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By CIVICUS
Oct 29 2026 (IPS)

 
CIVICUS discusses voter suppression ahead of the USA’s 2026 midterm elections with Aklima Khondoker, an Atlanta-based civil and voting rights attorney, civil society organisation executive and founder and principal of Atabey Strategies, a consultancy firm that advises civil society organisations on democracy and electoral participation.

Aklima Khondoker

On 14 September, the US Supreme Court maintained a freeze on the postal ballot provisions of Donald Trump’s March 2026 executive order, meaning they won’t apply in the November midterms. This was the latest setback to Trump’s efforts to manipulate the election. Since January 2025, Trump has pardoned around 1,500 people charged over the 2021 Capitol attack and placed 2020 election deniers in election security roles. The administration has ordered voters to show documentary proof of citizenship to register, and the Justice Department has sued 30 states for their voter rolls. Courts have blocked the citizenship requirement and dismissed most of these lawsuits.

How is the Trump administration changing the way elections are run?

President Trump has called for ‘nationalising’ elections, which means centralising election control within the federal government, giving his administration more control over who can vote, who receives a mail ballot and how election officials do their jobs. Trump is using the federal government to upend how elections are run. His March 2026 executive order required federal agencies to compile citizenship lists for states and instructed the Justice Department to prioritise investigations of election officials who issue ballots to people deemed ineligible. The order also directed the Postal Service to develop new mail ballot rules, including a federal enrolment system that could determine whether a voter’s postal ballot is delivered. Meanwhile, the Justice Department has demanded state voter data. The administration says these measures protect election integrity. Yet integrity requires accurate records and fair administration free of political pressure. Using disputed data to question eligible voters and threatening officials with investigation can undermine both and risk wrongful exclusion.

This creates serious constitutional tensions. The Constitution assigns states responsibility for running elections and gives Congress, not the president, the power to change the rules by law. The Supreme Court has allowed parts of the executive order to take effect on procedural grounds, without ruling on their legality. However, it has blocked the new postal ballot rules from applying in the midterms.

Democracy depends on people being able to register, get clear information and cast a ballot that will count. Rights can be hollowed out one procedure at a time, each change defended as technical or necessary, until they survive in name only. Erosion of this kind works like a slow boil, making each new restriction feel ordinary. A safeguard is weakened here, a group pushed to the margins there. The danger is that the rest of us grow accustomed to the heat and call it normal, while power moves further from the public it’s meant to serve.

What does the Supreme Court’s ruling on postal ballot deadlines mean for the midterms?

It means states can keep counting mail ballots that arrive after election day as long as they were posted on time. The case concerned Mississippi, one of several states that allow this, which gives ballots up to five business days to arrive. The Republican National Committee and the Libertarian Party of Mississippi argued that federal law requires ballots to be received by election day. Had the Supreme Court agreed, all these grace periods could have fallen, and the practical effect would have been to discard eligible voters’ ballots because of postal delays beyond their control. That’s voter suppression in practice.

But the ruling leaves states free to set their own rules and doesn’t require any state to offer a grace period, so voters face different deadlines depending on where they live. Someone can post a ballot on time and still be caught out by postal delays or other barriers. And voting by mail matters. The pandemic showed its value by letting people vote without in-person exposure, and many voters with disabilities still depend on it.

To be clear, postal voting is safe. For over two decades, Oregon has mailed ballots to active registered voters, who can return them by mail or drop box. From 2000 to 2019, around 61 million ballots were cast there and there were only 38 criminal convictions for voter fraud. In Georgia, amid the Trump campaign’s fraud claims after the 2020 election, a Republican-led audit of a random sample of 15,118 absentee ballot envelopes found no fraudulent ballots. Years of investigations have not substantiated claims of widespread or outcome-changing mail ballot fraud.

What pressure do election officials face from federal authorities?

They face federal demands, on tight deadlines and under threat of legal action, to withhold the ballots of voters whose citizenship is questioned. In California, the Justice Department gave officials 48 hours to review a list of voters on a password-protected drive, without disclosing how many people were on it. It demanded that ballots not yet sent to these voters be withheld until their citizenship was confirmed and that returned ballots be set aside if officials couldn’t verify it. It threatened emergency legal action if they didn’t comply.

The task involves far more than a database search. Officials must check whether records are accurate, coordinate across state and county offices and protect eligible voters’ ballots, all as the election approaches. California has 23.16 million registered voters. Los Angeles County alone had about 5.89 million in its June primary, in which over 80 per cent of ballots were cast by mail. Days after the vote, the county still had around 355,000 mail ballots to process. That’s the ordinary work. The 48-hour deadline lands on top of it.

Election workers also pay a personal price. After the 2020 election, some were falsely accused of fraud, treated as political enemies and subjected to racist threats.

Which voters are most likely to be shut out?

Those asked to spend the most time, money or effort proving they belong at the ballot box are the most likely to be excluded, including Black voters and those from other communities of colour, Native voters, people with disabilities, naturalised citizens caught in record mismatches and people with felony convictions. Exclusion doesn’t always arrive with a sign saying ‘you can’t vote’. It can come as an inaccessible polling place, an address that doesn’t match the one on an ID, a database error or a confusing deadline.

This kind of exclusion has a long history. The 15th Amendment to the Constitution promised Black men the vote. But after Reconstruction, the period following the Civil War, southern states used discriminatory laws, grandfather clauses, literacy tests, poll taxes, intimidation and violence to push newly enfranchised Black voters out of political life. While today’s barriers are not a replay of the Jim Crow era, that history shows how administrative rules can produce profoundly unequal consequences.

Eligible citizens whose records are incomplete or outdated, including naturalised citizens, risk being wrongly flagged as ineligible. If their citizenship can’t be confirmed quickly, their ballot may be withheld while they face a rushed demand to prove they belong. That can cost them their vote, and it can deter other eligible voters from taking part. The danger is real enough that on 9 October, a federal judge struck down as unlawful a Justice Department policy of cross-checking voter rolls against federal records, citing the risk that outdated federal records could mark eligible citizens as ineligible.

In 2024, an estimated four million Americans were barred from voting because of a felony conviction. Around 40 per cent had served their full sentences but still could not vote. This is ‘civil death’. People who live in a community, raise families and work alongside their neighbours have no say in the decisions that govern their lives.

Accessibility also determines whether voters with disabilities can participate independently and safely. In a national study of the 2020 election, 18 per cent of voters with disabilities who voted in person reported difficulty, compared with five per cent of those who voted by mail.

The representatives voters choose make decisions on the cost of living, education, healthcare and the future of democracy itself. When the people most affected by those decisions face the hardest path to the ballot, their interests become easier to ignore.

How is civil society protecting voting rights ahead of the midterms?

Civil society groups make a constitutional right reachable. They translate changing rules into clear guidance, connect voters with legal help, monitor the process, document problems and challenge unlawful barriers. Most voters will never read a court filing or an election observation report, but they may call a hotline because their name is not on the rolls, ask a volunteer what to do when a ballot is challenged or rely on a trained observer to document what happened at a polling place.

The Election Protection coalition brings together over 300 local, state-level and national organisations, and its trained volunteers help voters by phone or text. Observers witness and document the process so public confidence rests on evidence, not rumour.

Around the world, civil society groups are often among the first to document exclusion and defend civic space when governments restrict it. Contexts differ, but the lesson travels: participation does not protect itself. It takes organised people, acting together, to make sure that voters are heard.

What safeguards are needed to protect votes?

Safeguards begin with adequately funded election offices, clear rules announced well in advance, accessible ways to vote, and fair notice and time to fix registration problems. The right to vote means little if a voter can’t reach the polling place, understand the instructions, correct a registration error or get help without fear. Voter roll maintenance, which federal law requires to be uniform and non-discriminatory, should protect eligible voters from wrongful removal instead of leaving them scrambling to prove they belong.

Vote counting must also be transparent, with documented ballot handling, open audits and clear public explanations of the process. Voters, election workers and those who help people vote must be protected from intimidation and threats. The Voting Rights Act, the landmark law against racial discrimination in voting, must be strengthened and fully enforced. Its protections must cover every stage at which someone can be denied the vote or an equal voice, including registering, casting a ballot and having it counted. They must also guarantee language access and assistance for voters who need them. These safeguards are how we stop a slow erosion of rights from becoming a democratic rupture.

CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent.

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Flooding is a complex, sequential plant stressor, and its negative impacts on crops persist even after floodwaters recede. Credit: Shutterstock

By Esther Ngumbi
URBANA, Illinois, US, Oct 28 2026 (IPS)

Recently, countries around the world, including the United States of America, celebrated the United Nations 2026 World Food Day. This year’s theme, “Innovate Today. Nourish Tomorrow,” highlighted how efforts to foster innovation and forward-thinking solutions can help to ensure that everyone in our world has access to sufficient, diverse, safe, and nutritious foods while safeguarding the planet for future generations.

But realizing this vision and developing forward-thinking solutions to help nourish 9 billion people including the 645 million people who still face hunger, requires recognizing and investing in research on emerging agricultural challenges, specifically those that remain overlooked and underestimated.

Many of the currently grown agricultural crop varieties cannot withstand flooding and crop and yield losses of up to 100 percent have been reported both nationally and globally. Crops and yield losses arising because of flooding translate into economic losses and ultimately food insecurity

Arguably, flooding is one of the emerging yet underestimated and underappreciated threats to important agricultural crops, including rice and corn, and to food security, which has increased in frequency and intensity in recent years because of climate change.

Globally, between 2008 and 2018, according to a Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations report, flooding was ranked as the second driving factor resulting on crop production losses.

Flooding deprives soil and plant roots of oxygen, a necessary ingredient for all plant-sustaining life processes, including water uptake, respiration, and photosynthesis. Consequently, plants’ cellular, physiological, metabolic, and biochemical processes are disrupted, impacted, and impaired. Without oxygen, plants’ growth and development is impacted, and if flooding persists for days, they suffocate and die.

Sadly, many of the currently grown agricultural crop varieties cannot withstand flooding and crop and yield losses of up to 100 percent have been reported both nationally and globally. Crops and yield losses arising because of flooding translate into economic losses and ultimately food insecurity.

Alarmingly, flooding also negatively impacts soil biology, chemistry, functioning, quality, and microbial communities while disrupting the many beneficial relationships plants form with microbes, relationships that help plants deal with other stressors and promote growth and resilience.

Concerningly, flooding is a complex, sequential plant stressor, and its negative impacts on crops persist even after floodwaters recede. After floodwater subsides, agricultural crops enter the second phase of flooding stress, referred to as the post-flooding stress phase.

During the post-flooding stress phase, plants face additional stresses, including reoxygenation and dehydration, impaired root function, and nutritional deficiencies due to altered nutrient uptake. At the same time, plants are vulnerable to pathogens, diseases, and pests, threats that can collectively lead to agricultural crop losses.

The good news, however, is that science, research, and scientific discoveries can provide the forward-thinking solutions needed to safeguard our food systems against emerging threats.

But for research to provide these solutions, researchers working to address these questions must be funded.

Take the case of flooding. With funding and investments, researchers can pursue multiple research pathways to understand flooding while also pursuing bold and innovative ideas with the goal of developing and advancing science-based solutions to mitigate the negative and detrimental impacts flooding has on agricultural crops and soils that underpin plant and ecosystem health.

First, scientists can build a comprehensive understanding of flooding, including discovering the many strategies plants use to resist and recover from flooding and post-flooding stress.

Second, researchers can pursue both short- and long-term field-based experiments that incorporate thousands of crop varieties, including wild varieties, across different soil types to establish a more comprehensive understanding of flooding and post-flooding impacts on plant and soil health, biology, chemistry, and microbes, as well as the legacy and cascading effects of flooding.

Concurrently, this research can identify microbial taxa, communities, functions, and traits that improve flooding tolerance. Additionally, researchers can work to determine whether the current management practices that have been put in place to protect soil health and help plants resist biotic and abiotic threats, including regenerative practices, are keeping pace with intensifying flooding events.

Third and most importantly, with funding, scientists from multiple disciplines, including plant biology, entomology, engineering, agronomy, microbial ecology, predictive modelling, breeding, and soil health biology, can collaborate to design innovative solutions and accelerate the discovery of new solutions to flooding.

Ultimately, mitigating threats like flooding that could derail and undermine progress toward building climate-resilient crops and improving soil health and biology requires a comprehensive understanding of flooding and its impact on soil health, biology, and plants.

With sufficient funding and investment, scientists, in collaboration with stakeholders, can develop transformative solutions to address flooding and fulfill 2026 World Food Day theme “Innovate today. Nourish tomorrow.” Time is of the essence.

Esther Ngumbi, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Entomology at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.

By Sheila Aggarwal-Khan
GENEVA, Oct 28 2026 (IPS)

Governments today face an extraordinarily difficult set of tasks: cutting emissions, protecting nature, reducing pollution, creating jobs, strengthening economies, and improving people’s health, all while public finances remain under pressure.

Sheila Aggarwal-Khan

Chemicals sit at the centre of many of those tasks. They are essential to almost every economy and embedded in more than 95 per cent of manufactured goods. An estimated 40,000 to 60,000 industrial chemicals are in commerce globally, moving through increasingly complex supply chains and into billions of products used every day.

For much of my career, I have worked at the intersection of industry, the economy, and the environment. One lesson has become increasingly clear to me over the decades: the greatest gains come when chemical safety is built into economic and industrial decisions from the outset, rather than addressed only after harm has occurred. The global construction sector makes this particularly clear; chemicals and materials selected today can remain in buildings for decades. Safer choices at the design stage can prevent risks that otherwise become costly and difficult to manage decades later.

At the first International Conference of the Global Framework on Chemicals, taking place in Geneva this November, this lesson will come to the fore as governments, industry, workers, scientists, and civil society, including NGOs, consider how to accelerate implementation across the full life cycle of chemicals and products through sectors where change can happen at scale.

This matters because managing chemicals one substance at a time – while essential in some cases – cannot be the full strategy.

Agriculture offers a clear example. Under the Framework, stakeholders have committed to take effective measures by 2035 to phase out highly hazardous pesticides where risks remain unmanaged, and where safer and affordable alternatives are available. A new Global Alliance on Highly Hazardous Pesticides aims to turn that commitment into coordinated action, while projects supported by the Global Framework on Chemicals Fund are already helping farmers in East and West Africa move towards safer approaches.

Textiles offer another example. Argentina is testing a digital product information system that allows chemical information to move with products through the value chain. That kind of transparency can help businesses identify hazardous inputs, exposure risks, the liability that can come with that, and then choose safer alternatives and determine whether fabrics can be safely used, reused or recycled.

Exposure risks cannot be separated from the economic systems in which chemicals are used. This is also why chemicals policy cannot be driven by single ministries. Agriculture, environment, industry, health, labour, trade, and fiscal policies all influence which chemicals are used, how products are made, traded, and whether safer alternatives can compete.

The objective is not more bureaucracy. It is greater coherence in which multiple, often competing objectives across sectors, can be discussed together to find solutions that work.

Governments have a particularly important role to play in creating the conditions in which better solutions can compete and scale. Clear regulation can give businesses confidence to invest in safer alternatives. Better information can move through supply chains. Industrial and fiscal policies can support cleaner production, while chemical safety and the safety of the sectors in which chemicals are used—from agriculture, to construction, to electronics, and textiles-can be considered alongside circularity, competitiveness, jobs, and health from the outset.

The economic case for doing so is strong. The global chemicals market was valued at roughly US$5 trillion in 2017 and projected to double by 2030. A 2023 study estimated that lead exposure alone was associated with trillions of dollars in global economic losses in 2019.

Countries building industries today also have an opportunity to avoid the costly legacies inherited by economies that industrialized first as they can leapfrog to clean, prosperous economies without having to go through an era comprising pollution, health and environment impacts, and clean up. Strong institutions, modern chemicals legislation, safer technologies, and green and sustainable chemistry can help countries build competitive industries without locking in the same liabilities.

Finance, of course, is the engine of implementation. Incentivizing industries towards safer chemicals, safer products and production practices, strengthening national chemicals management systems, and scaling safer alternatives all require investment. The way in which public finances can leverage private investment, the type of fiscal policy that incentivizes these investments, and the right enabling regulatory environment, can make this journey viable. Unlocking domestic resources in this way, coupled with funding from financing mechanisms such as the Global Environment Facility and the Global Framework on Chemicals Fund and private investment all have a role.

The challenge is therefore bigger than only managing a longer and longer list of harmful chemicals. It is to make chemical and product safety part of how whole sectors grow, innovate, and compete.

If we can get that right, safer chemistry can become part of how stronger economies are built, with safety built in from the start for people and planet.

Sheila Aggarwal-Khan is Director of the UNEP Industry & Economy Division

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Credit: Liv Arnesen

By Liv Arnesen
OSLO, Norway, Oct 28 2026 (IPS)

A global boycott of Antarctic krill products is gathering support. As a Norwegian, I want my country – the world’s largest krill-fishing nation – to change course when it comes to protecting Antarctica.

Scientists, explorers and ocean advocates are urging consumers to stop buying supplements and pet food containing Antarctic krill and to avoid farmed fish raised on feed containing it. This follows earlier moves by retailers – from Holland & Barrett in Britain to dm-drogerie markt in Germany and supermarket giants Woolworths and Coles in Australia – to remove krill supplements from their shelves.

I hope my government is listening. This boycott is highlighting a little-known industry and putting pressure on governments that support it. From 19 October, the 27 members of CCAMLR – the international commission responsible for conserving Antarctic marine life – will gather in Hobart, Australia, to negotiate fishing rules and marine protection for the last pristine place on our planet. Norway’s choices will matter far beyond our borders.

Liv Arnesen

In 1994, I skied alone to the South Pole, as the first woman to do so solo and unsupported. Six years later, Ann Bancroft and I crossed Antarctica, skiing from Queen Maud Land through the South Pole to the Ross Sea. Those journeys made headlines worldwide, highlighting women’s achievements. For me, they began a lifelong connection with Antarctica.

Antarctica taught me what it means to live on nature’s terms. Its vastness felt almost timeless. But as I have returned as a guide and lecturer, and paddled through its waters, my sense of its permanence has given way to concern. Human activity is changing this remote place. What once seemed beyond our reach is increasingly exposed to our appetite for resources.

Among those is krill: small, shrimp-like animals that sustain whales, penguins, seals and seabirds. Yet we harvest krill for supplements, pet food and aquaculture feed while climate change alters the conditions on which the ecosystem depends.

This month, scientists reported that the chinstrap penguin population on Zavodovski Island has declined by almost two-thirds since 2011, as warming waters are changing the availability of krill, their main food source. This raises an urgent question: how can we justify expanding industrial fishing when the ecosystem it depends on is changing so profoundly?

As the largest Antarctic krill-fishing nation, Norway cannot continue to claim leadership in ocean protection while treating the needs of Antarctic wildlife as secondary to commercial expansion.

For two consecutive seasons, the krill fleet has reached the 620,000-tonne catch threshold months before the season’s end, forcing an early closure. This is not evidence that governance is working. That total catch figure masks how heavily the fishing became concentrated in feeding grounds for whales, penguins and seals after regional limitations expired in 2024.

Krill may be abundant across a vast ocean, but wildlife needs its food where it can reach it. A penguin feeding chicks must return repeatedly to its colony. Krill hundreds of kilometres away cannot replace food removed from nearby waters. Fisheries management must account for those local needs.

CCAMLR decisions require consensus among all 27 members. Norway cannot secure an agreement alone, but the Norwegian government must use its influence to push for stronger protection. It must support a moratorium on Antarctic krill fishing until binding, science-based rules protect vital wildlife feeding grounds. Fishing should resume only when up-to-date evidence shows it will not harm the ecosystem.

Protected areas need effective restrictions that safeguard habitats and wildlife in the long term. Norway must support all the proposed marine protected areas – around the Antarctic Peninsula, East Antarctica and the Weddell Sea – and work to secure their adoption. These areas must provide meaningful, lasting protection, without making it conditional on permission to catch even more krill elsewhere. China and Russia must stop blocking their adoption.

The Norwegian krill industry says it supports marine protection and better fisheries management. That commitment should include accepting a moratorium. But we should also ask: why do Norwegian companies continue taking this food source from Antarctica at all? Algae-based sources of the omega-3s used in supplements already exist. A moratorium is the immediate priority. In the longer term, governments and businesses should invest in alternatives, and plan a phase-out of commercial krill fishing.

Norway’s krill industry is closely tied to one of the country’s wealthiest billionaires. Our government must explain whose interests it is defending: private businesses or one of Earth’s last great wildernesses?

I have carried Norway’s flag across Antarctica. I want our delegation to carry a clear commitment to its protection into Hobart: support a moratorium on commercial krill fishing, secure meaningful protected areas and reject higher catches.

The world is watching. Norway should give it a reason to believe that protection can still prevail over profit.

Liv Arnesen is Norwegian polar explorer, educator and ambassador for Our Antarctica

IPS UN Bureau

 

 

 

 

Credit: Shutterstock

By James Alix Michel
VICTORIA, Seychelles, Oct 28 2026 (IPS)

On 21 September 1976, less than three months after independence, Seychelles took its seat in the General Assembly of the United Nations. We became the 145th member of the Organisation. For a young nation of scattered islands in the Indian Ocean, with a small population and no army to speak of, it was far more than a ceremony. It was a promise that, in the family of nations, size would not decide whose voice was heard.

Fifty years later, I still believe in that promise. But I also know that it has never been kept automatically. It has to be renewed by every generation of leaders, and it now faces one of its hardest tests.

On 24 October, the United Nations marked its 81st anniversary. In his final United Nations Day message as Secretary-General, António Guterres reminded the world that the UN is not only an organisation but an idea: that humanity’s future depends on our ability to work together to advance peace, development and human rights.

Those words land at a sobering moment. Wars continue in several regions, often with civilians paying the highest price. The climate crisis is accelerating faster than our responses to it. Inequality is widening within and between nations. New technologies are advancing more quickly than our ability to govern them. And the UN itself is under severe financial strain, while its Security Council is too often paralysed by the very powers entrusted with keeping the peace.

It is in this climate that the Security Council is now deliberating, through its private straw polls, on who should become the tenth Secretary-General when Mr Guterres’s term ends on 31 December. For small island states, it matters more than most people realise.

Why should a small island care so deeply about who leads the United Nations? Because for nations like ours, multilateralism is not a matter of preference. It is a matter of survival.

We will never be the largest economies or the strongest military powers. Our protection has always been the rule of law, the strength of partnership and a seat at the table where every nation, large or small, has one vote. When the rules hold, a nation of just over 100,000 people can stand beside a nation of a billion and be heard. When the rules weaken, the small are the first to be pushed aside.

The UN has given small states some of their greatest achievements. The Law of the Sea gave island nations sovereign rights over vast ocean territories. The Paris Agreement set the aim of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, a line that small islands fought hard to draw. And in January this year, the High Seas Treaty entered into force, bringing nearly two thirds of the world’s ocean, for too long a lawless frontier, under a framework for conservation and shared benefit. None of these would have been possible without the patient, often frustrating, work of multilateral diplomacy.

Yet I will not pretend the system is working as it should. A Security Council designed for the world of 1945 does not reflect the world of 2026. Africa, home to more than a quarter of the UN’s members, still has no permanent seat. Climate finance promised to vulnerable nations arrives slowly, in complicated forms, and often as loans that deepen debt.

The answer to an imperfect system of cooperation, however, is better cooperation, not less.

So what should the world, and especially its smaller nations, ask of the next Secretary-General?

First, courage. The Secretary-General has no army and a limited budget. The office’s greatest power is moral authority: the willingness to speak plainly to the powerful, to name injustice and to stand with those who have no other platform.

Second, the ability to build bridges. In a world divided between rival blocs, the UN’s leader must be trusted in Washington and Beijing, in Moscow and Brussels, but also in Victoria, Suva and Port Louis. Small states, which cannot afford permanent enemies, understand this better than most.

Third, a commitment to put the climate and the ocean at the centre of global security. For island nations, rising seas, coral collapse and extreme storms are not distant environmental issues. They are threats to our existence. In October, the International Union for Conservation of Nature warned that 96 percent of the world’s shallow-water coral reef ecosystems face an extremely high risk of collapse by 2075. Here in Seychelles, October storms have reminded us how fragile our coastlines and communities are. The next Secretary-General must treat the health of the ocean as the foundation of peace, food security and prosperity, and must ensure that the High Seas Treaty moves quickly from text to action as its first Conference of the Parties approaches.

Fourth, reform that people can feel. That means more than reorganising departments in New York. It must mean a fairer Security Council, a financial architecture that rewards resilience instead of punishing vulnerability, and a UN that delivers on the ground, where families, farmers and fishers live.

There is also a question of history. In 81 years, the United Nations has never been led by a woman. Without favouring any candidate, I believe it is time for the Organisation to show, at its highest level, the equality it rightly asks of its members.

Fifty years ago, Seychelles came to the United Nations as one of its smallest members, full of hope. We came because we believed that the ocean which surrounds us connects us to the world rather than isolating us from it. That belief has not changed.

The next Secretary-General will inherit a divided world and a weary institution. But they will also inherit the most important idea humanity has ever agreed upon: that our future is shared, and that no nation, however small, should face it alone.

Dialogue over division. Cooperation over confrontation. Solidarity over fear. Those words deserve to be more than a message for one day in October. They should be the test of the next ten years.

James Alix Michel is a former President of Seychelles, a Blue Economy pioneer and a champion of ocean protection.

IPS UN Bureau

 

 

 

 

Farwiza Farhan speaks about saving the Leuser Ecosystem at a Global Tipping Points Conference 2026. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 28 2026 (IPS)

Forty-year-old Farwiza Farhan’s eyes light up instantly when she talks about the Leuser Ecosystem – a national strategic area encompassing a national park, a wildlife reserve, protected forests and other land uses.

“It’s rare to have such a large landscape remain intact despite continuous encroachment by developers, which is shrinking the habitat of the tiger, the elephant, the rhino and the orangutan,” she says. At 2.7 million hectares, Leuser remains a rare stronghold for wildlife in a country where many forests have been decimated. “Leuser still stands, and the wildlife thrives there,” she says with a certain pride. “This is why the landscape is so incredibly special,” she says.

Farhan, a Sumatran forest conservator who heads Forest, Nature & Empowerment Aceh (HAkA), spoke to IPS on the sidelines of the Global Tipping Points Conference 2026, held at Sunway University, Kuala Lumpur, from October 12 to15. HAkA works to protect and restore the Leuser through conservation campaigns and meaningful community participation.

“If we don’t pay heed, we will push these animals closer to extinction,” she warned. “There are fewer than 250 tigers and maybe just 100 rhinos left.”

Corporations are shrinking wildlife habitats, says Farhan, pointing to large-scale gold mining and palm oil plantations, some spanning up to 10,000 hectares. “They’re located next to one another and compete for more space than anyone could ever,” she explained.

But wildlife is not the only thing losing space. According to Farhan, 500,000 people live within the ecosystem, and five million live outside it. Their lives are closely tied to the forest, which they use sparingly – consuming what they grow, unlike mining companies and corporations that extract resources on a large scale.

“Many concessions are located near towns and transport routes, making it easier to move commodities. But when forests are cleared, downstream communities bear the consequences, while upstream communities lose access to their land. Palm oil companies often take over land outside protected areas and push the communities living there further away,” said Farhan.

The costs of forest destruction, however, extend beyond the loss of wildlife. Women in communities that depend on the forest often bear a disproportionate burden.

“They are not scared of big multinational companies; they are truly militant in the way they respond to corporations they know will take away their land and forests. They feel the companies will slowly destroy their lives, so they might as well die fighting to stop them from bulldozing their village,” she said.

Farhan saw how women responded when disaster struck last year.

“Disasters force people to relocate, and that’s when women face immediate security concerns. In crowded camps, they may lack safe access to water and sanitation, and their privacy is often compromised. Yet they continue to shoulder the bulk of care work — looking after children and the elderly — while often losing their livelihoods and income.”

She says she has “massive respect and appreciation” for these women.

Sadly, these same women, who have a deep connection with the forest, are often excluded from policy-making forums where their voices matter most, she said.

Orangutan and infant. Credit: Anton Leddin/Wikimedia

She witnessed their knowledge and role in decision-making during Aceh’s catastrophic floods and landslides last November, triggered by torrential rains. “They understood local realities and were the first to mobilise and respond,” she pointed out.

And while many people see women huddled together as gossiping, Farhan playfully calls it “stakeholder mapping”.

“They know who’s doing what, which community members have betrayed them by taking bribes from corporations, and they know exactly what to do when that happens. Elderly women are the best: they have wisdom and respect, and they’ve seen it all before. They are the ones who hold the fort for their communities. Sometimes, an elderly woman will approach a young man engaged in illegal logging and ask, ‘Whose son are you?’ The question carries enormous weight.”

Working with communities has humbled Farhan.

“Our education taught us to speak in certain way, but not to listen. I think we need to invest more time in really listening to communities. We feel that because we are educated, we are there to educate, but in reality, the local people know and understand their problems and have the solutions.”

Spending a day alone in a village was all it took for her to realise how out of her depth she was. “Being left alone in the forest made me realise how quickly I could get lost without appropriate tools.”

Although her ancestry is Acehnese, she is uncomfortable identifying herself as indigenous because she and her family have not experienced the discrimination and lack of opportunities faced by indigenous communities.

“I can’t say that I shared those experiences directly,” she says, acknowledging that her education has given her privileges others have not had. “Identity-wise, I’m confused.”

Yet, she says, she understands their struggle and stands with them. However, she would not use that ‘Indigeneity’ card to gain access to funding and opportunities meant to expand opportunities for Indigenous peoples, as it is “unfair to the people who are actually going through the struggles and working hard to get the opportunities.”

A marine biologist by qualification, she also enrolled in a PhD programme in anthropology, which she later gave up. “I built the organisation while I was doing my PhD, but it died in the process,” she admits. “The work to protect forests was a lot more interesting,” she says with a smile.

But forests were not always her focus. By her own admission, her initial motivation was to protect the ocean because of her love for the underwater world.

Her degree in marine biology helped her understand ocean ecosystems better. She returned to the place where she had first fallen in love with the ocean, only to find it destroyed.

“In 2007, in a remote part of Aceh, Pulau Weh, I saw for the first time how El Niño had devastated an entire coral reef. I felt powerless,” she recalls. Realising how little she could do as an individual, she turned her attention to the forests. “Maybe protecting forests would be easier,” she thought.

But that was easier said than done. When she was hired to work for the government’s forest agency and the Leuser Ecosystem Management Authority, she accepted the offer without asking about the salary or her job description.

“I just wanted to work in conservation. I thought I’d be running around under the canopy of trees, going on patrol and watching wildlife. It turned out to be anything but that. I was stuck behind a desk with a computer in front!”

The job turned out to be in public relations. She was the spokesperson but rarely got the opportunity to speak.

“It was a very confusing place; I got sent to meetings to speak about forest allocations, spatial planning, environmental impact assessments…things I did not learn at university, things I was not equipped to deal with.”

Fate had other plans. All these experiences helped her understand power imbalances and conflicting interests. She also saw firsthand how people tasked with protecting forests could end up destroying them.

She stayed on until the government agency was shut down after its efforts to stop powerful interests from destroying forests met with opposition. She then joined her “stubborn and persistent” colleagues to help find HAkA.

She recalls countless half cups of coffee at cafés, bought because they could barely afford more, as they used the cafés’ Wi-Fi to brainstorm.

“We were not going to give up on protecting the Leuser ecosystem,” she said.

In 2011, Farhan and her organisation were among the environmental campaigners who challenged the government in court over its decision to grant concession to a palm oil company, in Aceh’s Rawa Tripa peat swamp forest (also in Leuser), despite a two-year nationwide moratorium on new concessions having been imposed three months earlier.

PT Kallista Alam, the company, pursued a series of appeals all the way up to the Supreme Court. In 2013, the apex court rejected the appeal and ruled in favour of the community. Yet it took until 2015 for the company’s USD 26.5 million fine to be upheld, and a decade for the company to pay the fine for the environmental damage caused by using fire to clear ten square kilometres of land.

“The company has paid part of the fine to the Ministry of Finance but not to the community,” said Farhan, a campaigner who witnessed the fire.

But she added many actors contributed to the victory, including people who trained judges and attorneys to better understand what it meant to quantify environmental loss in economic terms.

“Judges don’t come from biology or ecology backgrounds,” she said, explaining that judges in Indonesia undergo environmental training to understand that burning forests and replacing them with monoculture plantations is not reforestation.

Farhan’s work is far from over. As long as the extractive economy persists, the threats will remain. If it isn’t palm oil plantations, it will be gold mining or attempts to redraw boundaries.

Her organisation challenges these threats through legal action, spatial planning and, at times, by helping the government evaluate permits across districts and landscapes.

“There are times when government decisions need to be criticised and challenged, and we do that,” she said.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

 

 

 

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By Anwarul K. Chowdhury
NEW YORK, Oct 27 2026 (IPS)

The selection of the next Secretary-General of the United Nations has reached a critical juncture. It raises fundamental questions about fairness, transparency, regional balance, and the democratic legitimacy of the world’s most universal organization.

Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury

The announcement on 21 October by the United Arab Emirates nominating its Minister of State, Ambassador Lana Nusseibeh, has introduced another dimension to an already prolonged selection process.

Ambassador Nusseibeh is an experienced diplomat with an established record of service to the United Nations. However, the timing of this candidature raises legitimate questions about the integrity and credibility of the selection process.

Two Women Lead a Historic Selection Process

Six rounds of Security Council straw polls have already taken place. Two distinguished and competent women from the Latin American and the Caribbean regional group of the United Nations, Rebeca Grynspan of Costa Rica and Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett of Guyana, have emerged as the two topmost leading candidates, with the former receiving at the last straw poll the Charter-required minimum nine votes of the 15-member Council.

It is a not only a historic first but a pioneering opening in the selection of the first woman as the Secretary-General of the United Nations, thereby fulfilling a Charter obligation (Article 8) and at least a decade-long global aspiration to set right the aberration of a lineup of men only at the leadership of the UN.

The two topmost candidates have campaigned diligently, presented their visions, engaged with Member States as well as civil society and endured the rigours and uncertainties of successive straw polls. Their perseverance deserves our sincere respect and recognition.

Yet their candidatures face opposition from two permanent members of the Security Council.

The Veto Must Not Override the Will of 191 Member States

This brings us to a fundamental question: Why should the preferences of two veto-wielding countries outweigh the collective interests of the remaining 191 UN Member States?

The United Nations belongs to all its members. Its leadership should reflect that universal ownership.

The veto, inherited from the geopolitical circumstances of 1945, continues to cast a long shadow over the Organization. When the preferences of a few determine the choices available to the many, the principle of sovereign equality becomes increasingly difficult to reconcile with institutional practice.

The overwhelming majority of Member States should not be held hostage to the veto preferences of two powerful permanent members. Grynspan and Rodrigues-Birkett have even received three positive encouragement, thereby majority of the five veto-wielding members.

The General Assembly Must Assert Its Charter Authority

There is also a constitutional dimension which deserves renewed attention.

Article 97 of the UN Charter clearly stipulates that the Secretary-General shall be appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.

The General Assembly’s authority to appoint is explicit. It should never be reduced to a ceremonial rubber-stamping of the Council’s decisions negotiated behind closed doors.

If the Assembly finds a recommendation unacceptable, it has the authority to reject it. That constitutional responsibility should be exercised with independence, conviction, and without fear or favour.

The General Assembly represents the universal membership. Its voice, its authority must count.

Regional Balance and the Case for Latin America and the Caribbean

Regional representational balance is another essential consideration.

An established, though informal, understanding has guided the geographical rotation of the Secretary-Generalship. Asia was represented immediately before the current Secretary-General, António Guterres, who is the fourth head of the UN from West Europe, by Ban Ki-moon of the Republic of Korea.

Latin America and the Caribbean have produced only one Secretary-General, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar of Peru, who served from 1982 to 1991, 35 years ago from now.

The region’s expectation that its turn has arrived therefore rests on a compelling historical foundation.

Its candidates have invested considerable effort in the selection process. They have faced scrutiny, uncertainty, and political resistance. They weathered the storm with dignity.

To bypass them now, primarily because two permanent members remain dissatisfied, would raise troubling questions about the value of the entire process.

Late Candidatures and the Credibility of the Process

Late candidatures are permissible under existing practices. Nevertheless, entering the contest after six straw polls, including the decisive color-coded exercise identifying permanent-member opposition, inevitably raises concerns about procedural fairness.

It resembles arriving at harvest time to enjoy the fruit without having planted or nurtured the tree.

Various political calculations, sometimes rather arbitrary, surrounding the Secretary-General’s appointment have surfaced and featured often. They should not become a substitute for a transparent and credible selection process.

The next Secretary-General must possess integrity, independence, and courage. Gender equality and regional balance in representation should strengthen, rather than diminish, the search for these qualities.

The selection now before Member States is an opportunity to demonstrate that the United Nations remains faithful to its founding principles.

Eighty-One Years, Nine Men, Not One Woman

Above all, let me reiterate that one historic injustice and unacceptable reality demand correction.

In its eighty-one years of existence, the United Nations has not yet elected a woman Secretary-General — eight decades plus, nine men, and not one woman.

What an embarrassment – what a shame!

How can an institution that speaks of equality at every podium continues to model inequality at its pinnacle?

The credibility of the UN’s advocacy depends on its own reflection in the mirror.

This is an extraordinary contradiction for an Organization committed to gender equality and women’s empowerment.

The appointment of a woman as the tenth Secretary-General is long overdue.

The current two leading women candidates should not withdraw because of the threat of veto and pressurized by these two P5 members.

Their candidatures remain alive and valid before the General Assembly till it takes the final decision.

The veto must not become the voice of the United Nations.

The General Assembly must assert its rightful authority, as empowered by Article 97.

Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury, former Under-Secretary-General and High Representative of the United Nations, Initiator of the UNSCR 1325 on Women and Peace and Security as the President of the UN Security Council in March 2000 underscoring women’s equality of participation; President/Chairman of the UNICEF Executive Board on two occasions; Founder of the Global Movement for The Cultural of Peace (GMCoP) and a well-known analyst of the UN system’s work.

IPS UN Bureau

 

 

 

 

Members of the Global Catholic Congress pose with a poster supporting an end to child marriage. Credit: JRC

By Kizito Makoye
ROME & DAR ES SALAAM, Oct 27 2026 (IPS)

The message from Just Rights for Children (JRC) was clear: protecting children must take precedence over customs used to justify their marriage.

The Global Catholic Congress, representing 44 countries, has endorsed JRC’s campaign to end child marriage by 2030. Announced in Rome on 22 October, the commitment brings influential faith leaders into a global effort to end a practice that continues to deprive millions of children, particularly girls, of their childhood.

“Every child deserves a childhood filled with dignity, education, safety and hope,” said Rajeev Kochuparambil, president of the Global Catholic Congress, announcing its support for the campaign.

“Ending child marriage is a collective moral responsibility that calls upon families, communities and faith institutions to stand together.”

Welcoming the congress’s support, JRC founder Bhuwan Ribhu said faith leaders could play a decisive role in preventing child marriage.

“When faith stands with justice and the protection of children, child marriage can end in one day,” he said.

His words convey a sense of urgency that global progress has yet to match.

UNICEF estimated in 2023 that 640 million girls and women alive at the time had married in childhood. About one in five young women aged 20–24 had married before turning 18, down from nearly one in four a decade earlier. Despite this progress, the rate of decline remained insufficient to eliminate child marriage by 2030.

Behind these figures are girls whose marriages can interrupt their education, restrict their independence and limit their future economic opportunities. UNFPA describes child marriage as both a consequence and a driver of gender inequality, with girls from poorer households and rural communities disproportionately affected.

For the JRC campaign, religious leaders provide a way to reach families and communities where they make decisions about marriage.

According to JRC, the Rome gathering brought together senior Catholic clergy, bishops, archbishops and community leaders from across several continents, including India, the United States, Canada, Africa, Australia, Singapore, the Middle East and Europe. Participants signed a joint pledge to help end child marriage and mobilise faith communities to protect children’s dignity, safety and freedom.

The commitment places responsibility on institutions whose relationships with families extend beyond wedding ceremonies. The campaign seeks to encourage faith leaders to challenge harmful social norms, engage parents and mobilise communities to intervene before a child marriage takes place.

The alliance reflects the international reach of the challenge. UNICEF’s assessment found that South Asia accounted for 45 percent of the world’s child brides, followed by sub-Saharan Africa with 20 percent. India alone accounted for approximately one-third of the global total.

JRC’s approach combines community mobilisation with intervention when a child faces an imminent marriage. According to the organisation, its work involves engaging parents, faith leaders and those involved in wedding ceremonies through counselling and persuasion, with legal action where necessary. Children, friends and relatives can also alert its teams to planned marriages.

The organisation also seeks to address the pressures that can lead families to arrange early marriages by connecting vulnerable households with government assistance and scholarship programmes.

This broader approach matters because changing the law alone cannot address all the social and economic pressures that sustain child marriage. The World Bank has highlighted the importance of combining legal reform with education, economic opportunities and efforts to change social norms.

The Rome pledge comes amid wider international efforts to end child, early and forced marriage. On 4 September 2026, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution establishing 27 November as the annual International Day for the Elimination of Child, Early and Forced Marriage. The first observance will take place next month. Ribhu has been among those advocating for the establishment of the international day.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

 

 

 

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By Mandeep S.Tiwana
NEW YORK, Oct 27 2026 (IPS)

Notwithstanding last minute shenanigans and the possibility of backroom deals by powerful states, two women from Latin America are leading contenders in the race for the UN’s next Secretary-General. After 80-plus years of men-only leadership, momentum is building to break the glass ceiling at the global institution dedicated to saving future generations from the scourge of war.

Design flaws in the somewhat opaque appointment process that bestow arbitrary veto powers on the five permanent UN Security Council members could, however, torpedo the aspiration for equitable representation for women at the helm for the world body. But there is still time to build public pressure on governments to do the right thing by appointing a feminist woman leader from Latin America and the Caribbean in deference to the principle of regional rotation.

UN in crisis

The next Secretary-General will preside over a fractious UN facing one of its hardest tests. Russia and the USA, which as Security Council permanent members are supposed to maintain international peace and security, are actively violating the UN Charter’s ban on aggression. Their ill-conceived invasions of Ukraine and Iran are causing large-scale death and destruction.

The USA has also recently imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court, making it harder to pursue justice for the Israeli genocide of Palestinians and conflicts fuelled by powerful states in Congo, Sudan and Yemen. China, another permanent Council member, continues to provide cover for crimes against humanity committed by Myanmar’s brutal military junta, currently embroiled in a civil war against dissidents.

Demands on the UN are increasing. Over 100 million forcibly displaced people need the UN’s support. But the institution faces a deep financial crisis caused by delays in payments of dues by bigger countries and an unnecessarily complicated funding model. The funding crisis comes as the challenges are mounting up. Climate commitments are being undermined by fossil fuel lobbies and petrostates as the world hurtles towards tipping points. Repressive states are pushing to reverse hard-won human rights that the UN is supposed to protect, including sexual and reproductive freedoms for women. Some two-thirds of Sustainable Development Goals targets, which seek to promote social progress and better standards of living, are not being met, driven by a combination of inadequate resourcing and escalating attacks on civic space.

The UN needs a leader who can break the mould by being much more than a bureaucrat beholden to states. The next Secretary-General should seek to derive legitimacy by representing the needs and aspirations of over eight billion people around the world. With confidence in multilateralism at breaking point, the exercise of feminist leadership principles that combine active listening, courage, consensus building and empathy for victims of abuses, will be crucial.

She must be able to bravely stand up for the UN Charter and its commitment to human dignity and justice under international law. When Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev demanded that Dag Hammarskjöld resign as Secretary-General in 1960, he reminded the UN General Assembly that big powers are not the ones that need the UN for protection: “it is all the others.” In 2004, Kofi Annan had the courage to call the US invasion of Iraq illegal in a rebuke to US President George W. Bush.

Given the pressures, it may be a good idea for the next Secretary-General to declare they will stand for only one term, thereby avoiding the trap of being overly cautious towards the most powerful states in their first term so they can be re-elected. Security Council permanent members have shown they will block re-appointments if a Secretary-General does not do their bidding. In 1996, Boutros Boutros Ghali was denied a second term because of a US veto.

Civic engagement needed

A deep commitment to human rights and the quest for transparency, accountability and participation will determine how the next Secretary-General will be remembered by future generations in how approached this hard and often thankless job. Civic engagement should be at the heart of the UN’s agenda. Just 75 of 193 UN member states, accounting for only seven per cent of the world’s population, respect their people’s freedoms to organise, speak out and protest peacefully.

To start changing this, in her first 100 days, the next Secretary-General should appoint a UN Civil Society Envoy to drive the UN’s outreach to people and civil society around the world, elevate the issue of reprisals against activists who engage with the UN and highlight unfair blocking by states of civil society organisations that seek to participate in the UN’s work.

From the time of its founding in 1945 amid the ruins of war, oppressed people have looked to the UN to be the conscience of the world. In the second half of the 20th century, the UN, through leaders like U Thant, championed the aspirations of discriminated and colonised peoples for self-rule and dignity. The next Secretary-General should prioritise the voices of excluded peoples by bringing the voices of those on the sharp end of repression into rooms where decisions are made. She can build consensus the feminist way, by never letting a door close.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis in the early 1960s, U Thant kept communication channels open with both the world’s superpowers, proposed the standstill that helped pull the world back from the brink of nuclear war and then persuaded Cuban leader Fidel Castro to de-escalate the situation. The next Secretary-General’s moral clarity can shape the world of tomorrow. She must be mindful of the needs and aspirations of young people who have the greatest to gain from a functioning UN but have the least voice.

Her leadership must be bold, inventive and unafraid to fail. Dag Hammarskjöld invented the UN’s peacekeeping role during the 1956 Suez crisis, going beyond the UN Charter. He died in 1961 attempting to broker a ceasefire in the Congo. Kofi Annan publicly owned the UN’s failures in Rwanda and Srebrenica, then turned those lessons into the Responsibility to Protect. The world’s first woman Secretary-General must help the UN win back legitimacy and trust among the world’s people. To do that, she will need to be creative and not be constrained by tradition or fear of failure.

Mandeep S. Tiwana is the secretary general of civil society alliance, CIVICUS. He also serves as CIVICUS’s representative to the UN headquarters in New York.

IPS UN Bureau

 

 

 

 

IPS UN Bureau

 

 

 

 

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Oct 27 2026 (IPS)

Much of the world has been bemused by US President Donald Trump’s expectation of the Nobel Peace Prize. While aggressive towards most of the world, friend and foe alike, he has treated hostile nuclear powers more respectfully.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

War is peace!
One needs more than Orwell to understand why Trump seriously expected the Nobel for 2025 following his bombing spree, let alone this year after resuming his war on Iran for Israel.

Outdoing every previous US president, Trump authorised over 500 bombings of ten countries in the first year of his second term.

Besides attacking Nigeria, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and Venezuela, he also threatened Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, and Greenland with attacks. But Trump is not alone.

Every US president since World War II has committed war crimes, violating the UN Charter and the Geneva Convention. Over 4.5 million died in these wars, which created 38 million refugees in 2001-19 alone!

Trump believes he deserves the Prize. After he won the November 2024 presidential election, he pledged, “We had no wars for years…I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars…

“We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into. My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.”

Yet, Trump has also promised to build the world’s greatest military to achieve ‘peace through strength’, claiming he will not actually need to use it.

Barack Obama has acknowledged he does not know why he won the prize in the first year of his presidency. He then illegally bombed seven nations – Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and Iraq – without UN Security Council approval!

George W. Bush attacked five countries while Trump 2.0 not only ‘re-bombed’ Obama’s seven, but also surpassed him by adding Nigeria, Iran, and Venezuela!

After Biden gave tens of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Israel to ‘carpet bomb’ Gaza, Trump surpassed his predecessor’s generosity despite his contempt for him.

New US military strategy
Trump boastfully rebranded the US Defense Department as the Department of War at the start of his second term, to signal a more offensive and aggressive stance.

The latest US National Defense Strategy (NDS) sees NATO allies “strongly positioned to take primary responsibility for Europe’s conventional defense”.

The NDS envisages US control of the Panama Canal and Greenland, echoing Trump’s ‘Donroe doctrine’ for the Western Hemisphere, while claiming to avoid future interventions abroad!

In 2024, worldwide military spending totalled $2.7 trillion, with the US accounting for over a third! US spending then exceeded the aggregate expenditure of the next nine largest spenders, all Washington allies except for China and Russia.

Fortune magazine projects that the new US military spending target of $1.5 trillion will exceed the combined expenditure of the next 35 highest-spending countries!

The new NDS reasserts Trump’s claims that US allies took advantage of earlier Washington administrations to subsidise their own defence.

When Trump demanded, during his first term, that they spend at least 2% of GDP on the military, their responses were largely lukewarm. In 2025, NATO allies agreed with Trump to increase military spending to 5% of GDP!

The NDS asserts its War Department will be key to NATO “even as we calibrate US force posture and activities in the European theater” to focus on US priorities.

While reiterating “Russia will remain a persistent but manageable threat to NATO’s eastern members for the foreseeable future”, it envisages cutting US troops on Ukraine’s borders.

Unsurprisingly, the US’s NATO allies complain that Trump has created a ‘security vacuum’ undermining Europe’s confrontation of Russia.

China U-turn or American tai-chi?
The Biden NDS viewed China as the US’s main adversary. In contrast, Trump’s new NDS sees China as an established power in the Indo-Pacific region that only needs to be discouraged from dominating the US and its allies.

The goal “is not to dominate China; nor is it to strangle or humiliate them… This does not require regime change… Trump seeks a stable peace, fair trade, and respectful relations with China”!

Unlike Biden’s NDS commitment to “support Taiwan’s asymmetric self-defense”, the new NDS gives no assurances on Taiwan, although Beijing remains committed to reunification, by force if necessary.

Incredibly, it seeks to “open a wider range of military-to-military communications” with counterparts in China. Unsurprisingly, the US has since also eschewed new trade wars with China.

So why does Trump expect the Nobel Peace Prize? He probably sees himself as less belligerent than his predecessors to ‘near peer’ powers such as China and Russia.

Attacking and bombing ‘insignificant’ small non-nuclear powers probably does not matter to him. His attitude towards ‘shithole’ countries is similar.

Likewise, Trump claimed no one died when the US raided Venezuela on 3 January, apparently referring only to US fatalities, although over a hundred Latin Americans were killed!

IPS UN Bureau

 

 

 

 

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A young protester holds a sign that reads ‘Listen to us’ in Paris, France, on 22 October 2026. Credit: Eric Broncard/Hans Lucas via AFP

By Andrew Firmin
LONDON, Oct 26 2026 (IPS)

Classrooms with mouldy walls, riddled with cockroaches and rats, stifling in summer and freezing in winter: this is how French high school students describe the places where they’re meant to learn. These impossible-to-ignore symbols of underfunding and neglect sparked a protest movement that has shaken the country.

Students’ complaints centre on underfunding, teacher shortages, crumbling infrastructure, crowded classrooms and an opaque university admissions system. These matter in their own right and raise broader questions about whose interests economies and governments serve, and what futures people can look forward to.

When high school students blockaded their schools, it struck a chord. University students quickly joined in. Within weeks, at least 250,000 people were on the streets, with teachers, trade union members and supporters of the left-wing France Unbowed (LFI) party among those joining in. The government opened a consultation platform for students, announced the release of fuel reserves and promised school improvement policies, but these limited concessions didn’t stop the protests. Meanwhile the message spread across Europe.

A continental wave

Students organised school blockades in several cities in Belgium, while in Italy, thousands took to the streets to demand increased education spending, better school buildings and action on the cost of living.

In Spain, the crisis of unaffordable housing has brought nationwide protests, with many young people to the fore. The trigger was the eviction of 87-year-old María del Carmen Abascal, known as Maricarmen, from the Madrid apartment that was her home for over seven decades, after the investment firm that bought her building pushed the rent up by over 230 per cent. Weeks of protests followed across Spain and Madrid’s Puerta del Sol filled with over 1,200 protesters’ tents. When right-wing parties blocked emergency housing legislation, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called a snap election.

In Portugal, thousands camped in public squares to protest at unaffordable housing, calling on the government to withdraw a draft law that will make it easier for landlords to evict tenants and end rent caps on new leases. In Greece, students protested against high student rents.

Protests have resurged in Albania. They were initially triggered by a luxury tourism development linked to the Trump family, which unleashed discontent over unaccountable politicians, oligarchical power and corruption. France’s protests gave the movement fresh impetus, with students mobilising against high education costs, poor university conditions and limited job prospects.

The triggers and demands of protest movements vary, but movements speak to a shared understanding among many young people that they aren’t being heard and growing economic difficulties aren’t being addressed.

Roots of a generational revolt

What has happened in France and other European countries is part of a broader global pattern. Young people expect few opportunities in economies that fail almost everyone but the super wealthy. They see bad public services get worse, including their schools and universities, while the cost of essentials soars, driven by the climate crisis and needless conflicts.

When young people leave education they enter impossible job markets and face handing over most of what they earn in rent. A housing crisis that has been bubbling up for years has become a mainstream issue. Private sector interests have turned a necessity into an object of financial speculation. Corporate landlords seek to extract as much rent as the market can bear and use their lobbying power to water down policies to control rents.

Many people view governments as not having the answers. In France, as elsewhere, the current plan is more economic austerity. Established centre-right and centre-left parties are widely seen as differing little.

At the same time, young people have seen the power of self-organising. Gen Z-led protest movements have arisen in many countries, motivated by anger at economic failures, corruption and unaccountable political power. In 2024, young people rose up in Kenya against a planned tax on essentials. In Bangladesh, young people protested against a quota that restricted entry to public sector jobs, toppling an authoritarian government.

In 2025, a ban on 26 social media platforms showed Nepal’s young people how out of touch their government was. Their protests ousted the prime minister, leading to an election that brought democratic change. This year, India’s Gen Z-led cockroach movement secured the resignation of the education minister over exam leaks and is now protesting against unfair changes to the electoral roll.

In 2025, Gen-Z led movements arose in countries as diverse as Madagascar, Morocco, Peru, Philippines, Serbia and Togo, among many others. Movements share remarkably similar characteristics, practising internal democracy and sharing inspiration, tactics and symbols across borders. When movements broaden their support beyond their origins, connecting with established groups and organisations, Gen Z remains at their heart, driving them forward.

Repression and political opportunism

Because they question the distribution of economic and political power, Gen Z-led protests have invariably been met with state violence. In France, Amnesty International has tracked the use of batons, teargas and mass arrests, including against children. On 7 October, amid public outrage, the government was forced to suspend the police’s use of stun grenades after a 15-year-old boy lost a hand. Police have detained thousands of under-18s.

Protesters have mobilised overwhelmingly peacefully, apart from isolated acts of vandalism. But cost-of-living protests joined by hundreds of thousands over the weekend of 17 and 18 October ended in much more significant violence, with rioting and looting in several cities.

With a presidential election due in April, politicians have been quick to capitalise on the violence. Government spokespeople sought to blame LFI, while far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who currently tops the polls, has blamed the violence on what she calls ‘anarchic immigration’. Donald Trump and the Russian government have done the same, while far-right politicians across Europe have followed her lead.

Protesters don’t want a far-right victory, and if France or other countries shift further rightwards, the blame won’t lie with them. Public anger that demands disruption and seeks to punish elites can be channelled towards far-right populist and nationalist ends when no better alternatives are on offer. Economic and political failures, in countries with large Gen Z populations, all but guarantee further protests. The political establishment must start listening and offer a more positive response.

Andrew Firmin is CIVICUS Editor-in-Chief, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

 

 

 

 

Manvel Arzumanyan, retired veterinarian, says animal movements have been impacted by the conflict. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
YEREVAN and SHIKAHOGH STATE RESERVE, Armenia, Oct 26 2026 (IPS)

Less than 100 metres from military positions facing each other across the Armenia-Azerbaijan border, the forest suddenly disappears.

On 22 October, I travelled to Shikahogh State Reserve, a biodiversity hotspot in southern Armenia near the Azerbaijan border. At one point I stood less than 100 metres from military positions facing each other across the frontier. Looking across the landscape, what struck me most was not the presence of soldiers but the absence of trees.

Large patches of hillside were barren, interrupting what should have been continuous forest cover. From several points inside the reserve, stretches of land appeared stripped of vegetation. Armenian military positions and Azerbaijani posts were visible across the landscape, reminders that one of the South Caucasus’ richest ecosystems now sits at the edge of a heavily militarised frontier.

The reserve, located in Armenia’s Syunik Province, was founded in 1958 and spans almost 30,000 acres, about 94 percent of which is forested.

It is home to rare animals such as the Caucasian leopard, the Bezoar ibex, the brown bear, the Armenian viper and numerous bird species. It also has 1,100 plant species (70 of which are listed in the IUCN Red Data Book) and is regarded by conservationists as one of the ecological jewels of the Caucasus.

Yet today, biodiversity is only part of the story.

Local Armenian officials, led by Marat Harutyunyan, Deputy Mayor of Kapan, the municipality closest to the reserve and the Azerbaijan border, said the environmental changes have become more visible since the 2022 fighting that affected parts of southern Armenia.

Harutyunyan alleged that Azerbaijani forces had cleared sections of forest for military positions and access roads. The full extent of this clearing has not been independently verified. Visible signs of tree cutting and earthworks could also be seen on the Armenian side near military installations, although officials declined to discuss their purpose or scale.

Vladik Agatelyan and Harut Marzynyan talk about the impacts of war on the locals’ livelihood and wildlife. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Competing Environmental Claims

While Armenian officials and local residents in Syunik have linked environmental changes in and around the Shikahogh State Reserve to militarisation and forest clearance, Azerbaijani environmental representatives argue that environmental concerns in the region extend beyond forest loss and should be viewed more broadly.

No Azerbaijani government officials were present at COP17 to respond directly to questions about conditions in Shikahogh. Azerbaijan is not participating in the conference. However, Amin Mammadov, co-founder of the Environmental Protection First (EPF) Coalition and Chairman of the Public Council under Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources, said Armenia was selectively drawing attention to environmental problems in the region.

Mammadov argued that while Armenian authorities focus on alleged deforestation and ecosystem damage in border areas, they have remained largely silent on what he described as pollution of transboundary rivers resulting from mining activities within Armenian territory.

Referring to a statement recently issued by the coalition, Mammadov said the group had called on the COP17 Presidency and participants in the Leaders’ Summit to encourage Armenia to adopt “concrete and measurable decisions” on the protection of transboundary rivers, improved management of mining operations, transparent environmental monitoring mechanisms, and public access to environmental information.

Another coalition member, Mugabil Bayramov, Chairman of the Azerbaijani Cartographers Public Union, said the group had prepared a Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-based digital map in 2024 titled Mineral Raw Materials Resources of the Republic of Armenia. According to Bayramov, the map identifies mineral deposits, mining enterprises and rivers allegedly affected by industrial pollutants.

The competing allegations highlight how environmental issues in the South Caucasus are increasingly intertwined with political tensions and unresolved disputes. Independent verification of many claims remains difficult because of restricted access, security concerns and the absence of comprehensive cross-border environmental monitoring.

Installations and clearing of a large tract of forests along the Armenia-Azerbaijan border at Shikahogh State Forest Reserve. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Livelihood Along a Militarised Border

Harutyunyan said Azerbaijani forces occupy several heights overlooking parts of the reserve and surrounding communities. According to him, that has changed how residents use the landscape.

“People are afraid to go to certain places,” he said, often due to the fear of landmines in parts of the border.

Vladik Agatelyan, a 60-year-old farmer, said a mine blast killed two of his cows. “The risks are too many, so I have stopped raising cattle,” he said. Some of his neighbours still do, but they no longer graze livestock closer to the forest.

Whether the danger is widespread or localised, fear itself appears to be creating a social and economic impact, as pastures are abandoned and traditional livelihoods are slowly disappearing. For example, Agatelyan’s wife, also a senior citizen, took up a job to teach in a village school as income from their farm declined.

“The salary is very small (100 dollars a month), but it helps us to get by,” he said.

A Wildlife Corridor Under Pressure

Among those concerned about the reserve’s future is Manvel Arzumanyan, a retired veterinarian in his seventies. For decades, he worked with livestock in the region and closely observed the surrounding landscape. He remembers a time when bears, wild goats and other species moved freely through the forests and mountains around the village. The area, he said, served as an important ecological corridor linking habitats across Armenia, Azerbaijan and Iran.

Today, such sightings appear less frequent.

Harut Marzynyan, a zoologist at Shikahogh State Reserve who oversees wildlife monitoring, echoed his observations. Marzynyan said the conflict has made fieldwork increasingly difficult, limiting researchers’ ability to track animal movement and conduct regular surveys.

He noted that expanding roads, military infrastructure and fragmented landscapes can disrupt wildlife corridors and isolate animal populations. However, the reserve has been unable to carry out comprehensive studies because of security concerns and restricted access linked to the conflict.

Evidence From Another Frontline

The concerns emerging from Shikahogh are difficult to quantify. But scientists studying other conflict zones say the patterns sound familiar.

George Mitri, Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Balamand in Lebanon, said the environmental footprint of the ongoing Israel-Hezbollah conflict extends far beyond areas directly affected by fighting. More than 11,000 hectares have been affected by conflict-related fires, while thousands more hectares have suffered damage from explosions, military activity and vegetation loss.

“The ecological impact of war on biodiversity is much broader than the area directly affected by bombing,” Mitri told IPS.

Similar concerns emerged during an interview with Jen Maman, Senior Policy and Campaign Strategist at Greenpeace, the international environmental campaigning organisation.

Drawing on Greenpeace assessments and partner research, Maman said at least 65,000 olive trees have been burned during recent hostilities in southern Lebanon.

She said environmental damage extends beyond forests to include agricultural land, water resources and soil quality.

Maman also highlighted concerns surrounding the use of white phosphorus, which can ignite vegetation and potentially leave pollutants in soils and water sources. Maman shared some investigations that found elevated concentrations of phosphorus and heavy metals in some affected areas of Lebanon, raising concerns about long-term environmental impacts.

According to Maman, the consequences extend well beyond biodiversity. Environmental destruction has affected agriculture, fisheries, livestock production and food security, illustrating how ecological damage can quickly become an economic and humanitarian crisis.

Restoring Nature After Conflict

According to Mitri, meaningful restoration is an urgent need and must begin with “systematic documentation through satellite imagery, photographs, field surveys and scientific assessments”. Those records are critical not only for understanding the scale of destruction but also for future accountability and recovery efforts.

“Restoration must involve a wide range of specialists, including ecologists, biodiversity experts, hydrologists, soil scientists and toxicologists, to understand habitat loss, contamination and ecosystem disruption,” he said.

Displaced residents often possess detailed knowledge of ecological changes occurring in their landscapes and can provide information that may not appear in scientific datasets.

“The community has to be re-established where they were,” Mitri said, arguing that environmental recovery and community recovery are inseparable.

COP17: The Missing Finance Conversation

Restoration, however, raises another question that remains largely absent from international biodiversity negotiations: who will pay for it?

Restoring conflict-damaged ecosystems can require substantial investments in mine clearance, soil remediation, habitat restoration, reforestation, biodiversity monitoring and support for affected communities.

Mitri argues that environmental assessments must eventually be linked to compensation mechanisms, recovery planning and international financial support if damaged landscapes are to have a realistic chance of recovery.

Yet despite growing evidence of environmental destruction caused by armed conflicts in Lebanon, Gaza, Ukraine and the South Caucasus, conflict-related ecosystem restoration remains largely absent from biodiversity finance discussions.

At COP17, governments are debating how to mobilise billions of dollars to implement the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. But despite a packed COP agenda with 50 items, there is little discussion of dedicated funding mechanisms for ecosystems damaged by war or of how affected countries and communities should finance their recovery.

An Overlooked Threat to Biodiversity

At COP17, Astrid Schomaker, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), declined to comment directly on the Armenia-Azerbaijan environmental dispute. However, during the conference’s opening ceremony, she stressed the broader significance of biodiversity loss.

“No nation, no economy, no society is immune from the impacts of biodiversity loss,” Astrid Schomaker told delegates. She also warned that “even the best decisions that you will take at this meeting will be meaningless if there is no capacity to implement, monitor, make informed decisions and manage risks.”

As negotiations enter their crucial second week, it remains unclear whether the environmental consequences of armed conflict and the challenge of restoring ecosystems affected by it will receive greater attention in biodiversity negotiations.

Yet for communities living along contested borders, the impacts are already visible. In Shikahogh, trees have disappeared from parts of the landscape, access to land has become more restricted, and residents describe livelihoods that are increasingly difficult to sustain.

For many conservationists, scientists and communities living in conflict-affected regions, the lesson emerging from Armenia, Lebanon and other frontlines is increasingly clear: biodiversity protection cannot be separated from the environmental costs of conflict.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

 

 

 

Related Articles

• Ahead of COP17, UN Biodiversity Chief Urges Urgent Realignment of Finance with Nature Goals
• Nairobi Biodiversity Talks Set the Stage for Key COP17 Decisions

Excerpt:

Armenia-Azerbaijan's border forests, a biodiversity hotspot, are being transformed by militarisation, fear, and environmental loss. Experts say the same pattern is unfolding in conflict zones from Lebanon to Ukraine.

By Shahiduzzaman
DHAKA, Bangladesh, Oct 26 2026 (IPS)

Bangladesh has achieved remarkable economic progress over the past few decades. Its garment industry has become globally important, millions of people have entered the workforce, and private businesses have expanded across manufacturing, services, technology and trade. But economic growth alone does not create a healthy business environment. Businesses also need predictable laws, safe workplaces, fair competition, protection of property and contracts, and respect for the rights of workers, consumers and communities.

Shahiduzzaman

The important question is therefore not simply whether Bangladesh is open for business. It is whether Bangladesh can create an environment where economic growth and human rights, investment and public safety, and business success and accountability go together.

There has been progress, but significant gaps remain. The World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys have repeatedly identified corruption, infrastructure, access to finance and regulatory obstacles among the challenges faced by businesses in Bangladesh. These problems increase the cost and uncertainty of doing business, particularly for smaller enterprises. The World Bank has also emphasised that effective regulations and institutions governing business registration, licensing, inspections and property rights are essential for reducing business risks while protecting consumers, public health and safety.

Corruption is particularly damaging because it creates an uneven playing field. When businesses believe that personal connections or unofficial payments are necessary to obtain services, licences or approvals, honest businesses can be placed at a disadvantage. It also weakens confidence in government institutions and discourages investment.

The problem is not necessarily a lack of laws. Bangladesh has numerous laws and regulatory agencies. The deeper problem is often implementation and enforcement. Rules that are reasonable on paper have little value if they are applied selectively, slowly or inconsistently.

This gap is also visible in the rule of law. The World Justice Project’s 2025 Rule of Law Index ranked Bangladesh 125th among 143 countries, although Bangladesh’s overall score improved by 1.3 per cent from the previous year. The index examines areas including fundamental rights, regulatory enforcement, civil justice, criminal justice and order and security.

Human rights and workplace safety are another critical part of responsible business.

Bangladesh has made important progress since the Rana Plaza disaster, particularly in the garment sector. More recently, the country took a significant step by ratifying ILO Conventions 155 and 187 on occupational safety and health and Convention 190 on violence and harassment at work in November 2025. The ILO described these ratifications as an important commitment to safer workplaces and workers’ rights.

However, ratification is not the same as implementation. The ILO itself makes clear that ratification represents a commitment to progressively align national laws and practices with international standards; it does not mean that full compliance automatically exists on the day of ratification.

The real challenge is therefore to ensure that workplace safety rules are consistently enforced, labour inspectors have adequate resources and independence, and workers can report violations without fear of retaliation.

Public safety and institutional trust are equally important. A business environment cannot be stable when citizens lack confidence in the institutions responsible for law enforcement and justice. The Asia Foundation’s 2024 survey of 6,510 Bangladeshis found that only 20.5 per cent considered the police to have very high integrity. Trust in the judiciary was 38.2 per cent. The survey also showed that trust in both institutions had declined from 2022 levels.

Other countries demonstrate that stronger institutions and economic development can advance together. Singapore provides one example of the importance of consistent enforcement and institutional integrity. According to Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index, Singapore scored 84 out of 100 and ranked third among 182 countries. The index measures perceptions of public-sector corruption, based on expert assessments and business surveys.

Vietnam provides another useful comparison because, like Bangladesh, it has built a strong export-oriented manufacturing economy. The World Bank says Vietnam’s economic success over recent decades has been strongly supported by export-oriented foreign investment, but argues that further growth requires regulatory reform and higher productivity. Vietnam has introduced a programme to simplify or reduce business regulations and, by December 2023, had simplified or reduced 2,789 regulations. Its National Public Services Portal had also digitised more than 70 per cent of public administrative services.

So, what should Bangladesh do?

First, the government must close the gap between laws and enforcement. Regulations should be clear, simple and applied equally.

Second, government services such as licences, permits, taxation, customs and inspections should increasingly be digitised. Clear deadlines, published fees and traceable decisions can reduce opportunities for unofficial payments.

Third, regulatory agencies must be more accountable. Complaints against officials should be independently investigated, and disciplinary measures should follow transparent procedures.

Fourth, labour inspection must be strengthened. Workplace safety should not become a priority only after accidents occur. Employers who violate safety standards should face meaningful consequences, while compliant businesses should not be placed at a competitive disadvantage.

Fifth, police and justice institutions need to rebuild public confidence through professional training, independent complaint mechanisms, timely investigations and equal application of the law.

Finally, businesses, workers, civil society and consumers should have meaningful opportunities to participate in regulatory reform. Policies imposed without consultation often fail to address problems experienced on the ground.

Bangladesh does not have to choose between business growth and human rights. In fact, sustainable economic growth increasingly depends on both. Safe workers are more productive, predictable regulations encourage investment, fair competition rewards innovation, and trusted institutions reduce the risks and costs of doing business.

The ultimate test is simple: Can an entrepreneur compete without connections? Can a worker work without fear? Can a consumer obtain justice? Can a business receive government services without unofficial payments? And can every citizen expect the law to be applied fairly?

If Bangladesh can answer these questions through effective institutions rather than promises, it can build a business environment based not only on economic opportunity, but also on human rights, public safety, fairness and public trust.

Shahiduzzaman is the Editor and CEO of News Network. shahiduzzaman@newsnetwork-bd.org

This story was originally published by The Financial Express

8 November 1996
Graca Machel (left), former Minister of Education of Mozambique and the Secretary-General's appointed Expert on the Impact of Armed Conflict of Children, presents her report titled "The United Nations Report on the Impact of Armed Conflict of Children" to the Third Committee. Right is Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Credit: UN Photo/Evan Schneider

By Mikiko Otani
TOKYO, Japan, Oct 23 2026 (IPS)

WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind. The United Nations was established with this commitment.

Children, while constituting nearly a third of humanity, are disproportionately affected by war. Yet, children’s voices are rarely heard and children are largely absent from peace processes.

From Machel to Security Council Resolution 2427

Graça Machel, thirty years ago, in her groundbreaking report “Impact of Armed Conflict on Children” already told the United Nations: “clearly the most effective way to protect children is to prevent the outbreak of armed conflicts”; “All people need to feel that they have a fair share in decision-making,” emphasizing that young people should be seen as “active participants in creating solutions, not just as victims”.

The need for child participation was emphasized in the Paris Principles and Guidelines on Children Associated with Armed Forces or Armed Groups (2007). While the participation of children received less attention in the original Machel report, it was highlighted as an important issue in the 10-year strategic review (2009), having an entire chapter devoted to “Children as Peacemakers”. This recognition was followed by Security Council resolution 2427 (2018), which called on Member States and the UN system “to ensure that the views of children are taken into account … throughout the conflict cycle”, and to fully incorporate and prioritize “empowerment” of children in the post-conflict recovery, reconstruction and peacebuilding processes, taking into consideration the views of children.

Participation: a child’s right and a driver of peace

Participation is a right of the child under the most widely ratified Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). Children must be heard and have their views given due weight in all matters that affect them, including in the conflict context. Children’s participation is critical for conflict prevention, their protection in the conflict, recovery, reintegration and reparation. Children can also play an important role in bringing divided, torn communities together, as catalysts for social cohesion and building peace.

The momentum has been building for a further call for participation of children. The Security Council heard the views of a former child soldier from Colombia (2018), a 15-year-old girl from Mali (2020), and an 18-year-old peacebuilding activist from Cameroon (2023). All three speakers called for the participation of children.

In this year of special importance for children affected by conflict, 30th anniversary of the creation of the children and armed conflict mandate by the UN General Assembly, the Human Rights Council strengthened the scope of the call for child participation in its resolution 61/21 devoted to the rights of the child affected by armed conflict. It invites States to ensure the meaningful participation of children affected by armed conflict in the design, implementation, follow-up and evaluation of policies and programmes throughout the conflict cycle, including conflict prevention, peace and post-conflict processes, including protection, justice, accountability, reparation and recovery.

This resolution is particularly significant. Twenty-four children aged 12-17 from 10 countries in conflict situations shared their views in a consultation with the European Union, one of the penholders, and many of their recommendations helped shape the resolution (Child Rights Connect, meeting report and Child Friendly Guide, 2026).

The children and armed conflict agenda, deeply embedded in the Convention on the Rights of the Child as a basis for the Machel report, established by the General Assembly, strengthened by the Security Council, is now complemented by the Human Rights Council from the child rights perspective. This is very much in line with the call of the UN Secretary-General’s Guidance Note (2023) for mainstreaming child rights throughout the whole UN system including the peace and security pillar.

Three recommendations for the next steps

First, UN mechanisms, States and civil society should support and strengthen partnership with children and young people to make meaningful participation of children a reality. Second, children should be included in the Conference commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Paris Principles to be convened by France with UNICEF in February 2027, highlighting the transformative role that children associated with armed forces and armed groups can play as rights holders and agents of change. Third, children’s participation should be supported in the global peacebuilding architecture and space, starting from the annual peacebuilding week in June 2027, the beginning year of the International Decade of Strengthening of Peace for Future Generations (2027-2036) proclaimed by the General Assembly resolution 80/269 (2026).

Dr. Mikiko Otani, widely recognized as an international human rights lawyer, is currently the President of Child Rights Connect, a Geneva-based global NGO network promoting child rights. She was the Chair of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (2021-2023) during her eight-year membership for two terms.

IPS UN Bureau

 

 

 

 

Boats in Villa Marina, Falcón State. Credit:Jujovar2010, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Francisco R. Rodríguez
DENVER, Colorado, USA, Oct 23 2026 (IPS)

 
Money chase

So, if Venezuela claims to be importing from the rest of the world roughly as much as it was exporting during those years, and the rest of the world confirms Venezuela’s story, then where could those additional $11 billion that presumably ended up in the bank accounts of Maduro’s cronies be?

Technically, there are some ways in which a country could spend as much as it earns and still have large sums go missing. The first obvious one is if there were $11 billion lying around to steal. Except we know there weren’t, because the Venezuelan government was broke and had all its international accounts frozen. Even the Central Bank didn’t have access to most of its international reserves at the time. And remember, the Times is telling us that these $11 billion were coming out of unpaid receivables. In other words, the oil was being sold, it was being loaded into ships, and the owners of these ships were promising to pay Venezuela for that oil but, according to the Times, never did.

Another possibility is that Venezuela was accumulating assets because someone was lending it money. But that explanation doesn’t pass the smell test either. Nobody in their right mind would have lent $11 billion to Venezuela in 2021 and 2022. The country was sanctioned, barred from issuing any type of debt in the United States, and even non-US investment funds wouldn’t go near it with a 10-foot pole. The country didn’t even have access to bank accounts where a loan of that size could be wired.

And, quite frankly, if, say, China or Russia had lent Venezuela $11 billion and somehow gotten those dollars to Venezuela, don’t you think the New York Times, or Reuters, or the Wall Street Journal, would have written a story about that? And, by the way, where is that $11 billion creditor trying to get their money back? No other Venezuela creditors seem to know about them, which is quite odd for a country that has just announced that it’s about to start restructuring its debt.

In sum, nobody lent Venezuela $11 billion in 2021–22 because anyone deluded enough to do so wouldn’t have been lending the money; they would have been giving it away. The country already had a debt that was well in excess of its capacity to pay, and country risk premiums were through the roof. The expected return on any Venezuela debt issuance in those years would have been zero.

Digging in

Now here it is actually worth stopping for a minute and looking carefully at the numbers in the country’s current account, because what the balance of payments data allows us to do is not just look at how much the country receives and spends in foreign exchange, but also where that money comes from and where it goes. And here the story gets interesting because, oddly enough, what these numbers seem to tell us is that the Venezuelan government did borrow around $11 billion (or, more precisely, $10.4 billion) in those two years. They also tell us that it accumulated some $14 billion in accounts receivable, precisely the ones that the New York Times is telling us were not paid.

So, say you had just come down from Mars, knew nothing about Venezuela’s pariah status at the time, and looked at these numbers. You would say: well yes, Venezuela borrowed $10 billion in those years and at the same time accumulated $14 billion in accounts receivable (that is, promises to pay in the future) for its oil sales. And if then, on your short trip from Mars, you picked up a copy of the New York Times and read it, you would say: well, it looks like of those $14 billion, around $11 billion never got paid.

So why does the country’s current account data get us these numbers that are so strange? Herein lies what I think is the resolution of the issue.

Below is a slide from a presentation prepared by PDVSA in late 2022, where it reports all of the oil that was sold between 2020 and 2022.[1] Note that $13.3 billion in invoices were ceded to the Republic. That’s actually a bit higher than the Times’ $11 billion because it includes 2020. In other words, the government was paying for its imports through oil shipments because it could not use international bank accounts as a result of US sanctions. Normally, PDVSA would have sold the oil, received dollars in payment, and sold those dollars to the Central Bank. Then the government would have gone to the Central Bank and bought dollars from it to pay importers.

Exhibit 1: November 2022 PDVSA Presentation Shows Receivables Ceded to Republic

Source: Ministry of Popular Power for Oil.

Since that mechanism could not be used, the government resorted to paying in-kind. It went to the importers and said: look, if you bring this much in imports into the country, we’ll let you go and collect from the people who bought our oil and who owe us money.

In fact, if you look at the decomposition of the supposed borrowing that the government did, you’ll find $6.3 billion of portfolio investment securities being issued by the government. And that rhythm of roughly $500 million per quarter continues until the end of 2025. That’s not because the government is issuing bonds. Believe me, if the government had issued a single bond, we would know about it (and whoever had bought that bond would have become the laughingstock of the securities world). But if you look at the fine print of the IMF’s Balance of Payments Statistics Manual, you’ll find that what characterizes portfolio investment is the fact that securities have to be negotiable. And this is precisely what Venezuela was giving importers: negotiable IOUs that they could exchange for oil receivables entitling them to receive payment for oil that Venezuela had sold.

We find a very direct statement of this in another slide of the PDVSA 2022 presentation, where the board states, in discussing cases of cesión de facturas (assignment of invoices) corresponding to shipments requested by the National Executive, that these were used to compensate debts with providers of the Republic.

There it is: we’ve found our mystery lender: importers who were being issued debt so that they could exchange them for oil shipments. So, when you see the balance of payments accounts say that the government was accumulating receivables and issuing debt, what you are really seeing is the way in which balance of payments statistics handle a practice that is as old as humanity: barter.

Oil and prejudice

Reality is often much more prosaic than what we want it to be. Government cronies did not walk away with $11 billion in unpaid oil shipments. What really happened is something much simpler: Venezuela didn’t have a way to pay in cash for the imports it needed, so it ended up paying with oil. And because PDVSA, the state-owned oil company, is legally distinct from the Republic, it did not directly collect on the shipments but rather transferred them to the Republic in payment of its tax and royalty obligations.

American journalist Sydney Harris once wrote that “we believe what we want to believe, what we like to believe, what suits our prejudices and fuels our passions.” And yes, the idea that Maduro’s henchmen walked off with $11 billion in oil shipments feeds well into many stereotypes of Venezuela under Maduro. Even if it sits awkwardly with the fact that he doesn’t seem to have money to pay for his defense in a Brooklyn court, most of us are predisposed to believe it.

Yes, Maduro’s regime was highly corrupt. No one puts that in doubt. But there is a long distance between recognizing its corruption and claiming that regime insiders walked away with half of the country’s oil exports. That image may fit a lot of political stereotypes and be useful for many political narratives. It just doesn’t fit the facts.

Francisco R. Rodríguez is a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (cepr.net) in Washington, DC and a professor and fellow at the University of Denver’s Korbel School of International Studies.

[1] I obtained this presentation two years ago from reporters who wrote stories on it and who asked me to see it to discuss their interpretation of it.

IPS UN Bureau

 

 

 

 

Credit: United Nations

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 23 2026 (IPS)

The international day for the eradication of poverty, commemorated last week, was a grim reminder that the UN will not achieve its highly-ambitious target of helping eradicate extreme poverty—”in all its forms”– by 2030.

According to Secretary-General Antonio Guterres eradicating poverty by 2030 requires urgent political will, massive investments, and a commitment to justice rather than charity.

But that is unlikely to happen by the targeted date?

UN Deputy Spokesperson Farhan Haq told reporters last week the message to donors is that there is a crucial importance towards focusing aid on eliminating poverty as much as possible.

“It’s a disgrace that so many people – really, hundreds of millions of people around the world – still face acute poverty. Because of that, and because there’s still such a large gap in the needs that are to be addressed, it’s unlikely that we’re going to meet the targets by 2030. But the Secretary-General, as you know, continues to push for determination. The idea being, as he puts it, that he is neither hopeful nor pessimistic, but determined. And that’s what we have to do in the fight against poverty.”

Guterres has described poverty as an “insult” to human dignity, a denial of fundamental human rights, and an issue of social justice.

In 2026, an estimated 826 million people (or 1 in 10 people worldwide) were living in extreme poverty. If current trends continue, 9% of the world’s population will still live in extreme poverty by 2030.

Richard Ponzio, Director of the Global Governance, Justice & Security Program and a Senior Fellow at the Washington-based Stimson Center, told Inter Press Service (IPS) ending poverty in all its forms everywhere by 2030 is Goal #1 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

“While we saw tremendous progress on a similar Millennium Development Goal poverty alleviation effort from 2000-2015 — thanks in large part to advances in two large developing countries at the time (China and India) — we have seen less progress overall during the present period (2015-2030) for multiple reasons, including growing debt burdens, the COVID-19 pandemic, continued environmental degradation, and the drag on global economic growth stemming from tariffs and new major wars.”

Despite these obstacles, he pointed out, the Secretary-General and his UN system’s continued determination to fight acute global poverty merits the support and commensurate levels of commitment and determination by the world body’s 193 member states.

In the run-up to next September’s SDG Summit in New York, international efforts, including innovative developments strategies and new financing approaches, should be redoubled in support of the “No Poverty” SDG — while ensuring that steps to eradicate extreme poverty remain a central plank of an emerging Post-2030 Development Agenda, he declared.

Max Lawson, Oxfam International’s Head of Inequality Policy, told IPS extreme poverty can be ended by 2030—“but only if we radically reduce inequality.”

“Right now, for every new dollar of wealth created in the world, the richest one percent pocket 41 cents ―and the entire bottom half of humanity gets just a single cent. While everyday people are hit hard by rising prices, wars, and pandemics, billionaires have more than doubled their fortunes,” said Lawson.

According to one report, poverty has many dimensions. Its primary causes include unemployment, social exclusion, and the high vulnerability of certain populations to disasters, disease, and other crises that prevent them from earning a productive living.

The UN’s SDGs are a collection of 17 global goals and 169 specific targets adopted by UN Member States in September 2015 under the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

These goals also include an end to worldwide hunger, the need for quality education, good health and well-being, among others.

Anuradha Mittal, Executive Director, The Oakland Institute, told IPS: “As we look for solutions to end poverty, we need to focus on the causes of poverty.”

The international day for the eradication of poverty should be the day to eradicate wars around the world, she argued.

Global military spending continues to rise. Trump’s proposed defense budget for 2027 – a record high of US$1.5 trillion, nearly doubling the 2023 budget – is in line with projections estimating global military spending could reach $6.6 trillion by 2035.

The buildup of the military industrial complex comes at the expense of common good. A small fraction of annual military budgets – less than $300 billion could help eliminate extreme poverty. $93 billion per year – less than 4% of yearly global military spending – could help address global hunger, she said.

Today, over half the world’s 1.1 billion poor live in conflict situations. War diverts necessary funds for public health, education, and social safety nets. Destruction and pillage of war manufactures poverty and then maintains it,” said Mittal.

Danielle Nierenberg, President and Founder, Food Tank, told IPS “determination is good but in order to be effective, we need to have courage.”

With the cutbacks to international aid including the systemic dismantlement of USAID, we need to stand up to those who the aid is a waste of money, she said.

Millions of people are dying unnecessarily when only a very small percentage of rich countries budgets could help save them. Aid benefits us all—it’s not only the moral thing to do, but it helps strengthen national security, declared Nierenberg.

Frederic Mousseau, Policy Director at the Oakland Institute, told IPS focusing on “donors” to address the poverty and climate crises that the world faces today is misdirected.

Poverty goes hand in hand with growing inequities and cannot be addressed separately. There is plenty of money to go around to solve both these crises.

According to Oxfam, US$9 trillion could be raised just from increasing taxes on the wealth and income of the top one percent richest people and the profits of 722 of the world’s biggest corporations.

As the wealth of the billionaires and the largest corporations keeps increasing to insane levels, there is no other way to address poverty than to tax it. The UN should lead the way on an international tax reform that will allow a redistribution of the wealth towards the poor and the adaptation to the climate crisis, declared Mousseau.

According to the SDG 2026 report, poverty has many dimensions. Its primary causes include unemployment, social exclusion, and the high vulnerability of certain populations to disasters, disease, and other crises that prevent them from earning a productive living.

Why should I care about other people’s economic situation?

There are many reasons, but the simplest is that as human beings, our well-being is deeply interconnected. Growing inequality hurts economic growth and undermines social cohesion. This raises political and social tensions and, in some circumstances, drives instability and conflict.

Why is social protection so important?

Strong social protection systems are essential to cushion the blow of economic shocks and prevent vulnerable families from falling into poverty.

While social protection measures did expand during the COVID-19 crisis, approximately 46% of the world’s population—about 3.8 billion people, including 1.4 billion children—remained entirely unprotected in 2023.

In response to the subsequent cost-of-living crisis, 105 countries and territories announced nearly 350 social protection measures between February 2022 and February 2023. However, 80% of these programs were only short-term. To truly achieve the SDGs, nations must build permanent, universal, and sustainable social protection systems for all.

The contribution of science to end poverty has been significant. For example, it has enabled access to safe drinking water, reduced deaths caused by water-borne diseases, and improved hygiene to reduce health risks related to unsafe drinking water and lack of sanitation.

• If current trends continue, 9% of the world’s population may still live in extreme poverty by 2030, and only one in five countries will succeed in halving their national poverty levels.
• In 2025, 7.9% of the global workforce (284 million workers) lived in extreme poverty, down from 11% in 2015.
• For the first time on record, over half of the world’s population receives at least one social protection benefit. Despite this milestone, 3.8 billion people remain completely uncovered.
• Development aid focused on poverty reduction has fallen sharply, erasing a decade of progress and returning to 2015 levels.
• Advanced economies spend a significantly higher share of government budgets on essential services (like education, health, and social protection) compared to emerging and developing nations.
• Guaranteeing basic social security floors in low- and middle-income countries requires an additional $1.4 trillion annually, equal to 3.3% of their combined GDP in 2024.

Source: The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2026

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

 

 

 

By External Source
Oct 22 2026 (IPS)

 
The world is getting hotter. And the consequences are already being felt.

From devastating floods and prolonged droughts to intensifying heatwaves, climate change is disrupting lives and livelihoods across the globe.

According to the World Meteorological Organization, the eleven years from 2015 to 2025 were the hottest ever recorded.

In 2025, global temperatures were approximately 1.43 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

And the human impact is growing.

UNICEF reports that more than 171 million students had their education disrupted by climate-related hazards in 2025.

Three-quarters of those affected lived in low- and lower-middle-income countries.

Now, a new United Nations Environment Programme report delivers another warning.

Its 2026 Emissions Gap Report concludes that temporarily exceeding the Paris Agreement’s 1.5-degree warming threshold is now unavoidable.

But how far temperatures rise, and for how long, still depends on decisions made today.

UNEP estimates that limiting this overshoot requires global greenhouse gas emissions to fall by 18 percent by 2030, and 45 percent by 2035, compared with 2025 levels.

Current national climate commitments fall far short.

Yet solutions exist.

Renewable energy, cleaner transport, energy efficiency and stronger climate policies can reduce emissions.

And investment in climate adaptation can help protect vulnerable communities from worsening impacts.

On October 24th, International Day of Climate Action draws attention to the urgent need for collective action.

The challenge is no longer simply to prevent warming.

It is to limit the damage, protect lives and build a more resilient future.

Because every fraction of a degree matters.

IPS UN Bureau

 

 

 

 

By Shahiduzzaman
DHAKA, Bangladesh, Oct 22 2026 (IPS)

Bangladesh has earned global recognition for reducing deaths from cyclones and floods. Early warning systems, cyclone shelters, embankments and community preparedness have transformed the country’s disaster response. Yet another climate crisis is receiving far less attention: the economic damage climate change is quietly inflicting on households, farmers, workers, businesses and public finances.

Shahiduzzaman

The question is no longer whether climate change is costing Bangladesh. It clearly is. The real question is how much we are losing, who is paying the price and whether the country is doing enough to prevent these losses.

The uncomfortable reality is that Bangladesh still lacks a comprehensive annual system for calculating climate induced microeconomic damage. Losses are recorded separately through agricultural damage, disaster assessments, health costs, infrastructure destruction, lost working days, business interruption, declining household income and climate induced migration. As a result, much of the country’s real climate bill remains invisible.

Available evidence shows that the cost is already enormous. The World Bank estimates that tropical cyclones cost Bangladesh around US$1 billion annually. It has also warned that a severe flood could reduce national GDP by as much as 9 percent, while climate change could cause around one third of agricultural GDP to be lost by 2050. As many as 13.3 million people could become internal climate migrants by 2050 because of climate related pressures on agriculture, water and land. The economic burden is no longer limited to cyclones and floods. Extreme heat is emerging as a major source of economic loss. A 2025 World Bank assessment found that heat related physical and mental health conditions resulted in an estimated 250 million lost workdays in Bangladesh in 2024. The resulting economic loss was estimated at between US$1.33 billion and US$1.78 billion, equivalent to around 0.3 to 0.4 percent of GDP.

This should fundamentally change how Bangladesh understands climate damage. A disaster does not have to destroy a house, factory or bridge to cause economic loss. When extreme heat reduces the productivity of a construction worker, garment worker, farmer, transport worker or street vendor, the economy loses output.

The hidden climate bill therefore extends far beyond physical destruction.

Consider a farmer in coastal Bangladesh. Rising salinity may gradually reduce agricultural production. The immediate result is lower household income. But the consequences do not end there. A family may sell livestock, borrow money, reduce food consumption or withdraw children from school. Eventually, one or more family members may migrate to Dhaka or another city.

A climate shock that begins in a field can therefore become a problem for the labour market, housing, education, health services and urban infrastructure.

The same chain of losses occurs during floods. A small shopkeeper can lose inventory. A transport worker can lose several days of income. A factory may remain physically undamaged but stop production because roads are submerged or workers cannot reach their workplace. Households may spend their savings on repairs instead of education, healthcare or investment.

At the same time, the government must spend more on emergency relief, damaged roads, embankment repair, reconstruction and public health.

Climate change therefore creates a double burden: private income and productive assets are lost while public expenditure increases.

This is why Bangladesh urgently needs a national climate loss accounting system. It should systematically measure household and productive asset losses, agricultural and fisheries damage, lost income and working days, health and productivity costs, business interruption, supply chain disruption, displacement and loss of human capital.

Such a system would tell policymakers not simply how much a cyclone or flood costs in physical damage, but how much income ordinary citizens lose and how much economic activity Bangladesh sacrifices.

This is particularly important because a large share of Bangladesh’s workers remain in informal employment. Agricultural labourers, construction workers, transport workers, street vendors and small entrepreneurs often have limited access to paid leave, insurance or social protection. When a flood, cyclone or heatwave prevents them from working, their income can disappear immediately.

Climate change is therefore also an inequality crisis.

A wealthier household may be able to repair its home, relocate temporarily or pay medical expenses. A poor household may have to sell productive assets or take on debt. For families living close to the poverty line, one climate shock can erase years of economic progress.

Bangladesh has taken important steps toward adaptation. Its National Adaptation Plan for 2023 to 2050 identifies major adaptation priorities and recognises the enormous investment required to protect people, livelihoods and development. (UNDP) But the gap between ambition and implementation remains a serious concern.

The first major gap is data. Bangladesh cannot effectively manage climate related economic damage without knowing its full scale. The government should publish an annual National Climate Economic Loss Report covering households, agriculture, businesses, labour productivity, health and public infrastructure.

The second gap is institutional coordination. Climate adaptation cannot remain primarily the responsibility of environmental or disaster management agencies. Climate risks must be integrated into agriculture, finance, labour, health, housing, transport, industry, education and urban planning.

The third gap is prevention. Bangladesh has become relatively successful at responding after disasters, but prevention deserves much greater economic priority. A resilient drainage system that prevents repeated business disruption may be more valuable than repeatedly repairing flood damage. A climate resilient crop can protect rural income for years. A heat resilient workplace can preserve thousands of working days.

The fourth challenge is finance. Bangladesh cannot meet its enormous adaptation needs through public budgets alone. International climate finance, concessional financing, private investment, insurance and innovative financial mechanisms will all be necessary.

International experience offers useful lessons. The Netherlands demonstrates how flood protection can be integrated into long term spatial planning, infrastructure and water management. Its experience shows that flood resilience can be treated as an economic strategy rather than simply an emergency response.

Singapore offers another important lesson, particularly for Bangladesh’s cities. Its approach to rising temperatures combines urban greenery, heat modelling, climate sensitive planning and protection of vulnerable populations. Dhaka could similarly treat trees, shaded public spaces, cool buildings, drainage and water management as economic infrastructure rather than merely environmental amenities.

Bangladesh can also build on its own success. Its cyclone warning system and community preparedness programmes demonstrate that locally rooted approaches can deliver remarkable results. The same principle should now be applied to protecting livelihoods, small businesses, agriculture and workers.

Most importantly, adaptation should be judged by economic outcomes. Instead of simply reporting how much money is spent on a climate project, the government should measure how many jobs are protected, how much income is safeguarded, how many working days are preserved and how much future economic loss is avoided.

The real climate bill is not simply the cost of rebuilding a bridge after a flood. It is the farmer who produces less for years because of salinity. It is the worker who loses productive days because of extreme heat. It is the small entrepreneur whose capital disappears in a flood. It is the child whose education is interrupted because household income collapses. It is the family forced to migrate after losing its land.

When millions of such individual losses accumulate, they become a national economic crisis.

Bangladesh has demonstrated that it can protect its people from the deadliest consequences of climate disasters. The next challenge is to protect their livelihoods and economic future.

The country cannot manage what it does not measure. It is time to move from simply counting disasters to counting lost income, lost jobs, lost working days, damaged productive assets and the GDP that climate change prevents Bangladesh from generating.

The objective should not simply be to calculate how much climate change costs Bangladesh. It should be to determine how much Bangladesh can save by investing in resilience today.

Climate adaptation is no longer merely an environmental responsibility. For Bangladesh, it is an investment in GDP, employment, poverty reduction, human development and long term economic security. The climate bill is already being paid. The failure is that we still do not know its full size.

The author is the Editor and CSO of News Network.

IPS UN Bureau

 

 

 

 

UNESCO is growing its environmental DNA, or eDNA, expedition programme. This ambitious and cost-effective project can give usable ocean data in a couple of weeks using a small number of seawater samples collected by citizen scientists.

Estado Zulia - Venezuela. Credit: Breddyjgalvis, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

By Francisco R. Rodríguez
DENVER, Colorado, USA, Oct 21 2026 (IPS)

If you’ve been around Venezuelans for long enough, you know that we tend to speak in superlatives. We have the best baseball players, the most beautiful beaches, the tastiest arepas, and the wickedest dictators. But even being used to the scale of our superlatives didn’t quite prepare me for what I read in the May 5 edition of The New York Times, in a story called “In Venezuela, Trump Vowed to Show Accountability. Oil Deals Linger.” The story tells us that a network of shell companies controlled by Carlos Malpica (who is widely believed to be Maduro’s bagman) embezzled $11 billion of the country’s oil wealth in 2021 and 2022. In the Times’ words: “for every two dollars that Venezuela earned selling oil earlier this decade, one dollar was stolen, internal documents and official statistics show.”

Francisco R. Rodríguez

The story is written by Anatoly Kurmanaev, a veteran of Venezuela reporting and one of the most meticulous and careful reporters that I have ever known. As usual, Anatoly’s access to sources and ability to uncover crucial information is impressive. For example, he tells us about how a China-registered company linked to Malpica was allowed to sell oil received from Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA on highly favorable terms that included paying the national development bank in local currency. His story provides us with an exceptional window into the practice of Venezuelan corruption under Maduro.

However, it is one thing to document the practice of corruption and another to argue that half of the country’s oil revenues were stolen. That conclusion is inconsistent with what we know about flows of currency into and out of Venezuela. Put simply, $11 billion of oil revenues could not have been stolen because if they had, Venezuela would not have been able to buy the goods that we know it purchased from the rest of the world.

The claim that half of oil revenues in 2021–22 were lost to corruption rests on a specific assumption: that if Venezuela’s state-owned oil company did not receive direct payment for its exports, the money must have been stolen. That interpretation misses one important fact. During this period, Venezuela was highly sanctioned, could not access bank accounts, and was paying for many of its imports directly with oil. That PDVSA did not directly receive cash payment on billions of dollars in receivables is not evidence of corruption; it is evidence of barter.

The mother of all kleptocracies

The claim that $11 billion were stolen is staggering because it would represent by far the largest corruption scandal ever uncovered. To take one example: the largest ever kleptocracy investigation, that for Malaysia’s 1MDB scandal, has been alleged to have diverted $4.5 billion over a seven-year period in a country whose GDP was approximately $270 billion a year. That works out to about 0.2 percent of Malaysian GDP over that period. Were the New York Times’ $11 billion figure correct, it would represent roughly 8 percent of Venezuela’s GDP over the period — approximately 32 times the size of the Malaysian graft relative to its economy. And if you take into account that estimates suggest that every dollar of oil revenue generates about 4 dollars of non-oil activity, you would reach the conclusion that the costs of Maduro’s alleged corruption was around 40 percent of Venezuelan GDP — several orders of magnitude higher than the cost of corruption found in numerous quantitative cross-national studies (and that[s even without counting the money other people were stealing). This would make Venezuela by far the mother of all kleptocracies.

The Times’ $11 billion number, if true, has major implications for the debates about Venezuela. For a long time, proponents of maximum pressure sanctions have argued that we shouldn’t worry about their detrimental effect on the country’s economy because the real cause of Venezuela’s collapse is corruption. That argument has always been strongly flawed: there’s no reason why corruption, mismanagement, poor policies and sanctions can’t all have contributed to the collapse. That said, if it were true that half of Venezuela’s oil income was being brazenly stolen, then the idea that external constraints are at most a secondary cause of Venezuela’s economic malaise acquires a greater ring of truth.

Reality check

Yet the story that Maduro’s henchmen stole $11 billion has a deep problem. If that money had really vanished, then Venezuela would not have been able to pay for the goods that it imported in those years.

In 2021 and 2022, Venezuela sold $26 billion in oil shipments, or an average of $13 billion a year. In addition, it generated another $11 billion in non-oil exports, of which a large part is mining, and received around $7 billion in remittances. That means the country received total foreign currency inflows of $44 billion in those two years. Now here’s the rub. We also know that the country was paying around $44 billion in imports of goods, services, and income payments to the rest of the world over the same two years. In fact, for 2021 and 2022 combined, the country’s foreign currency revenues exceeded its spending by just $0.04 billion. This difference, also known as the current account balance, was essentially zero. It means the country was spending as much money as was coming in, which makes sense for a country that had no assets to run down and no one to lend it money.

In sum in 2021–22, Venezuela was living paycheck to paycheck. And when you’re doing that, it’s very hard for half of your paychecks to go missing without you and everyone around you noticing.

Table 1: Venezuela Current Account Statistics, 2021–2022

Source: Own construction using balance of payments data from Venezuelan Central Bank.

Now you might say: wait a minute, if the money was stolen, then maybe it didn’t come in at all, and instead of those $44 billion we would have had $55 billion in foreign currency earnings. Except that the New York Times story tells us that the oil was sold and invoiced, and that PDVSA never directly received payment for it. But if that’s true, then we know they must have been registered as exports. That’s how balance of payments statistics are built: you count an export when it is sold and invoiced, not when it is paid for.

But what if the Central Bank is lying? What if it’s just claiming that Venezuela sold $26 billion in oil to hide evidence of the corruption? Or what if it’s inflating import numbers with the same purpose?

Certainly, that would not be beyond them. And, in fact, we know there are circumstances under which over-invoicing of imports distorts balance of payments statistics. But that tends to happen in different conditions — for example, when there are exchange controls and people claim to be importing more than they really are.

To check this, I put together data reported by Venezuela’s 31 most important trading partners. Scaling up to the economy’s total trade, I estimate total goods imports of $23 billion for 2021–22, quite close to the Central Bank’s $24 billion.[1] I also looked at estimates of exports from physical oil shipments constructed by independent agencies.[2] Again, the numbers match up with what the Central Bank is telling us.

Francisco R. Rodríguez is a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (cepr.net) in Washington, DC and a professor and fellow at the University of Denver’s Korbel School of International Studies.

[1] The calculation assumes that the share of trade with these partners remained stable between 2012 and 2021.

[2] Average oil exports from Venezuela in 2021 and 2022 were 627,000 and 616,500 barrels per day, respectively, according to data from Reuters and Refinitiv Eikon. Using these export volumes, the BCV’s implied sales price for Venezuelan oil would be $47.0 and $68.1 per barrel in 2021 and 2022, respectively, implying a discount of 10 percent on average relative to OPEC’s Merey price for those years. This is consistent with evidence that Venezuela sold some of its oil at a lower price than that of the market reference reported to OPEC (see, e.g., this story based on internal PDVSA reports and this New York indictment in a corruption case with direct numbers reflecting discounts on PDVSA sales). For Venezuela to have had a sizable current account surplus, the BCV would have to be understating its oil exports — but this would imply either substantially higher export volumes than those calculated by Reuters/Refinitiv Eikon based on tanker loading data, or that Venezuela was selling its oil at a substantially higher price. Both appear highly implausible.

IPS UN Bureau