DG Simeon Ehui visits IITA Semi-Autotrophic Hydroponic SAH, cassava multiplication section with Kenton Dashiell and Debo Akande facilitated by Mercy Diebru-Ojo, Assitant Seed Specialist (Right). Credit: IITA
by Guy Dinmore (st davids, wales)
Inter Press Service
ST DAVIDS, WALES, Aug 02 (IPS) – “My key message is really simple,” says Dr Simeon Ehui, the newly-appointed director general of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, which works with partners across sub-Saharan Africa to tackle hunger, poverty and natural resource degradation.
“The clock is ticking,” Ehui tells IPS in an interview from Washington DC on his last day at the World Bank, urging Africa’s leaders to recognise the “absolute, paramount” importance of increasing funding for agriculture.
Dr Ehui, who also becomes regional director of Continental Africa for CGIAR, a global network of food security research organisations, says Africa’s food security is worsening. He lists the challenges: the climate crisis and extreme weather events that are presently causing floods in the west and central Africa and drought in the east; relatively high population growth; migration to urban areas; and specifically, the Ukraine-Russia war that triggered soaring prices of chemical fertilisers and grain.
As the African Development Bank recently noted, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine resulted in fertiliser prices rising two to three times over 2020 levels, creating serious supply gaps across the continent and driving food inflation. In sub-Saharan Africa, households spend up to 40% of their budget on food, compared to 17% in developed economies. Africa, the bank says, is over-reliant on food staples and agricultural inputs, importing over 100 million tonnes of cereals a year.
Much of that food deficit and accompanying poverty is concentrated in several African states, led by Nigeria (where IITA is based in Ibadan), which is projected to overtake the US as the world’s third most populous country by 2050 with some 400 million people.
“My vision is thriving agricultural food systems in Africa,” says Dr Ehui, and, specifically for IITA and CGIAR, this means fostering the conditions to sustain centres of research excellence where scientists will be excited to work, with transparency of management and gender equality.
“We have to be able to respond quickly … We need to accelerate our research to respond to the needs of the people,” he adds.
While the global climate crisis is having a huge impact on food security, Dr Ehui agrees that political issues cannot be set aside. “We can’t divorce policy issues from the bigger agenda . The two go together,” he says, singling out land tenure, land grabbing, and obstacles to women having access to land.
IITA will provide analysis and options for policy-makers to improve access to land and boost investments in agriculture.
Asked whether he is concerned that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation plays an overly dominant role in providing over half of IITA’s funding of “research and delivery” projects, Dr Ehui begins by expressing his appreciation of the foundation’s support, particularly in the development of Aflasafe to combat dangerous aflatoxin in maise, groundnuts and other crops. However, the new director general also says he wants to “diversify sources of funding and scale-up research”.
He also rejects criticism from some quarters of the “failure” of Africa’s Green Revolution as embraced by Bill Gates, saying India’s one-crop model of the “green revolution” and a lack of care for the environment had not been applicable to Africa and its own complex systems.
IITA and CGIAR are responding to the needs of smallholder farmers in Africa, Dr Ehui says, and that means agriculture that is sustainable and regenerative.
“The focus on regenerative agriculture reflects the importance of natural resource management and local eco-systems,” says Dr Ehui, a national of Cote d’Ivoire who worked for 15 years at CGIAR, managing multi-agricultural research development programs in Africa and Asia, and whose most recent post was World Bank Regional Director for Sustainable Development for West and Central Africa.
Asked if there was a genuine shift towards regenerative and sustainable practices for Africa, Dr Ehui said CGIAR had long been focusing on using local technologies for enhancing food security, for example, reducing reliance on chemical fertilisers for those who could not afford it and using locally available inputs instead. “When I was a young scientist, we were working on these technologies,” he notes.
The Dakar 2 summit on food security last January recognised how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had exposed Africa’s over-reliance on imports of chemical fertilisers. “We have the resources to make it locally,” says Dr Ehui, who chaired a summit session.
At the summit, Senegal’s President Macky Sall, then head of the African Union, declared that “Africa must learn to feed itself” and that at least 10 percent of national budgets should be spent on agriculture.
Dr Ehui says it has been shown that every dollar spent on agricultural research brings a return of 10 dollars and that such investment will go a long way to help improve the socio-economic conditions of the people. Meeting basic needs will also help stem migration across the Mediterranean to Europe, he says.
Despite the challenges, agriculture is growing in much of sub-Saharan Africa and remains the mainstay of most African economies and a major employer. With 65% of the world’s remaining arable land in Africa and with a youthful and dynamic population, the African Development Bank believes Africa is capable of feeding itself as the world approaches a total population of nine billion people by 2050.
But have the pleas heard at the Dakar summit been heeded? “There has been a shift,” Dr Ehui replies. Funding for agriculture is still “below optimum”, but “a few countries” have responded, and he feels confident that, with work, numbers will soon increase.
Faces of the dead. Myanmar’s non-profit Assistance Association for Political Prisoners has a museum in the Thai border town of Mae Sot documenting the identities of over 3,000 civilians killed by the military since it seized power in 2021, as well as those killed since the first post-independence coup in 1962. Credit: Guy Dinmore/IPS
by Guy Dinmore (kayin state, myanmar)
Inter Press Service
KAYIN STATE, Myanmar, Apr 17 (IPS) – Food is passed around a campfire, and a guitar strums as cool night air tumbles down mountain cliffs, relieving the jungle of its heat.
A dozen or so young Myanmar activists – some having just travelled long distances evading military checkpoints, others already living in exile – have come together in a jungle camp for a training course with a difference. Instead of armed combat, their chosen role is enabling the overthrow of the military junta through non-violent means.
Conversations are animated, with talk of federal democracy and creating a country that would also give political space and freedom to ethnic minorities. They are joined by soldiers of the rebel Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) protecting the camp deep in southeastern Kayin State.
The peaceful setting of the camp belies the horrors of the civil war beyond the mountains that is breaking Myanmar apart. The generals who overthrew a democratically elected government and seized power in 2021 are increasingly responding to a national uprising by waging terror on civilians it calls “terrorists” in an attempt to break their support for armed insurgents.
The aftermath of Myanmar military air strikes on a crowd gathered in Pa Zi Gyi village in Sagaing Region on April 11, in which the anti-junta resistance says over 150 people were killed, including children, performing dances. Credit: Local People’s Defence Force
On April 11, the military carried out what is believed to be the deadliest attack of the civil war so far, using air strikes and a helicopter gunship on a village ceremony organised by the parallel and underground National Unity Government (NUG) in Sagaing Region.
At least 165 people, including 27 women and 19 children, some performing dances, were killed, according to the NUG. The regime says it was attacking the NUG’s People’s Defence Forces.
Over the past two years, artillery and bombing raids using aircraft supplied by China and Russia have targeted schools, IDP camps, hospitals, mosques, Buddhist temples and Christian churches across the country. Tens of thousands of houses have been torched, and more than 1.3 million people displaced since the 2021 coup, according to UN estimates.
The barbarity defies belief. In February, a unit of some 150 soldiers known as the Ogre Column were dropped by helicopter in Sagaing and went on a marauding killing spree that lasted weeks. Scores of villagers were killed. Women were raped and shot. Men and boys were beheaded, disembowelled and dismembered.
Truth about massacres in wars gone by took months or even years to fully emerge, but in this modern era of mobile phones and social media, the grim evidence is transmitted by survivors within a day or so.
Kyaw Soe Win, a veteran activist with the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), which carefully documents civilian deaths, arrests and extra-judicial killings, shows IPS a picture he has just received on his phone of a man in Sagaing, disembowelled and his organs taken out.
Why do they do this? “It is to spread fear and terror,” he says.
AAPP, now based in the border town of Mae Sot just inside Thailand, has an exhibition dedicated to victims of successive uprisings against military rule since protests against the first post-independence coup in 1962. Rows of faces and names stare out from the walls, including pictures of some 30 civilians – among them two Save the Children charity workers – who were tortured and burned alive in what is now known as the 2021 Christmas Eve Massacre in Kayah State.
“This chapter is different,” Kyaw Soe Win, a former political prisoner, says of the present conflict. “The situation is getting worse and worse. The numbers of political prisoners and fatalities and houses torched are far higher. The junta is oppressing the people and is even more brutal than before.”
Sky, a resistance fighter and writer, who uses a nom de guerre, explains in a Mae Sot bar how the insurgency is also very different this time.
“After the 1988 student uprising, it took me three years to get an AK-47 and 300 bullets. Now it is much quicker. Now we are getting modified AK-47s through the Wa. They call it a Wa-AK,” he laughs, referring to an autonomous border area run by the heavily armed United Wa State Party. Their one-party narco-state on the border with China stays out of the war but makes money from both sides.
“China systematically eroded history after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, but after the 1988 protests in Myanmar, we still have the whispered stories. This generation knows what is right and wrong,” said Sky.
Despite what the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights recently called its “scorched earth policy”, the regime is steadily losing this war in terms of territory and military casualties.
“The military is in a very, very difficult situation which is only getting worse,” says Matthew Arnold, an independent policy analyst on Myanmar with previous conflict experience in Afghanistan and Sudan. He says the regime’s forces are “atomised” and “bleeding out in a war of attrition”. In some towns, they are pinned down in police stations and barracks and cannot be reinforced or resupplied for months on end.
Because it cannot move freely on the ground over the vast distances to maintain its outposts and impose its authority, the junta is resorting increasingly to air strikes and artillery against civilian populations.
Sagaing and the neighbouring region of Magwe are crucial conflict areas. Covering an area bigger than England, they are known as the heartland of the Bamar majority and had been, for decades, a fertile recruiting ground for the Bamar-dominated military. But no more.
“There are very few areas of Sagaing where they are not fighting on a regular basis. The junta was hit all over the place in February in Sagaing and Magwe,” says Arnold, who credits resistance forces moving rapidly “from muskets to drones and IEDS” (improvised explosive devices) in inflicting heavy losses.
Vulnerable in more remote areas in Chin State in the west and areas of the southeast, the military’s pullback is expected to accelerate as the monsoons come.
Thantlang in Chin State, near the border with India, was the first large town to fall to the rebels, although the junta’s bombing raids and artillery made sure that little was left standing. With no air defences, the resistance knows well that if it takes full control of more urban areas, then they are inviting disaster upon the civilian population.
Myanmar is, in effect, fragmenting.
The regime has a firm grip on the big cities of Yangon, Mandalay and the capital Naypyitaw – where residents say life is bustling and returning to some kind of ‘normal’ with even the makings of a property boom. But beyond, its real control is tenuous and weakening.
Fighting a war on many fronts, the regime is trying to follow its practised divide-and-rule tactics of cutting deals and ceasefire pacts with various ethnic armed groups, aided to some extent by China’s influence in border areas.
But major ethnic groups in most of the frontier states, such as the KNLA, which has been fighting the world’s longest civil war since 1949, are successfully resisting. A ceasefire with the mostly Buddhist Arakan Army also looks fragile in the western state of Rakhine, where in 2017, the military forced over 700,000 Muslim Rohingya into Bangladesh in a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing that has brought charges of genocide against Myanmar in the International Court of Justice.
“Sadly, a prolonged fragmentation is a possibility, but we must accept that has been a possibility in Myanmar since before the coup of 1962,” David Gum Awng, deputy minister for international cooperation for the NUG shadow administration, tells IPS.
“It is natural and unsurprising that EAOs (ethnic armed organisations) are consolidating gains, but the question is what these EAOs plan to do with their territory if and when the democratic forces win,” he adds.
The NUG, he says, aims to rid Myanmar of the “abusive and criminal military dictatorship and along with it the military’s obsession with centralised Bamar-Buddhist nationalist rule”, to be replaced by a democratic federal system offering “ethnic minorities genuine self-determination” through negotiations.
This significant shift in policy also extends to recognising and reaching out to the Rohingya, with the NUG promising justice and accountability for crimes committed against them by the military, a path towards citizenship, and peaceful repatriation for refugees.
Although the NUG is built around remnants of the old guard of the National League for Democracy government ousted in the 2021 coup, its stated intentions have set it apart from the Bamar nationalist leanings of Aung San Suu Kyi, its 77-year-old former leader now held by the junta in solitary confinement.
Strengthening but still, difficult ties between the self-proclaimed NUG and the ethnic armed groups are particularly worrying for China. Myanmar’s giant neighbour sees a threat to its long-term strategy of dominating the ethnic groups along its border while keeping Western powers out of a pliant Myanmar with the goal of developing massive infrastructure projects and a secure gateway to the Indian Ocean.
Even though it enjoyed favourable relations with Aung San Suu Kyi, China is keeping the NUG at a cold arm’s length while propping up the junta with weaponry and diplomatic protection at the UN. India’s tacit backing for the regime has facilitated its own strategic investments.
Much of the rest of Asia, including democracies like Japan and South Korea, are also working to protect their own interests in Myanmar while hoping that engagement with the regime will lead to a negotiated settlement of the war. UN agencies and the INGO aid industry also maintain a presence, mostly ineffectual, in junta-controlled Yangon.
This perceived complicity angers the Burmese diaspora, which is busily raising money for aid and weapons for the resistance. Notions of a negotiated settlement with General Min Aung Hlaing’s State Administration Council, as the junta calls itself, are far from the minds of those waging their “forgotten war”.
“Thai generals are brothers with the Myanmar military. Singapore banks hold their money. The Burmese feel forgotten,” said one US-based doctor, speaking in Bangkok after taking medical aid to the border.
While recognising that the West’s attention and resources are focused on the overriding goal of defeating Russia in Ukraine, the resistance did receive a significant boost last December with the US Burma Act passed by Congress.
The act authorises the Biden administration to extend non-lethal aid to “support the people of Burma in their struggle for democracy, freedom, human rights, and justice.” It explicitly mentions the NUG, although not ethnic armed groups.
Some Washington-based analysts argue that the legislation does not mark a major US policy shift, but diplomats and experts in the region see it as a highly significant step towards endorsing the NUG and the wider resistance movement.
“The US is now saying it wants the resistance to win and has fundamentally shifted the narrative. This is why China is getting worried. Beijing is focused on the discourse of talks and the peace process,” commented one expert in Bangkok who asked not to be named.
“There won’t be lethal assistance. The US doesn’t want to be involved in another war now. But there will be more public and diplomatic support of the resistance and pushing other actors not to engage with the junta,” he added.
David Gum Aung of the NUG is more cautious, calling the Burma Act “a significant piece of legislation” which makes funds available and opens the door to more sanctions against the regime while “recognising” the NUG.
“We can view the Burma Act as a very important document symbolically but less potent practically. Its symbolic value stems largely from the fact that it outlines that the US views the SAC and their caretaker government as illegitimate and does not recognize their authority, their right to represent Myanmar or their justification for the coup.”
“We are still sorely in need of all manner of aid, from humanitarian to strategic… but we cannot fall into the trap of assuming that everything the Act makes possible will eventuate,” he said.
Thinzar Shunlei Yi, a democracy and youth activist who led anti-coup protests in Yangon and is now in exile, stresses that the broad-based and non-violent Civil Disobedience Movement remains the “backbone of the revolution”.
Success, she says, will mean the surrender of the junta, with the people defining what happens to the perpetrators of crimes, whether to be put on trial in domestic courts or through international mechanisms. For her, it also means a social revolution that will tackle “patriarchy, hegemony, racism etc”.
Kyaw Soe Win of the AAPP, whose grisly routine is to scroll through fresh images of the dead, says war criminals must be prosecuted to achieve national reconciliation.
“We need justice for the survivors and victims,” he says. “Without justice, there can be no reconciliation. There was never any justice before, only impunity through the decades. No action was ever taken.”
AAPP has so far documented over 17,000 political prisoners still in detention and the deaths of over 3,100 civilians since the coup, although it knows the actual toll is much higher.
Nicholas Koumjian, head of the UN-authorised Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar which is working with AAPP, says credible evidence had been collected of an “array of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, rape, torture, unlawful imprisonment, and deportation or forcible transfer”.
Back in the jungle resistance camp, the young activists gather near caves that act as air raid shelters and talk of a future without military rule that will necessitate total reform of the armed forces. Among the group, one was severely tortured in prison, one shot in the leg during street protests and a mother who had to leave her child behind.
The annual New Year festival of Thingyan is approaching, and they sing popular songs of love and separation and a homecoming they know may be years away.
AAPP is working with the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar to collect and preserve evidence of crimes against international law committed since 2011 to expedite future criminal proceedings. Nicholas Koumjian, head of the IIMM, said on the second anniversary of the coup that credible evidence had been collected of an “array of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, rape, torture, unlawful imprisonment, and deportation or forcible transfer.”
Rohingya IDPs confined to a Sittwe camp in Rakhine State wait for international intervention. More than 1.5 million people are displaced in Myanmar. Credit: Sara Perria/IPS
by Guy Dinmore, Thompson Chau (bangkok)
Inter Press Service
BANGKOK, Feb 21 (IPS) – Nearly 18 million people – about one-third of Myanmar’s population – need humanitarian aid this year because of civil war and the post-coup economic crisis, according to the latest United Nations estimates.
The numbers needing support continue to rise from the estimated 14 million people needing aid last year. More than 10,000 people were displaced by fighting in southern Kayin State in early January alone, joining more than 1.5 million IDPs across the country.
The UN says it recognises the urgent need to remain in Myanmar and step up humanitarian operations, but it is caught between a hostile military junta imposing restrictions on its activities and a loose network of resistance groups accusing the world body of legitimising an illegal regime.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is also facing increasing criticism for his apparent hands-off leadership in the crisis.
“Almost 18 million people – nearly one-third of the Myanmar population – are estimated to be in humanitarian need nationwide in 2023, with conflict continuing to threaten the lives of civilians in many parts of the country,” said Ramanathan Balakrishnan, UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Myanmar.
He told IPS that international and local humanitarian aid organisations are “using a range of approaches” in different areas and had reached over four million people in 2022 despite severe underfunding and what he called “heavy bureaucratic and access constraints”.
Balakrishnan defended the importance of the UN’s engagement with General Min Aung Hlaing’s regime, which has ruthlessly crushed dissent since seizing power two years ago and overthrowing the elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi.
“Principled engagement with all sides is a must to negotiate access and also to advocate on key protection issues. Advocacy to stop the heavy fighting and airstrikes in populated areas that are threatening the safety of both civilians and aid workers is as important as reaching people in need with humanitarian aid,” he said.
Aid workers accuse the junta of further restricting aid operations and blocking urgently needed aid from reaching millions of people. The regime admitted this month it cannot effectively administer about one-third of Myanmar’s townships. But it is able to choke access to some areas controlled by resistance groups and ethnic armed organisations that have been fighting the military for decades.
The junta is seeking to impose its authority with a new law making registration compulsory for national and international non-governmental organizations and associations and introducing criminal penalties for non-registered entities with up to five years of imprisonment.
“Civic space has been decimated in the country already due to the military’s actions, particularly its systematic harassment, arrest, and prosecution of anyone who opposed their coup,” said James Rodehaver, chief of the UN Human Rights Office for South-East Asia (OHCHR) Myanmar Team. “These new rules could greatly diminish what operational space is left for civic organisations to deliver essential goods and services to a population that is struggling to survive.”
Muslim Rohingya IDPs wait for aid to be unloaded in Pawktaw camp in Rakhine State, an hour by boat from the main city of Sittwe. Credit: Sara Perria/IPS
Many of the more than one million refugees outside Myanmar also need help. Most are stateless Rohingya Muslims forced out of Rakhine State into Bangladesh in waves of ethnic cleansing before the 2021 coup, with many held in border camps.
The UN’s reputation was already battered before the coup over its handling of the long-festering Rohingya crisis in which it was accused by aid workers and activists of being too accommodating with the Myanmar military. And it has come under further fire since.
In a joint letter last September, more than 600 Burmese civil society organisations said they “condemn in the strongest terms the recent public signing of new agreements and presenting of letters of appointment to the illegitimate Myanmar military junta by UN agencies, funds, programmes and other entities working inside Myanmar.”
“We call on you and all UN entities to immediately cease all forms of cooperation and engagement that lends legitimacy to the illegal, murderous junta,” said the letter addressed to the UN Secretary-General. The signatories argued that letters of appointment and agreements should be presented to what they regard as the legitimate government of Myanmar – the parallel National Unity Government established by ousted lawmakers – and “ethnic revolutionary organisations.”
A Myanmar researcher specialising in civil society and international assistance highlighted the role of Burmese CSOs in delivering aid. “Local CSOs comprehend the complexity of specific local needs in the current crisis as the communities they serve struggle with security concerns and essential public services, including healthcare and education,” said the researcher, who goes by the name Kyaw Swar for fear of security reprisals.
He said that donors and foreign organisations had adopted risk aversion arrangements post-coup, referring to UN and INGO’s costs for capacity-building components and disproportionate country-office operations. “Local CSOs have fewer operations, and risk management options have no choice but to channel international aid to their respective communities.”
UN officials reject the notion that they are legitimising the regime and insist that only by operating in the junta-controlled heartland and also through cross-border assistance can aid be delivered to a substantial part of the population in desperate need.
“The UN finds itself in an almost existential bind. It can’t engage with an oppressive regime without being seen to condone its actions,” commented Charles Petrie, former UN Assistant Secretary-General and former UN chief in Myanmar.
“Somehow, the UN’s senior leadership needs to convince all that engaging in a dialogue with a pariah regime is not the same as supporting it and that it should be judged on the outcome of the discussions rather than being condemned for the simple fact of engaging,” he said.
“But being able to do so successfully implies that it has the level of credibility that right now it still needs to rebuild,” he added.
Questions have also been raised about the apparent lack of hands-on leadership on the part of Guterres. The UN Secretary-General seems to have made little personal intervention beyond routine statements, such as the latest marking the second anniversary of the coup in which he condemned “all forms of violence” and said he “continues to stand in solidarity with the people of Myanmar and to support their democratic aspirations for an inclusive, peaceful and just society and the protection of all communities, including the Rohingya.”
Since the coup and despite the unfolding humanitarian crisis, Guterres is seen as having taken a back seat and delegating to two successive special envoys. This stands in contrast to his predecessor Ban Ki-moon who actively intervened during the Cyclone Nargis disaster in 2008, personally meeting then-junta leader General Than Shwe and negotiating the opening of Myanmar to aid workers.
Petrie suggested Guterres should take a page out of Ban’s book and provide much more active leadership on Myanmar and be “more openly engaged and supportive of the work done by his special envoy.”
While China and Russia lend military and other support to the junta, much of the rest of the diplomatic world has taken a step back from the Myanmar crisis, leaning instead on ASEAN to assume the lead.
But the 10-member bloc has been ineffective so far. It has coordinated an unprecedented shunning of the junta’s leadership in regional meetings, but neighbouring countries – with their own blemished democratic records – are unwilling to penalise the regime. The ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance on Disaster Management (AHA Centre) has been charged to respond to the humanitarian crisis, but with no success.
Laetitia van den Assum, the former Dutch ambassador to Myanmar and Thailand, said the aid response would have been more effective if ASEAN had set up a partnership between AHA and experienced UN and other organisations.
“That, in fact, is what happened in the aftermath of Nargis, when under the strong leadership of Dr Surin Pitsuwan, ASEAN and UN worked in tandem. It took time to put the effort together, but ultimately it took off,” van den Assum told IPS.
As with the UN leadership, Lim Jock Hoi, a Bruneian government official who was ASEAN chief until last month, was barely noticed on the issue of Myanmar, in stark contrast to Pitsuwan, who helped persuade Than Shwe to accept humanitarian assistance in 2008 when Cyclone Nargis killed over 100,000 people.
“UN agencies like OCHA, WFP and UNICEF, as well as many dedicated INGOs, continue to provide assistance, more often than not under difficult circumstances, and with countless Myanmar civil society organisations playing critical roles,” Van den Assum observed.
“But until now, the SAC has stood in the way of more effective aid,” she added. “What is missing is an overall agreement between Myanmar and ASEAN about such assistance, how to expand it and how to guarantee that all those in need are served. ASEAN and AHA have not been able to deliver on this.”
Observers point out that AHA is set up to respond to natural disasters and has no experience in intervening with aid in conflict situations.
“That had already become clear in 2018 when AHA was tasked to make recommendations for ASEAN assistance to northern Rakhine state after the enforced deportation of more than 750,000 Rohingya. The initiative died a slow death,” Van den Assum said.
“AHA was not to blame. Rather, ASEAN politicians had taken a decision without first considering whether it was the most advisable approach,” the veteran diplomat said.
No breakthrough is in sight. The junta has extended a state of emergency for another six months, admitting that it lacks control over many areas for the new elections it says it wants to stage but which have already been widely denounced by the resistance as a sham.
“Heavy fighting, including airstrikes, tight security, access restrictions, and threats against aid workers have continued unabated, particularly in the Southeast, endangering lives and hampering humanitarian operations,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported in its latest update.
A dog trained under Africa Wildlife Foundation’s Canines for Conservation programme looks content with its handlers. Sniffer and tracker dogs deployed in six African countries have contributed to the arrests of over 500 suspects in the long-running fight against poachers and traffickers. Credit: Paul Joynson-Hicks
by Guy Dinmore (london)
Inter Press Service
London, Dec 09 (IPS) – Elephant populations are starting to recover in parts of Africa as law enforcement agencies and local communities turn the tide in their long-running battle against wildlife poachers and traffickers.
But criminal gangs are constantly shifting tactics and exploiting other species, while the greatest threat now is posed by the severe drought devastating swathes of East Africa, displacing hundreds of thousands of people, threatening famine in Somalia, and killing off wildlife and livestock.
“Poaching of big game is going down in most countries,” says Didi Wamukoya, senior manager of Wildlife Law Enforcement at African Wildlife Foundation (AWF), noting that poaching in Kenya and Tanzania of large iconic species for the international wildlife trade is now very rare. Elephant population numbers in those two countries are now increasing. It is a particularly dramatic turnaround for Tanzania, which lost some 60 percent of its elephants within a decade.
Elephant population statistics. Credit: AWF
Wamukoya, who heads AWF’s capacity training of law enforcement agencies to prosecute cases of wildlife trafficking, warns that criminals adapt. While elephants are faring better – also in part because major markets such as China have banned domestic trade in ivory — gangs trafficking to Asia are switching to other species, such as lions for their body parts, pangolins, and abalone.
Pangolins, which have been identified as a potential source of coronaviruses, are the most trafficked wild mammals in the world.
Combating cybercrime and enhancing the use of digital evidence in courts have become a key elements of AWF’s work as criminals adapted to Covid-19 lockdowns. “Criminals live in society and are part of us, and they moved online too,” Wamukoya told IPS in an interview, referring to social media platforms like Facebook used to market animals and wildlife products.
Much illegal wildlife trade – estimated by international agencies to be worth over $20 billion a year globally – has moved online, but the actual poaching and transporting of smuggled animals and products across borders is the target of AWF’s Canines for Conservation Programme, headed by Will Powell in Arusha, Tanzania.
Powell and his team train sniffer and tracker dogs as well as their handlers selected from ranger forces across Africa, including most recently Ethiopia.
“We are having to raise standards of our operations with dogs at airports as smugglers try to adapt and hide stuff in coffee, condoms, screened by tinfoil. First, rhino horn and ivory were the main target but now pangolin scales are the biggest thing, so dogs are trained on this,” he tells IPS.
Trafficking in lion bones and teeth for Asian ‘medicine’ has also gone up as criminals switch from tigers. “We have to be sure dogs are up to date,” he says.
Powell previously trained dogs to sniff out 32 kinds of explosives in the Balkans and says over 90 percent of dogs can refind a smell after a year without exposure to it. A new smell can be introduced with just hours of training.
“Ivory is a range of smells from freshly killed to antique pieces. Dogs are amazing at how they figure it out, for example, by not responding to cow horn but picking out tortoises,” he says.
A sniffer dog trained by AWF works in a Kenya airport. They are trained in wide ranges of smells and can learn to detect a new one within hours as traffickers constantly change their smuggling methods. Credit: Paul Joynson-Hicks
AWF canine teams currently work in Botswana, Cameroon, Kenya,
Mozambique, Tanzania, and Uganda. All staff are local nationals. Since 2020 teams operating in Manyara Ranch and Serengeti National Park in Tanzania have made over 100 finds, resulting in multiple arrests.
No elephants in the Serengeti have been lost to the international wildlife trade since the canine teams have been in place.
AWF says that dog units across the six countries have uncovered over 440 caches that led to the arrest of over 500 suspects. Finds have included over 4.6 tonnes of ivory, 22kg of rhino horns, over 220 lion claws, 111 hippo teeth. Seven live pangolins were recovered, and over 4.5 tonnes of pangolin scales.
Dogs and their handlers are also impacting corruption among officials and law enforcement agencies.
“Dogs are an incorruptible tool,” explains Wamukoya. Dealing with corruption is part of training for rangers and handlers. The transparency of their work and with handlers trained to send photos of seizures high up to authorities, corruption is made more difficult.
“Corruption is not zero but we are seeing light at the end of the tunnel,” she says.
Tanzania has been known as the world’s elephant killing fields, but a crackdown on poachers and traffickers in recent years has halted a horrendous decline in elephant numbers. On December 2, a Tanzanian high court sentenced to death 11 people for the murder of Wayne Lotter, a well-known South African conservationist who was shot in a taxi in Dar es Salaam in August 2017. The sentences are likely to be commuted to long jail terms.
Compiling accurate estimates of Africa-wide populations of various species, including big beasts such as elephants, is widely recognised as extremely difficult. So is the gathering of statistics on poaching and seizures of trafficked animals. The 2020 World Wildlife Crime Report by the UNODC attempts to unpick and track the trends since its 2016 edition, noting that lockdown measures taken by governments during the Covid pandemic forced organised criminal groups to “adapt and quickly change their dynamics”, possibly resulting in “illicit markets going even deeper underground, additional risks for corruption and shifts in market and transportation methodologies in the longer term”.
It estimates some 157,000 elephants were poached between 2010 and 2018, an average of about 17,000 elephants per year. Data suggests a declining trend in poaching since 2011 but rising again slightly in 2017 and 2018. While elephant numbers are growing in Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya, there is a worrying decline in ‘critically endangered’ forest elephants in Central and West Africa because of loss of habitat and poaching.
The UNODC said a “trafficking trend of note” was more mixed seizures containing both ivory and pangolin scales together, singling out a container coming from the Democratic Republic of Congo on its way to Vietnam in July 2019, found to hold nearly 12 tonnes of pangolin scales and almost nine tonnes of ivory. The consignment was declared as timber.
“It is possible that ivory traffickers, facing declining demand, are taking advantage of their established networks to move a commodity for which demand is growing: pangolin scales,” the report said.
Save the Rhino International, a conservation charity, says poaching numbers have decreased across Africa since the peak of 1,349 in 2015, but still at least one rhino is killed every day. South Africa holds the majority of the world’s rhinos and has been hardest hit by poachers.
A consignment of illegally trafficked pangolin scales and elephant ivory seized in Kenya. Pangolins are the most trafficked wildlife mammal in the world. Dogs trained by AWF have sniffed out a total of 4.5 tonnes of pangolin scales in six countries. Poaching of elephants and rhinos in Kenya is now rare as the government, local communities, and NGOs step up efforts to stop wildlife trade. Credit AWF
These are hard-fought gains against wildlife traffickers that still need to be reinforced through support and training of law enforcement agencies, greater participation of local communities in conserving wild areas and wildlife, and reforms of legal systems. Support from governments outside Africa, particularly in Asia, is vital to tackle shifting markets and trading routes.
But now, the most devastating and immediate threat in East Africa is the worst drought in 40 years. Four consecutive seasons of drought over the past two years have taken a dramatic toll on people, livestock, and wildlife.
In early November, the Kenya Wildlife Service reported the deaths of 205 elephants, over 500 wildebeest, 381 common zebras, 49 endangered Grevy’s zebras, and 12 giraffes within nine months. Rangers are removing tusks from dead elephants to stop poachers taking them.
“It is a tragedy despite all our efforts,” says Wamukoya. “Wildlife is not dying for poaching but it is drought and affecting the human population. Pastoral cattle communities no longer have pasture or food. Livestock are dying.”
IFAW, a global non-profit that helps people and animals thrive together, quoted Evan Mkala, program manager for Kenya’s Amboseli region, as saying he has never seen anything so devastating. “You can smell the rotting carcasses all around the area.” He says poaching is back on the rise as people lacking food security are desperate for money to buy water and hay for their cattle.
The Horn of Africa is described by the UN World Food Programme as “a region at the intersection of some of the worst impacts of climate change, recurring humanitarian crises and insecurity”.
It says over 22 million people face a severe hunger crisis in a swathe of territory covering parts of Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti, northern Kenya, and South Sudan. Over one million people have been displaced by drought; seven million livestock have died. A poor start to the October-December rains has initiated a fifth consecutive season of drought.
“This is the worst drought, the driest it’s ever been in 40 years. So, we are entering a whole new phase in climate change,” said Michael Dunford, WFP regional director for East Africa. “Unfortunately, we have not yet seen the worst of this crisis. If you think 2022 is bad, beware of what is coming in 2023. This means that we need to continue to engage. We cannot give up on the needs of the population in the Horn.”
