to be in contact with you, which makes living in such areas painful,” she (Muungani) told IPS.
Like Gonye in Germany, Muungani said, “Zimbabweans back home look at us in the diaspora as people who have made it in life and think we have no problems, and they look forward to us with trust that diaspora people can help them.”
Muungani said most people back in her home country do not believe people abroad can sometimes lack money.
Yet other Zimbabweans overseas say they miss the social unity back in their country as they fight to earn a better living abroad.
“What comes to mind is the togetherness we had back home, the spirit of neighbourliness, which is not there here. Nobody really cares for the next person. Children live just anyhow with no strangers bothering to discipline them, unlike what happens back home culturally,” Sophia Tekwane, a Zimbabwean woman based in Sweden, told IPS.
But Tekwane also said with the suffering in Zimbabwe, many like herself have no choice except to endure being abroad.
“The suffering in Zimbabwe makes things tough for all of us in the diaspora because it forces us to work even harder to support the loved ones back home.”
“You end up having no choice. Sometimes you end up sacrificing – starving yourself to support the people back home. You end up working abnormally long hours,” added Tekwane.
Eronildes da Silva proudly stands next to a bunch of bananas on his farm, whose large size is the result, he says, of the effective fertilizer of reusing waste water. In addition to farming, he drives a school bus and builds rainwater tanks in Afogados da Ingazeira, in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast region. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS
by Mario Osava (afogados da ingazeira, brasil)
Inter Press Service
“The rainwater tanks are the best invention in the world for us,” said Maria de Lourdes Feitosa, 46, who recalls the deadly droughts of the past in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast region.
“There has been a reduction of many diseases” that came from the so-called “barreros”, puddles and small ponds that are the result of the accumulation of water in muddy holes in the ground that people shared with animals, Feitosa, a farmer from a rural community in Afogados da Ingazeira, a municipality of 38,000 inhabitants, told IPS.
Feitosa owns a six-hectare farm and is less dependent on water than some of her neighbors because she produces agroecological cotton, which requires less water than horticultural and fruit crops.
Nearly 1.2 million tanks that collect 16,000 liters of potable rainwater from the roofs of homes now form part of the rural landscape of the semiarid ecoregion, an area that covers 1.1 million square kilometers and is home to 28 million of Brazil’s 214 million people, which extends throughout the interior of the Northeast and into the northern fringe of Brazil’s Southeast region.
The water tanks are a symbol of the transformation that the Northeast, the country’s poorest region, has been undergoing since the beginning of this century. During the longest drought in its history, from 2011 to 2018, there was no repeat of previous tragedies of deaths, mass exodus of people to the south and the looting of businesses by desperate people, as seen in the 1980s and 1990s.
According to the Articulação Semiárido Brasileiro (ASA), a network of 3,000 social organizations that created the program, adopted as public policy by the government in 2003, some 350,000 families are still in need of water tanks.
This 16,000-liter concrete slab tank stores rainwater collected on the roof and uses pipes to provide drinking water for Josaída Nunes and Eronildes Silva, in the Sertão de Pajeú, in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
Another battle is to increase fourfold the more than 200,000 “technologies” for collecting water for production, or “second water”, which already benefit family farming and are decisive for food security and poverty reduction in the region.
Reusing household water
Josaida Nunes da Silva, 38, and her husband Eronildes da Silva, 41, resort to reusing water from the bathroom and kitchen in their home, faced with shortages aggravated by the altitude of the hill they live on in Carnaiba, a municipality of 20,000 people bordering Afogados da Ingazeira.
A complex of pipes carries the wastewater to the so-called “fat box” and then to the Upflow Anaerobic Sludge Blanket (UASB) reactor and a tank for “polishing”, exposed to the sun, and another for the water ready for irrigation.
This system filters contaminating components, such as fecal coliforms (bacteria), and prepares the water with fertilizers for irrigation of the fields and fruit trees. “We grow lettuce, onions, cilantro and other vegetables, as well as bananas, corn, cassava, papaya, guava, passion fruit and even dragon fruit,” said Nunes.
Dragon fruit comes from the cactus family, of Mexican and Central American origin, and has recently become popular in Brazil.
The large size of the banana bunch is “proof” of the fertilizer’s effectiveness, said Nunes’ husband, who adds cow dung. “The treated water is a blessing. Besides providing us with water, it gives us good fertilizer,” Nunes said.
A “stone tank” that takes advantage of holes in the rocks to store rainwater is one of the technologies used to coexist with the scarcity of rainfall in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast ecoregion. In the background can be seen the mountainous landscape of the Sertão de Pajeú, in northeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
Her husband Silva is also a bricklayer and has built many water tanks in the region. He also drives school children from the rural area in an old van and keeps fodder for his ten cows in hermetically sealed plastic bags.
“The drought hit us hard. We had to bring water from the ‘barrero’ on the plain, up the mountain in the ox cart. We bought a cow, when she was still a calf, for 2500 reais and had to sell it for 500 reais (104 dollars),” lamented his wife.
The couple owns 8.5 hectares of land, a large property in the region where most farms are only a few hectares in size, the result of the frequent divisions between heirs of the large families of the past. But since the terrain is mountainous and rocky, the cultivable area is limited.
Nunes and Silva have three children, although only the youngest, 17, still lives with them.
Farmer Aluisio Braz (L) dries and threshes beans, accompanied by his wife, Joselita Ramos, on the terrace of their house that collects rainwater to fill the 52,000-liter tank at the back for agricultural irrigation on their farm in Carnaiba, in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
Coexisting with semiarid conditions
The techniques that benefit family farmers so that they can “coexist with the semiarid conditions” and prosper have been disseminated in the municipalities of the Sertão de Pajeú by Diaconia, a social organization of Protestant churches.
Pajeú is the name of the river that crosses 17 municipalities, whose basin is home to 360,000 people. The mountains surrounding the territory include the headwaters of several streams and creeks, which dry up in the dry season, but ensure greater humidity compared to other areas of the semiarid Northeast.
Agroecology practices are one of the focuses of Diaconia, whose agricultural technician Adilson Viana has dedicated 20 of his 49 years to supporting farmers and who accompanied IPS on visits to families involved in the program.
A tank that collects 52,000 liters of rainwater for production is the treasure of Joselita Ramos, 49, and her husband Aluisio Braz, 55, on their two-hectare farm, also located in Carnaiba.
The UASB reactor is an important component in the system for reusing bath and kitchen water for family farming in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
The rainwater falls on a concrete terrace on the ground that is about 200 square meters in size and is slightly inclined to fill the water tank. Braz uses it to dry and thresh string beans, which are typical of the Northeastern diet.
The couple grows fruit trees that Ramos uses to make pulp using mango, guava, acerola cherry (Malpighia emarginata) and a fruit native to the semiarid region, the umbu or Brazil plum (Spondias tuberosa), that comes from a small tree native to Northeast Brazil.
Ramos is taking a break from the activity “because it is not fruit season in the region and the energy to run the refrigerator is very expensive.” Another difficulty is that the city government’s payments for the pulp supplied to the schools have been delayed. “I only received a payment in November for sales from early last year,” she complained.
To boost the production of grains, such as beans and corn, as well as cassava, Braz grows them on his father’s four-hectare farm, about six kilometers from his own farm.
Ivan Lopes, an enterprising family farmer, shows a soursop plant that is highly productive thanks to irrigation with reused water and natural fertilizers, on his farm in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
Agroecological productivity
An exceptional case of entrepreneurial vocation and availability of water is that of Ivan Lopes, 43, who together with his brother grows fruit, including bananas, pineapple, mango, grapes, avocado, passion fruit and many more, on nine hectares of land.
Water is pumped from a lagoon on the property to four reservoirs located at the higher elevations, which make gravity irrigation possible. That is why electricity is one of the farm’s biggest expenses. “I plan to install a solar power plant to save money,” Lopes told IPS.
Honey is another product they make. “The last harvest totaled 40 liters,” from dozens of hives distributed throughout the orchard. Sugarcane is grown for the sale of sugarcane juice in the cities.
The farm is also a kind of laboratory for the dissemination of organic tomato cultivation in greenhouses. “At the agroecological market in São José do Egito (a neighboring city of 34,000 people) people line up to buy my tomatoes, because they are known to be clean, pest-free and tasty,” Lopes said.
To achieve his high level of productivity, the farmer makes his own fertilizer from earthworm humus. The success he has experienced in farming prompted him to get rid of his 10 cows in order to focus on crops and beekeeping.
Recent trends show that African women are abandoning traditional ways of engaging in agribusiness and adopting an intellectual property approach to transform food systems on the continent. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS
by Aimable Twahirwa (kigali)
Inter Press Service
KIGALI, Jun 29 (IPS) – Adeline Umukunzi, a 28-year-old woman mushroom farmer in Musanze, a district located about 100 km north of the capital Kigali, said women have often been the unseen faces of agribusiness in Rwanda.
“Women have always played a vital role in agriculture, but behind the scenes. We are starting to see more and more female faces in agribusiness,” she told IPS.
While she developed high potential and locally-adapted innovations in mushroom farming, the young cultivator was unaware of how much her produce was worth to the market. Little did she know that one local food company had purchased most of her produce to process mushroom-based biscuits and nuggets.
As part of Rwanda’s agriculture transformation efforts to enhance agribusiness competitiveness, a growing number of women are now engaged in agribusiness, where many have been able to generate business benefits throughout the value chain.
Official estimates show that in Rwanda, more women than men are primarily engaged in agriculture, yet female farmers face more challenges in starting successful agribusinesses than their male counterparts.
Despite these challenges, the latest official trends show that African women are abandoning traditional ways of engaging in agribusiness and adopting intellectual property (IP) approach to transform food systems on the continent.
According to experts, adopting IP in agribusiness aims to protect goods or services produced in the sector. It mainly deals with trade secrets, described as an essential component for businesses to protect confidential information that provides them a competitive edge.
According to Olivier Kamana, Permanent Secretary in Rwanda’s Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Resources, adopting IP rights allows innovators to generate good profits.
Kamana told IPS that key women agripreneurs in Africa could develop commercially viable products, so there needs to be some IP protection to incentivize the innovator.
In many African countries like Rwanda, where agriculture is the backbone of their national economy, experts stress the need to embrace talent, problem-solving ability, and innovation for women.
Official estimates by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) indicate that around 62 percent of women in Africa are involved in farming and do the bulk of the work to produce, process, and market food.
According to agriculture experts, business competitiveness in the regional intra-African trading space offered by the African Continental Free Trade Agreement requires agribusiness actors to operate more efficiently, which requires investments in new technologies, new ways of fertilizing and watering crops, and new ways of connecting to the global market.
For Kamana, African women agripreneurs have access to the type of innovations they need to overcome the unique challenges they face.
During the first Africa Regional Intellectual Property (IP) Conference for Women in Agribusiness, which took place in Kigali in May 2023, delegates expressed the desire to promote innovations in women-led agribusinesses in Africa by helping them understand and use IP to bring their ideas to the world.
Bemanya Twebaze, Director General of the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO), is convinced that Intellectual property (IPR) can be a powerful tool in empowering women and guaranteeing that they benefit from their innovations and creations in the agricultural industry.
“Policymakers should encourage and facilitate IP rights for women in agriculture while providing legal and technical aid to maximize their prospects of prosperity,” he said.
Agriculture scientists have made breakthroughs in identifying the actors that can be considered innovators to bring agricultural development and increase food production in Africa by examining how intellectual property rights could be largely promoted on the continent.
Estimates show that small farmers, with the majority of women, constitute Africa’s most important and most capable innovators, yet this category of the workforce is still struggling to aggregate their produce to supply foreign markets.
Supporters of IPRs argue that though the exclusive monopoly on the invention could impact agriculture in Africa, farming communities across the continent still have difficulty innovating by incorporating new technologies or varieties coming from outside into their production systems.
After graduating from university a few years ago, Rosine Mwiseneza, a young woman agripreneur and manager of BeeGulf company based in Kigali, started beekeeping with only five hives in the Rwamagana district from Eastern Rwanda. Soon after, the number of hives increased to 15 and later to 25.
Mwiseneza told IPS that there had been plenty of opportunity for honey production in Rwanda with the possibility to generate various products across the value chain without intermediaries.
Currently, Mwiseneza’s company is producing soaps, candles, and glass containers made from raw beeswax with a target to make appropriate use of IP rights in the stage of this innovation process.
“We are looking to apply for a valid invention patent, and we are confident to get substantial profits from these innovations in the near future,” she told IPS.
