Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Jun 28 2022 (IPS)

Rich country governments claim the high moral ground on climate action. But many deny their far greater responsibility for both historic and contemporary greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, once acknowledged by the Kyoto Protocol.

Climate injustice
Worse, responsibility has not been matched by commensurate efforts, especially by the largest rich economies in the G7, which dominates the G20. Its continued control of international economic resources and policymaking blocks progress on climate justice.

Anis Chowdhury

“That is the greatest injustice of climate change: that those who bear the least responsibility for climate change are the ones who will suffer the most”, says Mary Robinson, former Eire President and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

On a per capita basis, the US and close allies – Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Australia and Canada – produce more than a hundred times the planet-warming greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of some African countries.

The African population produced about 1.1 metric tonnes of carbon (dioxide equivalent) emissions per person in 2019, under a quarter of the 4.7 tonnes global average. The US emitted 16.1 tonnes – nearly four times the global average.

GHG emissions accumulate over time and trap heat, warming the planet. The US has emitted over a quarter of all GHG emissions since the 1750s, while Europe accounts for 33%. By contrast, Africa, South America and India contributed about 3% each, while China contributed 12.7%.

Wealth inequalities worsen climate injustice. The world’s richest 5% were responsible for 37% of GHG emissions growth during 1990-2015, while the bottom half of the world’s population accounted for 7%!

Poor regions and people take the brunt of global warming. The tropical zone is much more vulnerable to rapid climate change. Most of these countries and communities bear little responsibility for the GHG emissions worsening global warming, but also have the least means to cope and protect themselves.

Thus, climate justice demands wealthy nations – most responsible for cumulative and current GHG emissions – not only reduce the harm they cause, but also help those with less means to cope.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Rich hypocrisy
Wealthy countries have done little to keep their 2009 promises to provide US$100 billion annually to help developing countries. Most climate finance has been earmarked for mitigation. But this ignores their needs and priorities, as developing countries need help to adapt to climate change and to cope with losses and damages due to global warming.

The OECD club of rich countries has been criticized for exaggerating climate finance, but acknowledges, “Australia, Japan and the United States consider financing for high-efficiency coal plants as a form of climate finance.”

It reports climate finance of US$79.6bn in 2019, but these figures are hotly contested. However, ‘commercial credit’ is typically not concessional. But when it is, it implies official subsidies for “bankable”, “for profit” projects.

Many also doubt much of this funding is truly additional, and not just diverted (‘repurposed’) from other ends. Private finance also rarely goes where it is most needed while increasing debt burdens for borrowers.

Leading from behind
At the COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow in November 2021, US President Joe Biden described climate change as “an existential threat to human existence” and pledged to cut US emissions by up to 51% by 2030.

Biden had claimed his ‘Build Back Better’ (BBB) package of proposed social and climate spending would be a cornerstone of restoring international trust in the US commitment to stem global warming.

At the G7 Summit in June 2021, Biden announced his vision of a “Build Back Better World” (B3W) would define the G7 alternative to China’s multitrillion USD Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

All this was premised on US ability to lead from the front, with momentum growing once BBB became law. But his legislative package has stalled. Unable to attract the needed votes in the Senate, BBB is ‘dead in the water’.

Putting on a brave face, US Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer promises to bring the legislation to a vote early next year. But with their party’s declining political fortunes, likely ‘horse-trading’ to pass the bill will almost certainly further undermine Biden’s promises.

Meanwhile, breaking his 2020 campaign promise, Biden approved nearly 900 more permits to drill on public land in 2021, more than President Trump in 2017. While exhorting others to cut fossil fuel reliance, his administration is now urging US companies and allies to produce more, invoking Ukraine war sanctions.

Aid laggard
At COP26, Biden promised to help developing nations reduce carbon emissions, pledging to double US climate change aid. But even this is still well short of its proportionate share of the grossly inadequate US$100bn yearly rich nations had pledged in 2009 in concessional climate finance for developing countries.

Considering its national income and cumulative emissions, the US should provide at least US$43–50bn in climate finance annually. Others insist the US owes the developing world much more, considering their needs and damages due to US emissions, e.g., suggesting US$800bn over the decade to 2030.

In 2017-18, the US delivered US$10bn to the pledged US$100bn annual climate finance – less than Japan’s US$27bn, Germany’s US$20bn and France’s US$15bn, despite the US economy being larger than all three combined.

President Obama pledged US$3bn to the Green Climate Fund (GCF) – the UN’s flagship climate finance initiative – but delivered only US$1bn. Trump totally repudiated this modest pledge.

At the April 2021 Earth Day leaders’ summit, Biden vowed to nearly double Obama’s pledge to US$5.7bn, with US$1.5bn for adaptation. But even this amount is far short of what the US should contribute, given its means and total emissions.

After the European Commission president highlighted this in September 2021, Biden vowed to again double the US contribution to US$11.4bn yearly by 2024, boasting this would “make the US a leader in international climate finance”.

At COP26, the US cited this increased GCF promise to block developing countries’ call for a share of revenue from voluntary bilateral carbon trading. The US has also opposed developing countries’ call for a funding facility to help vulnerable nations cope with loss and damage due to global warming.

Worse, the US Congress has approved only US$1bn for international climate finance for 2022 – only US$387m more than in the Trump era. At that rate, it would take until 2050 to get to US$11.4bn. Unsurprisingly, Biden made only passing mention of climate and energy in his last State of the Union address.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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A half-century of reproduction rights upended by the Supreme Court. Credit: Greenpeace.

By External Source
BOSTON, USA, Jun 27 2022 (IPS)

After half a century, Americans’ constitutional right to get an abortion has been overturned by the Supreme Court. The ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization – handed down on June 24, 2022 – has far-reaching consequences. The Conversation asked Nicole Huberfeld and Linda C. McClain, health law and constitutional law experts at Boston University, to explain what just happened, and what happens next.
What did the Supreme Court rule?

The Supreme Court decided by a 6-3 majority to uphold Mississippi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. In doing so, the majority opinion overturned two key decisions protecting access to abortion: 1973’s Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, decided in 1992.

The Supreme Court’s rolling back a right that has been recognized for 50 years puts the U.S. in the minority of nations, most of which are moving toward liberalization. Nevertheless, even though abortion is seen by many as essential health care, the cultural fight will surely continue

The opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, said that the Constitution does not mention abortion. Nor does the Constitution guarantee abortion rights via another right, the right to liberty.

The opinion rejected Roe’s and Casey’s argument that the constitutional right to liberty included an individual’s right to privacy in choosing to have an abortion, in the same way that it protects other decisions concerning intimate sexual conduct, such as contraception and marriage. According to the opinion, abortion is “fundamentally different” because it destroys fetal life.

The court’s narrow approach to the concept of constitutional liberty is at odds with the broader position it took in the earlier Casey ruling, as well as in a landmark marriage equality case, 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges. But the majority said that nothing in their opinion should affect the right of same-sex couples to marry.

Alito’s opinion also rejected the legal principle of “stare decisis,” or adhering to precedent. Supporters of the right to abortion argue that the Casey and Roe rulings should have been left in place as, in the words of the Casey ruling, reproductive rights allow women to “participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation.”

Chief Justice John Roberts concurred in the judgment that Mississippi’s law was constitutional, but did not agree with the majority opinion that Roe and Casey should be overruled entirely.

The ruling does not mean that abortion is banned throughout the U.S. Rather, arguments about the legality of abortion will now play out in state legislatures, where, Alito noted, women “are not without electoral or political power.”

States will be allowed to regulate or prohibit abortion subject only to what is known as “rational basis” review – this is a weaker standard than Casey’s “undue burden” test. Under Casey’s undue burden test, states were prevented from enacting restrictions that placed substantial obstacles in the path of those seeking abortion. Now, abortion bans will be presumed to be legal as long as there is a “rational basis” for the legislature to believe the law serves legitimate state interests.

In a strenuous dissent, Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor faulted the court’s narrow approach to liberty and challenged its disregard both for stare decisis and for the impact of overruling Roe and Casey on the lives of women in the United States. The dissenters said the impact of the decision would be “the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens.” They also expressed deep concern over the ruling’s effect on poor women’s ability to access abortion services in the U.S.

 

Where does this decision fit into the history of reproductive rights in the U.S.?

This is a huge moment. The court’s ruling has done what reproductive rights advocates feared for decades: It has taken away the constitutional right to privacy that protected access to abortion.

This decision was decades in the making. Thirty years ago when Casey was being argued, many legal experts thought the court was poised to overrule Roe. Then, the court had eight justices appointed by Republican presidents, several of whom indicated readiness to overrule in dissenting opinions.

Instead, Republican appointees Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter upheld Roe. They revised its framework to allow more state regulation throughout pregnancy and weakened the test for evaluating those laws. Under Roe’s “strict scrutiny” test, any restriction on the right to privacy to access an abortion had to be “narrowly tailored” to further a “compelling” state interest. But Casey’s “undue burden” test gave states wider latitude to regulate abortion.

Even before the Casey decision, abortion opponents in Congress had restricted access for poor women and members of the military greatly by limiting the use of federal funds to pay for abortion services.

In recent years, states have adopted numerous restrictions on abortion that would not have survived Roe’s tougher “strict scrutiny” test. Even so, many state restrictions have been struck down in federal courts under the undue burden test, including bans on abortions prior to fetal viability and so-called “TRAP” – targeted regulation of abortion provider – laws that made it harder to keep clinics open.

President Donald Trump’s pledge to appoint “pro-life” justices to federal courts – and his appointment of three conservative Supreme Court justices – finally made possible the goal of opponents of legal abortion: overruling Roe and Casey.

 

What happens next?

Even before Dobbs, the ability to access abortion was limited by a patchwork of laws across the United States. Republican states have more restrictive laws than Democratic ones, with people living in the Midwest and South subject to the strongest limits.

Thirteen states have so-called “trigger laws,” which greatly restrict access to abortion. These will soon go into effect now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe and Casey, requiring only state attorney general certification or other action by a state official.

Nine states have pre-Roe laws never taken off the books that significantly restrict or ban access to abortion. Altogether, nearly half of states will restrict access to abortion through a variety of measures like banning abortion from six weeks of pregnancy – before many women know they are pregnant – and limiting the reasons abortions may be obtained, such as forbidding abortion in the case of fetal anomalies.

Meanwhile, 16 states and the District of Columbia protect access to abortion in a variety of ways, such as state statutes, constitutional amendments or state Supreme Court decisions.

None of the states that limit abortion access currently criminalize the pregnant person’s action. Rather, they threaten health care providers with civil or criminal actions, including loss of their license to practice medicine.

Some states are creating “safe havens” where people can travel to access an abortion legally. People have already been traveling to states like Massachusetts from highly restrictive states.

The court’s decision may drive federal action, too.

The House of Representatives passed the Women’s Health Protection Act, which protects health care providers and pregnant people seeking abortion, but Senate Republicans have blocked the bill from coming up for a vote. Congress could also reconsider providing limited Medicaid payment for abortion, but such federal legislation also seems unlikely to succeed.

President Joe Biden could use executive power to instruct federal agencies to review existing regulations to ensure that access to abortion continues to occur in as many places as possible. Congressional Republicans could test the water on nationwide abortion bans. While such efforts are likely to fail, these efforts could cause confusion for people who are already vulnerable.

 

What does this mean for people in America seeking an abortion?

Unintended pregnancies and abortions are more common among poor women and women of color, both in the U.S. and around the world.

Research shows that people have abortions whether lawful or not, but in nations where access to abortion is limited or outlawed, women are more likely to suffer negative health outcomes, such as infection, excessive bleeding and uterine perforation. Those who must carry a pregnancy to full term are more likely to suffer pregnancy-related deaths.

The state-by-state access to abortion resulting from this decision means many people will have to travel farther to obtain an abortion. And distance will mean fewer people will get abortions, especially lower-income women – a fact the Supreme Court itself recognized in 2016.

But since 2020, medication abortion – a two-pill regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol – has been the most common method of ending pregnancy in the U.S. The coronavirus pandemic accelerated this shift, as it drove the Food and Drug Administration to make medication abortions more available by allowing doctors to prescribe the pills through telemedicine and permitting medication to be mailed without in-person consultation.

Many states that restrict access to abortion also are trying to prevent medication abortion. But stopping telehealth providers from mailing pills will be a challenge. Further, because the FDA approved this regimen, states will be contradicting federal law, setting up conflict that may lead to more litigation.

The Supreme Court’s rolling back a right that has been recognized for 50 years puts the U.S. in the minority of nations, most of which are moving toward liberalization. Nevertheless, even though abortion is seen by many as essential health care, the cultural fight will surely continue.

Linda C. McClain, Professor of Law, Boston University and Nicole Huberfeld, Edward R. Utley Professor of Health Law and Professor of Law, Boston University

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

A placard on display at activists' demonstration outside the 4th meeting of the CBD Working Group at the UNEP headquarter in Nairobi. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
Nairobi, Jun 27 2022 (IPS)

As the last working group meeting of the Post 2020 Global Biodiversity Agenda concluded here on Sunday, the delegates’ job at COP15 Montreal just got tougher as delegates couldn’t finalize the text of the agenda. Texts involving finance, cost and benefit-sharing, and digital sequencing – described by many as ‘most contentious parts of the draft agenda barely made any progress as negotiators failed to reach any consensus.

Nairobi – the Unattempted ‘Final Push’

The week-long 4th meeting of the Working Group of the Biodiversity Convention took place from June 21-26, three months after the 3rd meeting of the group was held in Geneva, Switzerland. The meeting, attended by a total of 1634 participants, including 950 country representatives, had the job cut out for them: Read the draft Post 2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) and its 21 targets, discuss, and clean up the text – target by target, sentence by sentence, at least up to 80%.

But, on Saturday – a day before the meeting was to wrap up, David Ainsworth – head of Communications at CBD, hinted that the progress was far slower than expected. Ainsworth mentioned that the total cleaning progress made was just about 8%.

To put it in a clearer context, said Ainsworth, only two targets now had a clean text – Target 19.2 (strengthening capacity-building and development, access to and transfer of technology) and target 12 (urban biodiversity). This means that in Montreal, they could be placed on the table right away for the parties to decide on, instead of debating the language. All the other targets, the work progress has been from around 50% to none, said Ainsworth.

An entire day later, on Sunday evening local time, co-chairs of the WG4 Francis Ogwal and Basile Van Havre confirmed that those were indeed the only two targets with ‘clean’ texts. In other words, no real work had been done in the past 24 hours.

On June 21, at the opening session of the meeting, Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, described the Nairobi meeting as an opportunity for a ‘final push’ to finalize the GBF. On Sunday, she called on the parties to “vigorously engage with the text, to listen to each other and seek consensus, and to prepare the final text for adoption at COP 15”.

Answering a question from IPS News, Mrema also confirmed that there would be a 5th meeting of the Working Group before the Montreal COP, indicating the work done in the Nairobi meeting wasn’t enough to produce a draft that was ready to be discussed for adoption.

The final push, it appeared, had not even been attempted.

Bottlenecks and Stalemate

According to several observers, instead of cleaning up 80% of the texts over the past six days, negotiators had left 80% of the text in brackets, which signals disagreement among parties. Not only did countries fail to progress, but in some cases, new disagreements threatened to move the process in the opposite direction. The most fundamental issues were not even addressed this week, including how much funding would be committed to conserving biodiversity and what percentage figures the world should strive to protect, conserve, and restore to address the extinction crisis.

True to the traditions of the UN, the CBD wouldn’t be critical of any party. However, on Sunday evening, Francis Ogwal indicated that rich nations had been dragging their feet on meeting the commitment of donating to global biodiversity conservation. Without naming anyone, Ogwal reminded the negotiators that the more time they took, the tougher they would get the decision.

At present, said Ogwal, 700 billion was needed to stop and recover global biodiversity. “If you keep giving less and less, the problems magnify. Ten years down the line, this will not be enough,” he said.

The civil society was more vocal in criticizing the delegates for losing yet another opportunity.

According to Brian O’Donnell, Director of the Campaign for Nature, the negotiations were faltering, with some key issues being at a stalemate. It is, therefore, up to heads of state and other political and United Nations leaders to act with urgency. “But time is now running out, and countries need to step up, show the leadership that this moment requires, and act urgently to find compromise and solutions,” O’Donnell said in a statement.

The Next Steps

The CBD Secretariat mentioned a string of activities that would follow the Nairobi meeting to speed up the process of building a consensus among the delegates. The activities include bilateral meetings with some countries, regional meetings with others, and a Working Group 5 meeting which will be a pre-COP event before COP15.

Finally, the CBD is taking a glass-half-filled approach toward the GBF, which is reflected in the words of Mrema: “These efforts (Nairobi meeting) are considerable and have produced a text that, with additional work, will be the basis for reaching the 2050 vision of the Convention: A life in harmony with nature,” she says.

The upcoming UN Biodiversity Conference will be held from 5 to December 17 in Montreal, Canada, under the presidency of the Government of China. With the bulk of the work left incomplete, the cold December weather of Montreal is undoubtedly all set to be heated with intense debates and negotiations.
IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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A group of women fleeing Ukraine arrive in Moldova. May 2022. Credit: UN Women

By Mandeep Tiwana
NEW YORK, Jun 27 2022 (IPS)

2022 is halfway through. It’s clear this is a year of immense disruption, mayhem and contestation. Horrendous war crimes are taking place in Ukraine.

The conflict is spurring soaring living costs, impacting the most vulnerable people, already faced with the adverse impacts of the pandemic and extreme weather caused by climate change.

In this scenario, concerned citizens and civil society organisations are responding by protesting misgovernance, campaigning for justice and helping out those worst affected. CIVICUS’s 2022 State of Civil Society Report analyses global events and outlines the current state of play.

Five findings with implications for the future stand out and are highlighted below.

1. Rising costs of fuel and food are global protest triggers

Governments around the world are failing to protect people from the impacts of massive price rises worsened by Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. Fossil fuel companies are banking record-breaking profits while many people, already strained by the pandemic, are struggling to make ends meet.

Public anger at corruption and dysfunctional markets is rising. In Sri Lanka, mass demonstrations against crony capitalism recently led to resignation of the prime minister. In Indonesia students protested over the rising cost of cooking oil. In Spain, increases in food, energy and fuel prices brought thousands to the streets in early 2022.

In more repressive contexts protests are met with state brutality. In Kazakhstan over 200 civilians were killed with impunity following protests over fuel price increases in January.

Reported lethal violence has also come in response to recent food price protests in Iran. In contested political environments such as the occupied Palestinian territories the potential for renewed cycles of protest and state violence remains high.

2. These are harrowing times for democracy but there are successes too

Institutions and traditions of democracy are facing increasing attacks from anti-democratic forces. Military coups are making a comeback. In Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, Myanmar, Sudan and Thailand armies are running governments.

In Tunisia hard-fought gains are being reversed by a president who dismissed parliament, took control of the judiciary and is rewriting the constitution. India’s constitutional commitment to secularism is being strained by religious intolerance promoted by its ruling party. In El Salvador, a president with a legislative supermajority is removing democratic checks and balances.

In Nicaragua, a sitting president organised a fraudulent election, enabled by mass repression. In Turkmenistan, the outgoing president bestowed the office to his son. The Philippines election saw two authoritarian dynasties enter into an alliance to win the presidency and vice presidency through a campaign of disinformation and falsification of history.

Nonetheless, there have also been bright spots, with successful mobilisations to strengthen democracy. In the Czech Republic and Slovenia political leaders who fostered divisiveness were voted out. In Australia, the incumbent government, with its failure to act on climate change, was defeated after almost a decade in power.

Meanwhile, Chile elected its youngest and most unconventional president ever, and his choice of cabinet reflects the country’s diversity and his commitment to social justice. Honduras elected its first woman president, who ran on a progressive platform to address poverty, expand women’s sexual and reproductive rights and tackle corruption.

3. Struggles for justice and equality are gaining momentum

Despite severe pushback by anti-rights groups on hard-won gender justice gains in Afghanistan and on women’s sexual and reproductive rights in countries such as Poland and the USA, the overall global trajectory is leaning towards progress.

In several Latin American countries including Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador and Mexico, restrictions on abortion have been eased. While opportunistic politicians in Ghana and Hungary have to sought to gain political advantage from the vilification of LGBTQI + people, globally the normalisation of LGBTQI+ rights is spreading.

Recently, the people of Switzerland voted in favour of an equal marriage law. Even in the challenging context of Jamaica advances have been made by civil society through the regional human rights system.

Steps forward have come after years of campaigning by civil society, which is increasingly modelling and proving the value of diversity. A new, young and diverse generation is forging movements to advance racial justice and demand equity for excluded people. They are embedding demands for rights for everyone with potential impacts for better democracy and inclusive economies.

4. Action on climate justice has transformative potential

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change through its recent reports has made clear that greenhouse gases must be cut drastically to avoid catastrophe. As the brunt of climate change continues to be disproportionately felt by excluded populations, renewed urgency is being demanded by civil society movements for governments to make ambitious emission cuts.

Activism, including mass marches, climate strikes and non-violent civil disobedience, is likely to intensify as the impacts of destructive storms, heatwaves and floods are being felt by growing swathes of populations.

Vital street action will continue to be supplemented by other tactics. Climate litigation is growing, leading to some significant breakthroughs, such as the court judgment in the Netherlands that forced Shell to commit to emissions cuts.

Shareholder activism towards polluting industries and their funders is intensifying, and pension funds are coming under growing pressure to divest from fossil fuel companies. The intersectionality of the climate movement holds hope for the future.

5. The UN needs to revitalise itself

A key purpose behind the formation of the UN in 1945 was to ‘save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’. Experience from the past few years, including in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Sahel region, Syria, Yemen and many other places shows that the UN’s record in preventing and stopping conflict is patchy at best.

Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and brutal attacks on civilian populations have further exposed fundamental weaknesses. The UN Security Council is hamstrung by the veto-wielding role of Russia as one of its five permanent members, although the UN General Assembly voted to suspend Russia from the UN Human Rights Council.

The UN’s top leadership are expected to ‘reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights’ and ‘establish conditions for justice under international law’ but have often struggled to find their resolve when powerful states have committed grave human rights violations, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

A lot of the UN’s energies appear focused on humanitarian response and management of crises over effective preventative diplomacy and justice for victims. Meaningful civil society engagement and access to key arenas can help overcome these bureaucratic shortcomings. Regardless, courage and vision will be needed from within and outside to reinvigorate the UN.

The world as it stands today is characterised by crisis and volatility, where regressive forces are mobilising a fierce backlash against struggles for equality and dignity, but also where determined civil society actions are scoring vital victories for humanity.

Mandeep Tiwana is chief programmes officer and representative to the UN headquarters in New York at CIVICUS, the global civil society alliance.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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The proposed law seeks to provide age appropriate sexual and reproductive health information and services. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Stephanie Musho
NAIROBI, Jun 27 2022 (IPS)

The Ministry of Health in Kenya recently reported that about 700 teenage girls got pregnant daily over a two-month period, in this year alone. What is more is that during this period, 98 adolescent girls between the ages of 10 and 19 contracted HIV every week in this time period

Worse still is that HIV positive women in the country continue to be stripped of their dignity and face abuse in the form of forced sterilization which is as a warped method of reducing HIV infection despite there being no scientific evidence to support these assaults. Moreover, consider that concurrently, 7 women die every day from complications arising from unsafe abortion.

This is only a snapshot of the depressing state of sexual and reproductive health and rights in the country.

If passed, all partner states of the EAC will be required to integrate sexual and reproductive health in their efforts towards universal health coverage. Additionally, countries will be required to harmonize their national health policies and regulations, more so, on and sexual and reproductive health rights

The grim reality however does not seem dire enough for Kenyan parliamentarians who have twice before – in 2014 and in 2019, failed to enact separate but similar legislation – the Reproductive Health Bills – that would have provided a framework to mitigate the prevailing circumstances, prevent future occurrences and ultimately bring down these figures.

The much-needed legislation was not passed despite the Constitution providing for the right to the highest attainable standard of health – including reproductive health in article 48 (1) (a).

Worse still is that policies are often drafted, and withdrawn at the whim of Ministry of Health officials, leaving Kenyans at the mercy of individuals and their biases.  Take for instance the Standards and Guidelines on Safe Abortion which were developed to direct medical practitioners on how to administer safe medical abortion, in compliance with the law.

The then Director of Medical Services, Dr. Nicholas Muraguri arbitrarily withdrew the policy document. The High Court ruled in 2019 that Dr. Nicholas Muraguri and the Ministry of Health violated the rights of Kenyan women and girls in withdrawing these guidelines and ordered their reinstatement. This was not done. Consequently, women and girls in need of safe abortion, with very few – or no safe options.

In 2022, the Head of Reproductive and Maternal Health in the same ministry, Dr. Stephen Kaliti wrongfully stated that giving contraceptives to minors is a criminal offense punishable by a jail term of up to 20 years. In his erroneous statement that pointed to a proposed policy that is yet to be passed, Dr. Stephen Kaliti misled millions of Kenyans. To make matters worse is that the police then use such pronouncements to harass patients and service providers. Consequently, they are hesitant to give and seek services respectively, exacerbating the crisis.

The state of affairs is depressing. Nonetheless, there remains hope at regional level. On the floor of the East Africa Legislative Assembly is the East Africa Community Sexual and Reproductive Health Bill, 2021 (EAC SRH Bill); sponsored by Hon. Kennedy Mukulia; a South Sudanese national representing South Sudan in the House.

The Bill is anchored on article 118 of the East Africa Community Treaty which speaks to the commitment by partner states to cooperate in health specifically in the advancement of reproductive health and rights.  If passed, all partner states of the EAC will be required to integrate sexual and reproductive health in their efforts towards universal health coverage. Additionally, countries will be required to harmonize their national health policies and regulations, more so, on and sexual and reproductive health rights.

Specifically, the proposed law seeks to provide age appropriate sexual and reproductive health information and services. Often, most people associate the term “age-appropriate” in the ambit of sexual and reproductive health and rights only with adolescents.

Stephanie Musho

Nonetheless, it cuts across the divide; including provisions for elderly persons on issues of menopause and andropause – which is a collection of symptoms, such as fatigue and a decrease in libido, experienced by some middle-aged or older men and attributed to a gradual decline in testosterone levels.  Additionally, the Bill seeks to prohibit and facilitate the elimination of harmful practices from the community.

These include female genital mutilation, forced sterilization of HIV positive women and forced marriage among others. Which all remain pressing issues in all partner states of the East Africa Community.

While it could be argued that countries are sovereign and will retain the current hard stance on sexual and reproductive health and rights; the Bill has a clause on monitoring and reporting where if passed, all countries will have to provide reports as to the state of implementation to the Secretary General who will then provide a compiled report to the legislative assembly.

Where dissatisfied with fellow states’ progress – or lack thereof, partner states can engage mechanisms including through the East Africa Court of Justice among others, to hold other states accountable to their commitments. This is a welcome prospect as countries – including Kenya have a history of selectively adhering to the rule of law at national level.

As the Bill comes up for public participation on June 26 2022, it is important that Kenyans and all other persons in the East Africa Community fully understand the issues articulated in the Bill. Thereafter submit informed memoranda to the East Africa Legislative Assembly. It is important that we #PassEACSRHBill to put an end to preventable diseases and preventable deaths.

Stephanie Musho is a Nairobi-based human rights lawyer and a Senior Fellow at the Aspen Institute. She is the Host of the Steff Musho Show, that focuses on leadership in Africa. Twitter: @steffmusho

By External Source
Jun 27 2022 (IPS)

Published at the halfway point of 2022, the State of Civil Society Report shines a light on a time of immense upheaval and contestation. Russia’s illegal war on Ukraine has directly blighted the lives of millions but is also sending echoes of disruption around the world, as soaring food and fuel prices pile further misery on communities already hit hard by the impacts of the pandemic and extreme weather caused by climate change.

The report finds hope, however, in the many mobilisations for change around the world: the mass protests, campaigns and people’s movements for justice, and the many grassroots initiatives defending rights and helping those most in need. Civil society is striving by all means available to make a difference.

VIEW THE REPORT

Five key trends

The report identifies five key current trends of global significance:

1. Rising costs of fuel and food are spurring public anger and protests at economic mismanagement
2. Democracy is under assault but positive changes are still being won
3. Advances are being made in fighting social inequality despite attacks
4. Civil society is keeping up the pressure for climate action
5. Current crises are exposing the inadequacies of the international governance system

1. Governments around the world are failing to protect people from the impacts of massive price rises worsened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Public anger at a dysfunctional economic system, poverty and economic inequality and corruption is rising. Mass protests are the result. In Sri Lanka, widespread protests against economic mismanagement led to resignation of the prime minister. In Iran people are demanding fundamental change as food prices soar. In Kazakhstan over 200 people were killed with impunity following protests over fuel price rises. But people will continue to protest out of necessity even in the many countries where fundamental freedoms are repressed and state violence is inevitable.

2. Institutions and traditions of democracy are under increasing attack. Coups are imperilling hard-fought gains. The military has gained power in multiple countries, including Burkina Faso and Sudan. In several others, including El Salvador and Tunisia, elected presidents are removing democratic checks on power. Entirely fraudulent elections have been held in countries as different as Nicaragua and Turkmenistan. Autocratic nationalists have triumphed in elections in countries including Hungary and the Philippines. But at the same time there have been successful mobilisations to defend democracy, not least in the Czech Republic and Slovenia, where people voted out political leaders who fostered divisiveness in favour of fresh and broad-based alternatives. Progressive leaders promising to advance social justice have won power in countries such as Chile and Honduras. In many contexts, including Costa Rica and Peru, a prevailing sentiment of dissatisfaction is leading to a rejection of incumbency and willingness to embrace candidates who run as outsiders and promise disruption.

3. In politically turbulent times, and despite severe pushback by anti-rights groups, progress has been achieved in advancing women’s and LGBTQI+ rights. The USA, where neoconservative forces are emboldened, is ever more isolated on sexual and reproductive rights as several other countries in the Americas, including Colombia and Mexico, have eased abortion restrictions following civil society advocacy. Opportunistic politicians continue to seek political advantage in vilifying LGBTQI+ people, but globally the normalisation of LGBTQI+ rights is spreading. Most recently, the people of Switzerland overwhelmingly voted in favour of an equal marriage law. Even in hostile contexts such as Jamaica important advances have come through civil society’s engagement in regional human rights systems. But when it comes to fighting for migrants’ rights, only Ukrainian refugees in Europe are being received with anything like the kind of compassion all such people deserve, and otherwise the dominant global sentiment is hostility. Nonetheless, a new generation is forging movements to advance racial justice and demand equity for excluded people.

4. A young and diverse generation is the same social force that continues to make waves on climate change. As extreme weather gets more common, the brunt of the climate crisis continues to fall disproportionately on the most excluded populations who have done the least to cause the problem. Governments and companies are failing to act, and urgent action on emissions cuts to meet the size of the challenge is being demanded by civil society movements, including through mass marches, climate strikes and non-violent civil disobedience. Alongside these, climate litigation is growing, leading to significant legal breakthroughs, such as the judgment in the Netherlands that forced Shell to commit to emissions cuts. Shareholder activism towards fossil fuel firms and funders is intensifying, with pension funds coming under growing pressure to divest from fossil fuels.

5. Russia’s war on Ukraine is the latest crisis, alongside recent conflicts in the Sahel, Syria and Yemen, among others, to expose the failure of global institutions to protect people and prevent conflict. The UN Security Council is hamstrung by the veto-wielding role of Russia as one of its five permanent members, although a special session of the UN General Assembly yielded a resolution condemning the invasion. Russia has rightly been suspended from the UN Human Rights Council, but this peak human rights body remains dominated by rights-abusing states. If the UN is to move from helping to prevent crises rather than trying to react to them, effective civil society engagement is needed. The world as it stands today, characterised by crisis and volatility, needs a UN prepared to work with civil society, since civil society continues to seek and secure vital progress for humanity.

About the report
This is the 11th annual State of Civil Society Report, published by global civil society alliance CIVICUS. This year’s report takes a shorter and more accessible format. It draws from stories published by our rolling commentary and analysis initiative, CIVICUS Lens, and from over 120 interviews with civil society activists, leaders and experts who are close to the important issues of the day.

By Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana
BANGKOK, Thailand, Jun 27 2022 (IPS)

As the Second Global Ocean Conference opens today in Lisbon, governments in Asia and the Pacific must seize the opportunity to enhance cooperation and solidarity to address a host of challenges that endanger what is a lifeline for millions of people in the region.

Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana

If done right ocean action will also be climate action but this will require working in concert on a few fronts.

First, we must invest in and support science and technology to produce key solutions. Strengthening science-policy interfaces to bridge practitioners and policymakers contributes to a sound understanding of ocean-climate synergies, thereby enabling better policy design, an important priority of the Indonesian Presidency of the G20 process. Additionally policy support tools can assist governments in identifying and prioritizing actions through policy and SDG tracking and scenarios development.

We must also make the invisible visible through ocean data: just three of ten targets for the goal on life below water are measurable in Asia and the Pacific. Better data is the foundation of better policies and collective action. The Global Ocean Accounts Partnership (GOAP) is an innovative multi-stakeholder collective established to enable countries and other stakeholders to go beyond GDP and to measure and manage progress towards ocean sustainable development.

Solutions for low-carbon maritime transport are also a key part of the transition to decarbonization by the middle of the century. Countries in Asia and the Pacific recognized this when adopting a new Regional Action Programme last December, putting more emphasis on such concrete steps as innovative shipping technologies, cooperation on green shipping corridors and more efficient use of existing port infrastructure and facilities to make this ambition a reality.

Finally, aligning finance with our ocean, climate and broader SDG aspirations provides a crucial foundation for all of our action. Blue bonds are an attractive instrument both for governments interested in raising funds for ocean conservation and for investors interested in contributing to sustainable development in addition to obtaining a return for their investment.

These actions and others are steps towards ensuring the viability of several of the region’s key ocean-based economic sectors, such as seaborne trade, tourism and fisheries. An estimated 50 to 80 per cent of all life on Earth is found under the ocean surface. Seven of every 10 fish caught around the globe comes from Pacific waters. And we know that the oceans and coasts are also vital allies in the fight against climate change, with coastal systems such as mangroves, salt marshes and seagrass meadows at the frontline of climate change, absorbing carbon at rates of up to 50 times those of the same area of tropical forest.

But the health of the oceans in Asia and the Pacific is in serious decline: rampant pollution, destructive and illegal fishing practices, inadequate marine governance and continued urbanization along coastlines have destroyed 40 per cent of the coral reefs and approximately 60 per cent of the coastal mangroves, while fish stocks continue to decline and consumption patterns remain unsustainable.

These and other pressures exacerbate climate-induced ocean acidification and warming and weaken the capacity of oceans to mitigate the impacts of climate change. Global climate change is also contributing to sea-level rise, which affects coastal and island communities severely, resulting in greater disaster risk, internal displacement and international migration.

To promote concerted action, ESCAP, in collaboration with partner UN agencies, provides a regional platform in support of SDG14, aligned within the framework of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030). Through four editions so far of the Asia-Pacific Day for the Ocean, we also support countries in identifying and putting in place solutions and accelerated actions through regional dialogue and cooperation.

It is abundantly clear there can be no healthy planet without a healthy ocean. Our leaders meeting in Lisbon must step up efforts to protect the ocean and its precious resources and to build sustainable blue economies.

Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana is an Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and Executive Secretary of the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP)

IPS UN Bureau

 

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By Sania Farooqui
NEW DELHI, India, Jun 27 2022 (IPS)

The Covid-19 pandemic has impacted lives all over the world. According to this report, gender is emerging as a significant factor in the social, economic and health effects of Covid-19. Women have been hit much harder socially and economically than men. The greatest and most persistent gender gap was seen in employment and uncompensated labour, with 26% of women reporting loss of work compared with 20% of men globally in September 2021.

Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka

UNESCO has projected almost 11 million girls might not return to school due to Covid-19’s unprecedented education disruption. This alarming number not only threatens “decades of progress made towards gender equality, but also puts girls around the world at risk of adolescent pregnancy, early and forced marriage and violence,” states this report. As almost 90% of the world’s countries have shut their schools in efforts to slow the transmission, this study estimates that 20 million more secondary school-aged girls could be out of school after the crisis has passed.

“The world has changed, and these changes are impacting women. Poverty has deepened, the sexual and reproductive health and rights of women are under attack, climate change is upon us, and changes in technology are also disproportionately impacting women. The world is facing a gender divide,” says Dr. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Chair of the Board at Women Deliver and former United Nations (UN) Under Secretary General and Executive Director of UN Women in an exclusive interview given to IPS News.

The impact of Covid-19 pandemic has threatened to reverse decades of progress made towards gender equality. Dr. Mlambo-Ngcuka says, in the last decade the world was heading in the right direction including addressing extreme poverty, but now things have changed.

“The pandemic has hit women disproportionately and young women, women are now facing food insecurity in a significant way, and of course we’ve seen that the conflicts have not ended, they have escalated. We have the war in Ukraine, and as you may know any situation that creates a humanitarian crisis, women are always likely to be the ones that pay the price more than men bearing arms. Women and children tend to be affected much more and then of course an increase in gender-based violence in trafficking of women,” says Dr. Mlambo-Ngcuka.

Women have faced compounding burdens from being over-represented working in health systems, to facing increased risks of violence, exploitation, abuse or harassment during times of crisis and quarantine. Women have been at the forefront of the battle against the pandemic as they make up almost 70% of the health care workforce, exposing them to greater risk of infection, while they are under-represented in leadership and decision-making processes in the health care sector.

This crisis and its subsequent shutdown response resulted in dramatic increase in unpaid emotional and care burden on women and families, women were already doing most of the world’s unpaid care work prior to the onset of the pandemic, only to have it increased since 2020.

Worldwide, women lost more than 65 million jobs in 2020 alone, resulting in an estimated US$800 billion loss of income, an estimate which doesn’t even include wages lost by the millions of women working in the informal economy – domestic workers, market vendors and garment workers – who have been sent home or whose hours have been drastically cut. COVID-19 has dealt a striking blow to recent gains for women in the workforce.

“Honestly, my heart goes out to our young people today just because of the difficulties we are facing. I do want to challenge older people like myself to really open the space through collaborations and co-creations with younger people, their involvement and engagement should not be token, but real.

“It’s important for us to mobilize allies from the other side so that it is not always women who are knocking on doors, there must be someone inside who is trying to open the door for you. Working with men and pushing an agenda for men to stand for gender equality is also very important. I go back to emphasizing on the need to have policies, we always must open a door for more people to come in and be empowered,” says Dr. Mlambo-Ngcuka.

However, one area where women stood out was where data supported the fact that countries led by women handled Covid-19 much better than their male counterparts. Countries with female leaders tend to have lower Covid-19 death rates and better economic performance, but the number of countries with women in executive government positions continues to remain low. As of 1 September 2021, there are only 26 women serving as Heads of State or government in 24 countries.

Whether it is balanced political participation, leadership roles in organizations or power-sharing between women and men, Dr. Mlambo-Gnuka believes the answer lies in setting targets, quotas and policies for effective participation and representation of women.

“We need to have mechanisms for accountability towards those who are responsible for implementing these measures, and we also need women themselves to continue making demands, we must balance what happens in boardrooms policy wise and outside through those who are carrying black cards.

“It’s hard to talk about progress but you cannot deny that there are more women leaders than before, that’s for sure there are more women in the labour force, more girls in schools, but our best is not good enough, there is still much more for us to do,” says Dr. Mlambo-Ngcuka.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Orange trees growing with the help of a digital watering system attached to the water tank on the right side. Al Ittifaq farm, Ciwidey, West Java, Indonesia. Credit: Kompas

By Kafil Yamin
CIWIDEY, West Java, Indonesia, Jun 24 2022 (IPS)

It appears to be business as usual at the Al-Ittifaq pesantren, the local term for an Islamic boarding school. Yadi and Rezki, both 18, join the subuh, pre-dawn prayer, in the local mosque. After a session of religious meditation, along with other santris, or students, the two study science in a pre-dawn class for about 30 minutes.

Once the session ends, the students know where to go and what to do. They pick up a hoe, shovel and machete and walk together to the school’s farm. The ustadz, or teacher, divides them into groups and issues instructions.

Soon the students no longer look like learners but like young farmers working the land. “This is part of our class lessons. We do this every day,” said Yadi, who is busy planting seeds. “I am planting green onion. But my friends are harvesting it in other side of this farm.”

Soon more business, job and career opportunities will be available in villages than in cities. With digitalization the future for the young generation is in villages

Ridwan Kamil, West Java Governor

The pesantren environment seems ideal for farming. Located in a hilly, mountainous area of Ciwidey, West Java, 170 kilometres or about a 4-hour drive from Jakarta, Al-Ittifaq compound is surrounded by green, in a temperature that hovers between 18C and 22C – cold by tropical standards.

 

Orange grove — with a surprise

Senior teacher Anwar Mustiawan shows a reporter an area where leafy orange trees with white trunks are growing — and what makes the pesantren unique is revealed. Arranged in neat rows, some trees are over two metres tall, others less than one metre. The soil under each one is covered with a tarpaulin, and under it is a sensor that measures the temperature and humidity of the soil. A water hose is attached to each tarpaulin and connected to an auto-watering machine, which joins a huge water tank.

“The machine decides, based on the soil temperature, when to water the soil,” Anwar said. “This is what digital farming technology is all about,” he added.

He also pointed out that the auto-watering machine isn’t used for all crops. “Our students should know the soil temperature and when it is time to water them,” Anwar said.

Also on hand is Aziz Elbehri, the senior economist who leads the 1,000 Digital Villages Initiative (DVI) at the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in the Asia-Pacific region.

“We are promoting sustainable, resilient and digitalized agricultural and farming practices by assisting policy makers, national and local government to meet the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030,” Elbehri told IPS as he visited the pesantren on 27 June.

“This use of technology needs to be spread and replicated to other rural communities,” he added.

While Al-Ittifaq is at the heart of a thriving farming community, digitalization is giving its inhabitants a further boost.

Everything produced on the farm goes to the Ittifaq cooperative, where students sort, grade, pack, wrap and label items. The enterprise supplies local supermarkets, malls and wholesalers with vegetables and fruits. It also purchases produce grown by local farmers, who have been its business partners since it was established in 1977.

The organization sends at least five tonnes of various vegetables daily to major cities in Indonesia, said the cooperative’s head, Agus Setia Irawan. “The demand is increasing because our product is highly competitive, which suggest that local farmers are capable of producing quality vegetables and fruits.”

That Al-Ittifaq practices organic farming is what makes the difference. “It is public knowledge that our products are planted, grown and processed in a sustainable and environmentally friendly way,” Agus added.

 

A student working on the Al Ittifaq farm, Ciwidey, West Java, Indonesia, June 2022. Credit: Kafil Yamin/IPS.

 

Self-financing farm

The proceeds of the business are used to finance the Ittifaq educational operations. “Our syeikh taught us that a good person is financially self-reliant and does not hope for charity. He makes it into reality. This pesantren is financially self-financing,” said Rezki, another student.

Al-Ittifaq also employs local residents to work on its 14-hectare farm, so that students and local residents toil together. “There are hundreds of people, most of them women, working with us in shifts. We are like a big family here,” Refky added.

The cooperative also partners with five farmers’ groups, each one consisting of 300 farmers who work 70 hectares of land.

Not only has the pesantren made big steps in the agro-industrial business, it has also become the centre of agricultural and agribusiness training for residents, in collaboration with 20 other pesantren in West Java.

And as part of the digitization drive, Ittifaq has started online marketing. Agus said the cooperative has adopted the so-called business-to-business-to-consumer model (B2B2C). By partnering with other businesses, its online e-commerce efforts are able to reach new markets and customers.

“Our virtual marketing is made through an online agricultural store called Alifmart, which offers several features, including a catalogue of products, purchasing mechanism and customer service,” he said.

FAO Representative in Indonesia Rajendra Aryal said that with more and more people having access to the internet, digital agriculture is becoming a main vehicle for transforming Indonesia’s food system.

“Indonesia is an archipelagic country that is struggling to give its people wider access to economic resources. Digitalization of agriculture is coming into play now,” he said.

 

Target — 104 digital villages

West Java’s administration has set the target of digitalizing 104 villages in the province in 2022.

“The villages are selected because they don’t have access to the internet yet. But we have been building internet infrastructure during the last two years. Soon, they are not in the blank spot anymore,” said the head of the West Java Communication and Information Office, Ika Mardiah. “And soon the villages’ potential and products, will be in e-commerce, online transactions and promotion,” she added during a meeting with FAO officials on 26 June.

To date, Mardiah’s office has incorporated 4,225 village enterprises in West Java into the digital business network under her management. “This involves more than 400 products, 12.8 million customers and a huge amount of money,” she said.

According to West Java Governor Ridwan Kamil, soon more business, job and career opportunities will be available in villages than in cities. “With digitalization the future for the young generation is in villages,” he added at the meeting.

Kamil’s administration has succeeded in building three thematic digital villages: one focused on health, which use technology to address the lack of health facilities and specialized doctors. Patients in five pilot areas are able to consult a family doctor online.

The multimedia digital village provides capacity building in digital content-making skills for villagers in the province, while education digital villages are equipped with a so-called Smart Router as a source of education materials that can be accessed by all village residents. The materials are regularly updated.

A global initiative inspired by FAO’s Director-General, Mr QU Dongyu, the DVI is being piloted throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Ciwidey is among many communities being showcased and sharing its advancements with other villages and areas in Asia-Pacific as well as other regions of the world.

Mrinalini Rai, head of Women4Biodiversity and leader of the Women’s Caucus at the UN Biodiversity Convention and Cristina Eghenter of World Wildlife Fund for Nature, at a media roundtable at the ongoing UN CBD Working Group 4 meeting in Nairobi. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
Nairobi, Jun 24 2022 (IPS)

“I often hear, ‘What do women have to do with biodiversity?’ And I want to ask them back, ‘What do men have to do (with biodiversity)?’,” says Mrinalini Rai, a prominent gender equality rights advocate at the 4th Meeting of the Open-Ended Working Group of the UN Biodiversity Convention, which started this week in Nairobi.

Her comment appears to reflect the frustration women activists feel as their demand for a specific target on gender equality – known as Target 22 – shows few signs of progress.

Target 22 was first submitted last September at the 3rd meeting of the Open-ended Working Group (OEWG) of the post-2020 global biodiversity framework (GBF) in Geneva. The target, when summarized, proposes to “ensure women and girls’ equitable access and benefits from conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, as well as their informed and effective participation at all levels of policy and decision making related to biodiversity.”

The target was proposed officially by Costa Rica, with the support of GLURAC – a group comprising 11 countries from Latin America and West Africa which has been since accepted as a point of discussion by the CBD. The GRULAC members are Guatemala, Argentina, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Chile, Cote d’Ivoire, Ecuador, Togo, Benin, Cameroon, and Tanzania.

However, this week in Nairobi, when asked by IPS for their comments on Target 22, the co-chairs of the CBD appeared largely dismissive. “We already have a Gender Action Plan,” said Basile Van Havre – one of the two co-chairs, implying little importance or need for a standalone target.

Unsurprisingly, the draft remains a barely-discussed target on Friday – two days before the current meeting ends.

Gender in Biodiversity and Drafting of Target 22

Ratified by 200 nations, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is the first legally binding global treaty. It has three main goals: conserve biological diversity, promote sustainable use of its components, and attain fair and equitable sharing of the benefits derived from the utilization of genetic resources.

The convention’s 14th Conference of the Parties, held in Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt, in 2018, adopted a decision to develop a new biodiversity framework that builds on the CBD’s 2011-2020 strategic plan known as “Aichi Biodiversity Targets”. The decision also includes “a gender-responsive and gender-balanced process for the development of the post-2020 global biodiversity framework”.

However, while a lot of progress has been made since 2018 on crafting and shaping the targets for the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), the Convention has yet to truly center gender issues. Of the 21 targets within the draft Framework, only one target mentions women, and no single target refers to gender. Some parties have stated that since the Gender Plan of Action (GPA) will complement the Framework, there is no need for a standalone target on gender. Feminists and gender equality advocates, however, believe it is critical to have strong integration of gender within the Framework itself to anchor and give life to the Gender Plan of Action.

“What we are saying is that this target is not supposed to be seen as something separate from everything in the GBF. When you adopt a standalone target on gender equality, it will guide all the work being done under the framework and to operationalize the framework including the communications, knowledge management, capacity building and financing of the new mechanism”, says Rai.

Cristina Eghenter, Global Governance Policy Coordinator at World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) links the currently lacking gender-segregated data and how the adoption of Target 22 could help plug the gaps.

“Women’s contribution to biodiversity is often questioned because this contribution is underreported and therefore, undervalued. A standalone target on gender equality would lead to the setting of clear indicators and a monitoring system which would then contribute to the production of gender-segregated data,” Eghenter points out.

Gaining support from other advocacy rights and equity groups

UNCBD Working Group 4 meeting in Nairobi in session. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Jennifer Corpuz leads the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity (IPFB) – a collection of representatives from indigenous governments, indigenous non-governmental organizations, and indigenous scholars and activists that organize around the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

On being asked her stance on a standalone, specific target on gender equality, Corpuz says that she wholeheartedly supports this. “When the GBF has included target 21, it is a natural progression that there should be a target 22”. Corpuz also explains that  Target 21 – the only target to mention women in the GFB, emphasizes indigenous communities and therefore, it will be more helpful to have a standalone target on gender equality that goes beyond women and is inclusive of all genders.

“We, therefore, strongly support Target 22 and hope it will be taken up for adoption at COP15,” she says.

Besides, IIFB and WWF, several other rights and equity advocacy groups are supporting the proposed new target. The Global Youth Biodiversity Network – an advocacy group that is demanding greater focus on youths in the GBF, also has voiced its support for a target on gender equality. Other groups lending their support are the UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR), the Convention on Biological Diversity Alliance (CBDA), and the Women Caucus at the UNCBD.

Expectation VS Reality

As the Nairobi meeting nears its end – the conference will close on Sunday – there are more meetings of the contacts groups which oversee discussing and finalizing the text of the draft GBF with the negotiation in each meeting turning more intense. However, when it comes to Target 22 – the contact group 4, responsible for discussing and cleaning up the text of both targets related to gender, has had only one reading of the Target 22.

According to Benjamin Schachter, Human Rights Officer on Climate Change and Environment at ORCHR, the text of the target 22 is right now ‘full of brackets’ which indicates there is hardly any agreement among the contact group members discussing the target on its content.

As the GBF is expected to have at least 80% of ‘clean text’ before it is presented by CBD to the parties for discussion and adoption, the question that most people are wondering is if the draft GBF at COP15 includes a target for gender equality at all? Some are even asking if the draft in its current form (full of brackets) can be rejected by the parties altogether if they feel the task to clean it up is too arduous?

Total exclusion is ‘extremely unlikely,’ explains Schafter, explaining the technical process: since the target has been officially proposed by a group of parties and discussed at the contact group, the parties must work harder and get the draft to a shape where it can be considered for consensus building and eventual adoption.

A long way to Montreal

The onus, then, lies equally on parties as well as on groups such as Women4Biodiversity to lobby more parties and gain their support. Already, in the Nairobi meeting, a few more countries including Maldives, Norway, and the EU have expressed their support, taking the total number of supporting parties to 22.

Norway has, in fact,  also proposed an alternative text for the Target which reads “Ensure gender equality in the implementation of the global biodiversity framework and the achievement of the 3 objectives of the convention including by recognizing equal rights and access to land and natural resources of women and girls and their meaningful and informed participation in policy and decision-making”

“This language is both cleaner and stronger”, says Schachter.

Mrinalini Rai of Women4Biodiversity agrees: “Norway proposed and supported by American countries a new way to address the rights of gender equality and rights of women to lands and natural resources which is a fantastic improvement and if this new text comes in, it would be monumental step forward for CBD,” she says.

But can the advocates and supporters get 108 remaining countries to read, give input and prepare themselves for an informed discussion in the next five months? Undoubtedly, that remains an arduous task for the nations, requiring manpower, time, and resources.

The Target 22 advocates appear well aware of the challenge ahead: “It is going to be a long road to Montreal,” says Ana di Pangracio of the Convention of Biodiversity Alliance (CBDA).

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Credit: US government

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Jun 24 2022 (IPS)

They call it MAD: Mutual Assured Destruction. It is about the nuclear-armed powers’ doctrine of military strategy and national security policy. And they spent on their MAD policy more than 156.000 US dollars, every single minute, in just one year–2021.

According to their MAD doctrine a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by an attacker on a nuclear-armed defender, with second-strike capabilities, would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender.

Nuclear Weapons - The United States spent three times more than the next in line- a whopping 44.2 billion US dollars. China was the only other country crossing the ten billion mark, spending 11.7 billion US dollars. Russia had the third highest spending at 8.6 billion US dollars

Nine countries are classified as nuclear-armed powers, with the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom and France ranking at the top of the list. Others: India, Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea.

 

Already before the war now unfolding in Europe

In its report “Squandered: 2021 Global Nuclear Weapons Spending,” the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) reveals that in 2021 –the year before the Russian invasion of Ukraine– nine nuclear-armed states spent 82.4 billion US dollars on these weapons of mass destruction, that’s more than 156,000 US dollars… per minute.

Specifically, the United States spent three times more than the next in line- a whopping 44.2 billion US dollars, reports ICAN. China was the only other country crossing the ten billion mark, spending 11.7 billion US dollars.

Russia had the third-highest spending at 8.6 billion US dollars, though the United Kingdom’s 6.8 billion US dollars, and the French 5.9 billion, weren’t so far behind. ICAN adds that India, Israel and Pakistan also each spent over a billion on their arsenals, while North Korea spent 642 million US dollars, according to the 2017 Nobel Peace laureate: ICAN.

 

Arsenals expected to grow

Another prestigious global peace research body, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) on 13 June 2022 launched the findings of its Yearbook 2022, which assesses the current state of armaments, disarmament and international security.

One key finding is that despite a marginal decrease in the number of nuclear warheads in 2021, nuclear arsenals are expected to grow over the coming decade.

The nine nuclear-armed states—the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea —continue to modernise their nuclear arsenals and although the total number of nuclear weapons declined slightly between January 2021 and January 2022, the number will probably increase in the next decade, SIPRI reports.

 

90% of all nukes, in the hands of Russia and the U.S.

Russia and the USA together possess over 90% of all nuclear weapons.

Of the total inventory of an estimated 12.705 warheads at the start of 2022, about 9.440 were in military stockpiles for potential use.

Of those, an estimated 3.732 warheads were deployed with missiles and aircraft, and around 2000—nearly all of which belonged to Russia or the USA—were kept in a state of “high operational alert,” according to SIPRI’s 2022 Yearbook Global nuclear arsenals are expected to grow as states continue to modernise.

 

Technology adds greater risks

The study Emerging technologies and nuclear weapon risks explains that the specific risks posed by advancements in cyber operations and artificial intelligence are still being discovered, but some risks include:

• Cyber attacks could manipulate the information decision-makers get to launch nuclear weapons, and interfere with the operation of nuclear weapons themselves;

• The increased application of advanced machine learning in defence systems can speed up warfare – giving decision-makers even less time to consider whether or not to launch nuclear weapons;

• Countries may be eager to apply new artificial intelligence technologies before they understand the full implications of these technologies;

• It is impossible to eliminate the risk of core nuclear weapons systems being hacked or compromised without eliminating nuclear weapons.

 

‘Eliminate nuclear weapons before they eliminate us’

“These [nuclear] weapons offer false promises of security and deterrence – while guaranteeing only destruction, death, and endless brinkmanship,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said on 20 June 2022 in a video message to the First Meeting of States Parties to the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, in Vienna, Austria.

“Let’s eliminate these weapons before they eliminate us.”

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons prohibits a full range of nuclear-weapon-related activities, such as undertaking to develop, test, produce, manufacture, acquire, or stockpile nuclear weapons, or other nuclear explosive devices.

It was adopted in July 2017 and entered into force in January 2021.

 

‘Recipe for annihilation’

The UN chief also said that the “terrifying lessons” of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are fading from memory, referring to the atomic bombing of these two major Japanese cities during the Second World War.

However, with more than 13,000 nuclear weapons still held across the globe, “the once unthinkable prospect of nuclear conflict is now back within the realm of possibility.”

“In a world rife with geopolitical tensions and mistrust, this is a recipe for annihilation. We cannot allow the nuclear weapons wielded by a handful of States to jeopardise all life on our planet. We must stop knocking at Doomsday’s door.”

 

The most destructive instruments of mass murder ever created

ICAN has been repeatedly warning that nuclear weapons are the most destructive, inhumane and indiscriminate instruments of mass murder ever created.

The term “catastrophic humanitarian consequences” describes their unique and horrifying effects on people, including lethal harm to those who are not part of the conflicts in which they are used.

 

The world at Doom’s doorstep

While the past year offered glimmers of hope that humankind might reverse its march toward global catastrophe, the Doomsday Clock was set at just 100 seconds to midnight, on 20 January 2022 warned the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

The time is based on continuing and dangerous threats posed by nuclear weapons, climate change, disruptive technologies, and COVID-19.

“All of these factors were exacerbated by “a corrupted information ecosphere that undermines rational decision making.”

“US relations with Russia and China remain tense, with all three countries engaged in an array of nuclear modernization and expansion efforts—including China’s apparent large-scale program to increase its deployment of silo-based long-range nuclear missiles; the push by Russia, China, and the United States to develop hypersonic missiles; and the continued testing of anti-satellite weapons by many nations.”

Founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein and University of Chicago scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock two years later, using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet.

Pakistani medics treat Afghan quake survivors on the border of the two countries. More than 1000 were killed and thousands displaced after the 5.9-magnitude quake hit the Paktika and Khost on June 22, 2022. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Jun 24 2022 (IPS)

Survivors of the deadly earthquake that hit Afghanistan’s Paktika and Khost provinces told of their losses while being treated in hospitals in neighboring Pakistan after a 5.9-magnitude quake killed at least 1000 and displaced thousands more in the early hours of June 22, 2022.

The Taliban-led government has appealed for assistance, and its neighbor Pakistan was the first responder, sending aid and treating injured people.

A resident of Khost province Abdur Rahim, a daily wager, brought his nine-year-old daughter, Samia Bibi, to the North Waziristan’s hospital. She has a head injury.

Rahim told IPS that they were asleep when the earthquake started.

“My wife and two sons died on the spot, and my daughter sustained head injuries. I ran out after feeling the tremor, and within seconds the roof of our home collapsed,” he said.

A weeping Rahim said he was able to retrieve his daughter from the debris.

“Now, she is improving after getting medication. Doctors will operate upon her when she improves some more.”

Zahoor Shah, from the same province, said all his family members were still under the debris of his mud house, which fell due to the quake. He miraculously survived.

“We were all sleeping and heard the noise made by our house collapsing. I was sleeping near the door, therefore, received fewer injuries,” he said, lying in hospital with fractured legs and hands.

He lost his 38-year-old wife, his son, aged ten, and two daughters, 17 and 18.

Shah, 45, a prayer leader, said that he was thankful for the Pakistani medics.

Pakistan sent humanitarian aid to the Afghan victims, including blankets, tents, and medicine, the Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s office said in a statement.

Pakistan ambassador to the United Nations, Munir Akram, urged the international community not to link assistance for the disaster-hit nation with political concerns.

“The humanitarian assistance should not become a victim of geopolitics. UN’s humanitarian principles, including the principles of neutrality and impartiality, must be upheld,” said Akram in New York, according to media reports.

Pakistan’s Ministry of Health said about 30 of Pakistan’s tribespeople, who had gone to adjacent Khost province for business, were also among the dead.

“In line with the government’s directives, we have alerted hospitals to receive injured people from Afghanistan in North Waziristan district located on Afghanistan’s border,” he said.

Pakistan received eight injured people on June 23 from the Khost province for treatment in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and the number of people crossing the border for treatment rose daily.

“We have imposed an emergency in the hospitals in North Waziristan district located close to Khost province, the epicenter of the earthquake, and have called in all medical staff,” Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s health director Dr Ikramullah Khan told IPS.

In addition, Pakistan sent a team of 61 doctors and medical supplies to the affected areas to treat the people.

“Most people required medication for diarrhea, dysentery, and gastroenteritis due to dehydration,” he said. “Ambulances are standing near the border to transport the patients to hospitals. It is an ongoing process as we would provide continuous relief to the needy people.”

Seventeen-year-old Rozina Begum lost her parents and two brothers.

“I was shifted to this hospital by rescue workers. Many say that my parents and brothers are alive, but I don’t believe because I saw their dead bodies with my own eyes,” Begum said.

She said she was to be married in a few months, but now she lay hospitalized at Khalifa Gul Nawaz Hospital, Bannu district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, near North Waziristan. Doctors are expected to operate on her for multiple abdominal injuries within the next few days.

“She is not fit for surgery. We are giving her antibiotics to prevent infection before her surgery,” Dr Kashmala Khan said.

She said that they had already received 30 bags of blood from local donors. Most of the injured people required blood.

“Local people are giving cash and serving food and drinks to the patients. They are donating blankets and clothes as well, “Khan said.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken tweeted: “The earthquake in Afghanistan is a great tragedy, adding to an already dire humanitarian situation. We grieve for all the lives lost, and the hardships Afghans continue to face. The US is working with our humanitarian partners to send medical teams to help those affected.

The Taliban in Afghanistan has appealed for international support.

Taliban’s spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told IPS from the capital Kabul that they had appealed for international assistance because providing food, shelter, and medicines to those affected by the natural disaster was challenging.

“We welcome UN agencies and international organizations’ donations and help for the people. We have already allocated one billion Afghanis (over 11m USD) (to disaster relief), but we are unable to deal with the situation,” he said.

Rasool Ahmadzai, who works with World Food Programme, said they faced hardships reaching the area because of inclement weather and rain.

“Rescue workers find it extremely difficult to remove the debris and retrieve the bodies. Still, we are re-enforcing efforts to provide food and save the people from starvation,” Ahmadzai said.

Most mud-built homes in southeastern Paktika province were destroyed, and he said it was difficult to reach the victims.

“Displaced population also require shelter, and UNHCR is working to donate the needful, but the task isn’t easy,” he said.

He elaborated that the roads were in shambles, and mobile phones were not working, hampering rescue work.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the agency was “fully mobilized” in Afghanistan.

“My heart goes out to the people of Afghanistan who are already reeling from the impact of years of conflict, economic hardship, and hunger. I convey my deep condolences to the families of the victims and wish a speedy recovery to the injured,” Guterres said.

After an Afghan foreign ministry spokesman said the Taliban would welcome international help, US President Joe Biden directed USAID and other federal government entities to assess how they could respond.

Salahuddin Ayubi, a spokesman for the Afghanistan interior ministry, feared the death toll was likely to rise “as some of the villages were in remote areas in the mountains and it will take some time to collect details.”

Ayubi said that most of the houses had been reduced to rubble, and bodies swathed in blankets could be seen lying on the ground.
IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Men working for Edy Prasetyo harvesting catfish in Indramayu, West Java, take a break on a recent day. Credit: Kafil Yamin/IPS

By Kafil Yamin
INDRAMAYU, Indonesia, Jun 24 2022 (IPS)

For years Indramayu has been known as one of Indonesia’s rice centres. The district in West Java is the country’s number one rice producer, generating 1.3 million tonnes of husked rice in 2021, according to Indonesia’s Centre of Statistics (BPS). The country’s total rice production was 54 million tonnes.

What we witness as we drive to the district confirms the rice-dominant economy. Paddy fields stretch on the right and left as far as the eye can see. This is early June, traditionally the start of the harvest, but the plants are still green, indicating that the harvest is still months away.

It is also a clear sign that the paddy growing cycle has changed, due to a shift in climate.

Ironically, Indramayu was one of the five poorest districts in West Java in 2021, according to the BPS report, which also revealed that the Covid-19 pandemic increased the number of poor in Indramayu by 13 percent.

Even before the pandemic, Indramayu was a pocket of poverty in Indonesia. The majority of people in the paddy-dominant district are not land-owning farmers but farm labourers or landless growers.

Paddy fields are labour-intensive only during planting season and harvest, which take place three times a year on average. That leaves three to four months as free time for landless farmers. Both men and women migrate to the capital Jakarta, 240 km away, to find temporary jobs, before returning to Indramayu for the harvest.

 

Labour migration decreasing

Global climate change has been disrupting these patterns — of planting, harvesting, and migration. But one silver lining of this disruption is that landless growers have begun to find alternative livelihoods without migrating to Jakarta. Fish farming is a popular choice in the coastal district.

Indramayu farmers started making ponds along the seashore to raise tiger prawns, a popular commodity. But this farming is vulnerable to incursions from the ocean, including tidal waves.

That’s why Edy Prasetyo, 46, chose to enter the catfish farming business in 2001. Twenty-one years later, Prasetyo has 69 ponds in Soge village, Kandanghaur sub-district.

In recent years catfish has become a favourite street food for middle and low-income people in almost all major cities in Indonesia. Demand is so high that in the Jakarta area, where most Indramayu catfish is sold, shortages are common. Seeing the opportunity, some young local growers have become rich quick.

It’s demanding work, Prasetyo tells an IPS reporter on a recent visit. “We have to stick to a fixed feeding schedule, including during the night and when it rains. Imagine walking around the ponds in heavy rain and throwing catfish food into them. I have 69 ponds. I need at least 10 people to do it.”

But now, new technology is making the farmers’ lives easier. In October 2020, FAO Indonesia and Bogor Agriculture University (IPB) introduced technology known as eFishery to Prasetyo’s village. After a short training he and other catfish farmers began to adopt the system, particularly a digital automatic fish feeder.

Invented by a graduate of Indonesia’s Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), Gibran Huzaifah, the auto-feeder connects through the internet to farmers’ smartphones. There they can set the breed of fish, feeding schedules and the amount of food pellets to drop into the ponds.

 

Gunawan, 47, a catfish farmer in Ciseeng, West Java, has been using the auto-feeder since 2019. Credit: Kafil Yamin/IPS

 

Detects level of hunger

The auto-feeder is equipped with an in-water, vibration-based sensor that is able to read the movements of hungry versus full fish. Guided by the farmer’s feeding schedule, when the artificial intelligence detects hunger, it releases the amount of feed required. This avoids over or underfeeding the fish.

The auto-feeder connects through the internet to farmers’ smartphones. There they can set the breed of fish, feeding schedules and the amount of food pellets to drop into the ponds

The eFishery’s sensors collect and store real time data, such as feed volumes and consumption levels. Farmers can access this through eFishery’s web and mobile apps on their smartphone, tablet or computer and make any needed changes to the feeding.

“This is the kind of technology we need,” says Prasetyo. “It cuts time spent for feeding the catfish and saves a lot of energy.”

With eFishery, production has increased 25-30 percent, says the farmer, adding that he has more time to spend on other things. Additional benefits of the technology include that the size and weight of the catfish can be controlled and the water quality is monitored.

While Prasetyo spoke, several men placed buckets of catfish on weighing scales and then transferred them to a small truck, which soon drove out of the village, bound for Jakarta.

Losarang sub-district has now become Indramayu’s catfish centre, with the majority of residents farming the species. Catfish ponds dominate the landscape. “Sixty percent of Indramayu’s 200 hectares of catfish ponds are in Losarang sub-district,” said Thalib, the village head.

The technology and knowledge has spread throughout the area, and Prasetyo’s success story has drawn fishermen from other villages to learn about eFishery.

“This is what Member Nations want. This is what this project is designed for,” said Aziz Elbehri, senior economist at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization’s Regional Office in Bangkok, who leads the 1,000 Digital Villages Initiative (DVI) for Asia and Pacific.

A global initiative inspired by FAO’s Director-General Mr QU Dongyu, the DVI is being piloted in the Asia-Pacific region. Soge village is among many being showcased and sharing its advancements with other villages and areas in Asia and the Pacific, as well as other regions of the world.

“A successful undertaking in one village should be copied, or in popular terms, replicated to other villages. And this is what is happening here now,” Elbehri told IPS as he and his FAO team visited Soge village on 26 May.

“Indonesia is one of the success stories,” Elbehri said, pointing out several female catfish farmers who joined his visit. As eFishery is a national innovation, the project is also driving national excellence, he added.

 

Challenges remain

Catfish farming is not without challenges. Mardiah, 52, has been farming the species for 26 years. “Sometimes we go through lack of water during prolonged drought, which has caused many of our catfish to die. At other times, we get flooded during heavy rainfall and our ponds are destroyed,” he told IPS, adding that farmers can do little about such natural occurrences. Disease is another serious threat.

But what gives farmers their largest headache is the soaring price of catfish food. “More and more people make fish ponds, while catfish food production remain the same. This make its price soar,” Mardiah said.

Head of the Indramayu Fishery and Marine Office, Edi Umaedi, told IPS that fish ponds cover 560 hectares in his area, more than half of it is used for catfish farming. Last year, Indramayu’s catfish production reached 85,000 tonnes.

Setting up the business is not difficult, added Umaedi, and farmers prefer it because unlike rice, catfish can endure a water shortage and do not require irrigation. “Fish ponds, particularly catfish ponds, do not need a vast amount of land. One pond of 100 or 200 square metres is enough to farm catfish.”

To date, FAO and IPB have established eFishery in 30 villages in West Java and there are plans to expand to other Indonesian provinces.

 

Credit: FAO

By Jong-Jin Kim
BANGKOK, Jun 24 2022 (IPS)

It wasn’t that long ago that Internet connectivity faded the moment one left a populated area like a city or big town – “no service” was the take-away message back then. But thanks to 3G, 4G and now 5G mobile technology, coupled with widespread installation of cellular towers in rural areas region-wide, that little message shows up much less frequently.

Most importantly, the rapid spread of internet connectivity and mobile telephony, reaching into the most remote rural communities, has resulted in countless opportunities to help address chronic problems such as poverty, malnutrition and inequality.

Investing in an enabling environment to ensure equal access is key to ensuring the benefits of rural digitalization are enjoyed more broadly

From farmers to fishers to herders, digital technologies are increasingly relied upon to help transform and enhance livelihoods for hundreds of millions of people each day. From a smart phone in the hands of a woman or man checking optimal conditions to sow a field, or band together to rent a drone for aerial assessments, to a herder checking the weather, to fishers finding the best places to cast their nets, digital technologies are becoming increasingly accessible, useful and affordable for those in rural areas.

This paradigm shift offers great hope to get this region – and the world – back on track to meet the 2030 SDG deadline.

While this digital revolution sweeping rural areas of Asia and the Pacific holds great promise, not everyone is benefiting equally. Indeed, in some cases, digital technologies can even be disruptive, or lead to unintended consequences by widening, not reducing, the digital divide if their implementations result in a loss of decent work.

This needs to be addressed, and it’s in everyone’s best interests to do so. Policy makers in countries across the region do understand the added value, and they see the economic benefits digitalization of rural areas bring to their nations and people. Hence, investing in an enabling environment to ensure equal access is key to ensuring the benefits of rural digitalization are enjoyed more broadly.

 

Credit: FAO

 

Digitalization of rural areas needed now – more than ever before

Indeed, the move to accelerate implementation of digital technologies, equitably across the region’s rural areas couldn’t come at a more important time. The global pandemic hit rural communities disproportionately hard – particularly with respect to individual livelihoods. Now, as we try to recover from the devastation of COVID-19, we are facing the highest prices for many basic foods – the highest we’ve seen in decades. Higher food costs hit poorer and marginalized communities the hardest, particularly in rural areas, as they must spend a greater proportion of their disposable income to feed their families.

These challenges are compounding an already existing and alarming situation. Last year, prior to the inflation of food commodities, FAO and partners pointed out that many people – at that time – already couldn’t afford a healthy diet in Asia and the Pacific.

By leveraging the advancements offered by digital technologies we can find ways to counter some of these and other devastating negative effects that already existed such as severe weather related events, droughts and floods.

That is already happening in some countries in this region, and they are well on the road to digitalization of even the smallest and most remote villages and towns. And they have good examples to share with their neighbors.

At the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), we’ve been following these trends, policies and initiatives of our Member Nations in the Asia-Pacific region. We know the full scale of their desire and determination to embrace, and fully harness, the potential of digitalization.

For our part, FAO has pledged to assist in bringing together these existing good practices of our Members, and to create a space for others to share their digital solutions as part of FAO’s 1,000 Digital Village Initiative. A key component of this initiative is the Digital Village Knowledge Sharing Platform for Asia-Pacific that can act as a one-stop village square, where those working in the food and agriculture sectors can share their innovations and technologies with us all.

A digital village isn’t necessary a small place. It is a concept – one that is inclusive, operational, country-led and fit-for-purpose to deliver solid benefits to people.

At the end of the day, the ultimate goal is to make things better for everyone.

Working together, and sharing together, this region’s digital village innovations and technologies can help lead us all to a world of better production, better nutrition, better environment and a better life – leaving no one behind!

 

Credit: FAO

 

More information on the Digital Village Initiative:

Join the Knowledge sharing and policy dialogue live (and recorded) – 27 June 2022, Bangkok, and more information about the Programme is here.

At G20, FAO’s Director-General calls for closing of digital divide.

FAO Video on Digital Village Centres empowering farmers in Bangladesh and a social media video here

For more information on FAO’s Digital Village work with our Members in Asia and the Pacific, see here.

For more information on FAO’s Digital Village work with our Members in Africa, see here.

For more information on FAO’ Digital Village work with our Members in Latin America and the Caribbean, see here.

 

Excerpt:

Jong-Jin Kim is Assistant Director-General and Regional Representative, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)

The World Food Programme (WFP) says 41 million people around the world, including in Nigeria (pictured) are at imminent risk of famine. Credit: UNOCHA/ Eve Sabbagh

By Danielle Nierenberg
NEW ORLEANS, Jun 24 2022 (IPS)

When I first met Dr. Roland Bunch, I have to be honest—he scared me. As one of the most well-respected leaders on agronomy and resilient land management, he offers extremely prescient predictions on how famines take root when soils fail—and also has an admirably clear-eyed view of what we need to do better.

When we first met in the mid-2000s, I was at the Worldwatch Institute and invited him to contribute a chapter to a book I was writing. He described how farmers in Malawi and other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa were noticing their soil was getting tired.

Maize yields were unpredictable and decreasing year to year—problematic when that’s the crop you depend on most for both consumption and sale to earn your livelihood. Droughts were a major concern, but Dr. Bunch understood that farmers were, rightly, more worried about loss of soil fertility.

Droughts and depleted soils can be difficult to distinguish. While fertile soils can soak up and retain what little rain does fall, depleted soils become compacted and water simply runs off, so each problem accentuates the other.

Plus, when farmers are facing infertile soils, they are more likely to move to new areas of land, which unfortunately eats up arable land without regenerating it. And in some cases, folks give up farming altogether and move to cities, where it’s difficult for them to find jobs that match their skills.

He wrote this warning right around the 2007–08 food and financial collapse, which stretched into riots and famines around the globe over the next half-decade. And unfortunately, we may be back where we were then.
Dr. Bunch warns that the coming famine will be a “hurricane of hunger,” which sounds ominous to me and so many of us who work in this space. But things are not hopeless.

Over the past 20 years, one of the so-called solutions that’s been heavily promoted in places like Malawi are fertilizer subsidies and artificial fertilizers—which are not the answer.

We forget that artificial fertilizer should be used sparingly like medicine, to help get farmers over a hump or temporarily boost soil quality to allow for better use of organic matter.

But unfortunately, subsidies have led to farmers becoming dependent on artificial soil amendments and have actively disincentivized growing a more diverse set of crops or using organics to fertilize soils in countries across Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and more.

One of the answers to what we’re seeing around soil infertility are cover crops and ‘green manure’ (which refers not to colorful animal poop but rather the practice of growing certain crops to turn or incorporate back into the soil).

These can be things like bushes, trees, and vines that help improve soil quality, control weeds, and retain water. Other great options are crops like cowpeas and scarlet runner beans, which people can eat.

This is something else we often forget when we’re talking about how to keep folks from being hungry: The foods people have depended on for generations are not only regenerative but also delicious! Farmers have an opportunity,

Roland says, to return to growing these indigenous crops—sometimes called forgotten crops or orphan crops—that are resilient to droughts, have deep root structures to keep water and nutrients in soils, grow perennially so they don’t need to be replanted every year, and taste really, really good.

Between crises like climate change, soil depletion, global conflicts, and Covid’s supply chain fallout, the bottom line—and it’s a sobering one—is that we’re facing a massive famine and that “hurricane of hunger” over the next year.

I’ve talked before in this newsletter about the power of citizen eaters and the participatory democracies Frances Moore Lappé advocates for—but for these ideas to actually translate into powerful results, we need governments that are actively engaging in agriculture.

Roland says it’s possible to end hunger in one generation, and quite inexpensively, but only if we have the will to do so. We’ll need action from leaders in policy, business, and more to invest in helping farmers adopt greener, more regenerative soil practices.

As he says, better soils lead to better lives—which is more urgent now than ever before.

I want to thank and commend Dr. Roland Bunch for his leadership and—seriously—for scaring me. His predictions not only frighten me but also give me hope. He tells us how bad things can be—but also how good things can be if, again, we have that political engagement.

I’ve included more writing from Dr. Bunch and other luminaries in the Learn More section below, and as always, please shoot me an email at danielle@foodtank.com with your perspectives and ideas for how we move forward.

Danielle Nierenberg is President of Food Tank and an expert on sustainable agriculture and food issues. She has written extensively on gender and population, the spread of factory farming in the developing world and innovations in sustainable agriculture.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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A man sells poultry in Refugees Market, Peshawar, on 17 June. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS.

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Jun 23 2022 (IPS)

“We came here in 1979 after Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan. My children and grandchildren have grown up here and they don’t want to go back to that war-ravaged country. I go there occasionally to mourn the deaths of near and dear ones,” says Muhammad Jabbar, 67, a former resident of Kabul, capital of Afghanistan.

This South Asian nation is home to 1.3 million registered refugees and more than double this number of unregistered ones who have fled neighbouring Afghanistan
Jabbar, who sells dry fruits in Muhajir Bazaar (known as the ‘refugees market’), in Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, one of Pakistan’s four provinces, said that he hadn’t been able to convince his family members to visit their country due to the endless violence.

The latest in that series of events was the takeover by Taliban militants in August 2021, which has further heightened Jabbar’s fears that even he may no longer be able to visit his native land. At the same time he acknowledges that Pakistan is now the family’s home and calls the local people ‘friendly’.

This South Asian nation is home to 1.3 million registered refugees and more than double this number of unregistered ones who have fled neighbouring Afghanistan. Most of them run small businesses or do petty jobs and send remittances to their family members who remain across the border.

A vegetable seller in the same market, Hayat Shah, says business is so good that he and his family never think of returning. “We are very happy as here we live in peace and earn money for our survival. In Afghanistan, people are faced with an extremely hard economic situation. My two sons and a daughter study here in a local school,” says Shah, 49.

“We arrived in Peshawar in early 1992 when our home was bombed by unknown people. My parents and two brothers died,” he adds.

 

An awareness session with Afghan women in Akora Khattak refugee camp, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, 16 June. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS.

 

Shah and his family live in Baghlan Camp in Peshawar, one of 3,500 refugee families in the camp (though UNHCR now calls camps ‘refugee villages’). There are 54 refugee camps across Pakistan — 43 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province — housing 32 per cent of refugees. More than two-thirds of refugees live in urban areas, where they are legally permitted to work, according to UNHCR.

Most Afghans interviewed by IPS in the market, said they feel that Pakistan is now home. Ninety percent of merchants in the sprawling market are Afghan businessmen, who run clothing, fish, meat and fruit and vegetable shops. “Refugees bazar is bustling with Afghan women and men buying all sorts of stuff,” says fruit seller Ghafoor Shah. “This market is no different from any market in Afghanistan, where women clad in burkas can be seen shopping,” he adds.

Sultana, 51, says they visit the bazaar frequently to do bulk shopping for the Islamic festival Eidul Fitre, marriage ceremonies and other holidays. “We can find all type of articles we need in accordance with Afghan traditions. Us women can talk to Afghan shopkeepers and tailors easily in our own languages compared to Pakistanis, with whom conversation is difficult.”

UNHCR spokesman for Pakistan Qaisar Khan Afridi told IPS that the arrival of new refugees after the Taliban took charge in Kabul has created major issues.

“Over, 250,000 Afghans have reached here in the last 18 months — that’s just the registered refugees. The UN refugee agency is in talks with the host government to seek a solution to the problem of these people who aren’t registered in Pakistan yet,” he says adding, “Pakistan isn’t accepting new refugees,” he adds.

The UNHCR’s voluntary repatriation programme for refugees to Afghanistan has come to almost a complete halt. Only 185 families have returned since January this year, with each getting US$250 as assistance. About 4.4 million refugees have been repatriated since 2002.

Muhammad Hashim, a reporter for Shamshad TV channel in Jalalabad, told IPS that the Taliban aren’t allowing journalists to work freely and suspect anyone who was employed during the former government’s tenure. “I came with my wife and two daughters to Pakistan using back routes and now we’re trying to seek asylum in the US or any European country. Going back is out of the question,” he told IPS, awaiting registration outside UNHCR’s office in Peshawar.

Hashim, 41, says he survived a murder attempt a day before his departure for Pakistan and left so quickly that his belongings remain in Afghanistan.

Women journalists are sitting at home, he adds. Fearing prosecution by Taliban, hundreds of people who worked in the police or in offices under the former Afghan government have also rushed to Pakistan, he says. “Violence and lack of jobs, education and health facilities are haunting the people.”

 

Muhammad Abbas Khan, Commissioner for Afghan Refugees Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, speaks at a function marking visits of senior UNHCR officials to Padhana refugee camp, Haripur district, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 17 June 2022. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS.

 

Schoolteacher Mushtari Begum, 39, is among the fresh refugees. “I did a masters in computer science from Kabul University and used to teach in a private girls school for eight years. Now, the women’s schools have been shut down and teachers and students are sitting in their homes,” says Begum, a mother of two. “We live with relatives in Peshawar temporarily and have run of money,” she added.

On 12 June the Pakistan government approved a policy under which transit visas will be issued to Afghan asylum seekers to enable them to travel to any country of their choice. At the same time, the federal cabinet said that Pakistan has always welcomed refugees and would continue to host them in their trying times.

Gul Rahim, who drives a taxi in Nowshera district near Peshawar, says he arrived here in 2002 and has been lucky to educate his two sons. “Pakistan has proved a blessing for me. In Afghanistan I wouldn’t have been able to raise my sons, who are now teaching at a refugee school and helping me financially.”

 

Afghan students take classes at the Padhana refugees camp, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Pakistan 15 June. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

 

Fazal Ahmed, a local officer at the Afghan commissionerate in Peshawar, which oversees all refugee camps in the province, says they hold awareness sessions for refugees from time to time, on issues like violence and gender, health and education. “In over 30 refugee camps we also arrange skill development programmes, especially to enable women to earn their livelihoods.

“Sports activities are part of our programme, which we organize in collaboration with the UNHCR,” he says. Afghan students have also been admitted in Pakistani schools, universities and medical colleges, he adds.

However, all is not well. Many refugees complain of being harassed by police, a charge vehemently denied by authorities.

“We arrived here in February 2022 because of fear of reprisals by the Taliban. We have no documents because Pakistan isn’t registering new refugees and police often arrest us and release us only when we pay bribes,” says Usman Ali, who worked as a police constable in the former government in Kabul. Ali, 24, said his elder brother, a former army soldier, was killed by the Taliban in December 2021.

“To save my life, I rushed to Pakistan’s border in a passenger bus and ended up in Peshawar,” he adds.

Local government official Jehanzeb Khan tells IPS that Afghans are treated as guests. “There are isolated cases where Afghans are mistreated by local people but we take action when complaints are filed,” he says.

On Nasir Bagh Road, where Ali sells cosmetics goods from a hand cart, Police Officer Ahmad Nawaz told IPS that they arrest only those Afghans who are involved in crimes and are friendly towards innocent ones. “The Afghans commit robberies and even murders and go back to Afghanistan. We don’t harass Afghans (living here) because they are in trouble,” Nawaz adds.

 

Notwithstanding the various declarations, international agreements, conventions, platforms for action, and the progress achieved in recent decades, women continue to lag behind men in rights, freedoms, and equality. Credit: UN Women, India

By Joseph Chamie
PORTLAND, USA, Jun 23 2022 (IPS)

Why aren’t more women angry about their subordination, discrimination, and unequal treatment in the 21st century? Of course, some of the world’s women are angry, but they are comparatively few.

Women represent half of the world’s population and clearly play vital roles in humanity’s development, wellbeing, and advancement. Yet, women continue to experience discrimination, abusive treatment, misogyny degrading slurs, and subordinate roles in virtually every major sphere of human activity. 

Despite their treatment, discrimination, and subordination, most women aren’t expressing anger. If the situation between the two sexes were reversed, men would certainly be angry and would no doubt take the necessary steps to change the inequalities. 

Article 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted nearly seventy-five years ago applies all rights and freedoms equally to women and men and prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex. 

Some 40 years ago, the international community of nations adopted the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women. And more recently, the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 5 aims to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. 

Notwithstanding those various declarations, international agreements, conventions, platforms for action, and the progress achieved in recent decades, women continue to lag behind men in rights, freedoms, and equality.

 From the very start of life in some parts of the world, baby girls are often viewed less favorably than baby boys. In many societies boy babies continue to be preferred over girl babies. In too many instances the preference for sons has resulted in sex ratios at birth that are skewed in favor of males due to pregnancy interventions by couples.

The natural sex ratio at birth for human populations is around 105 males per 100 females, though it can range from 103 to 107. At present, at least seven countries, including the world’s two largest populations, have skewed sex ratios at birth reflecting son preference pregnancy interventions (Figure 1).  

 

Source: United Nations.

 

China and India have skewed sex ratios at birth of 113 and 110 males per 100 females, respectively. High sex ratios at birth are also observed in Azerbaijan (113), Viet Nam (112), Armenia (111), Pakistan (109), and Albania (109). In contrast, for the period 1970-1975 when pregnancy interventions by couples had not yet become widespread, the sex ratios at birth for those seven countries were within the expected normal range. 

Also in some countries, the female sex ratio imbalance continues throughout women’s lives. For example, India, Pakistan, and China, which together account for nearly 40 percent of the world’s population, the sex ratios for their total populations are 108, 106, and 105, respectively. In contrast, the population sex ratios are 100 in Africa and Oceania, about 97 in Northern America and Latin America and the Caribbean, and 93 in Europe (Figure 2).

 

Source: United Nations.

 

In terms of education, while progress has been achieved in the past several decades, girls continue to lag behind boys in elementary school education in some countries, especially in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. For example, 78 girls in Chad and 84 girls in Pakistan are enrolled in primary school for every 100 boys.

Among young women between 15 to 24 years approximately one-quarter are expected not to finish primary school. In addition, about two-thirds of the illiterate people in the world are women.  

With respect to decision making, women do not have political representation or participation levels similar to men. Worldwide the estimated percentages of women in national parliaments, local governments, and managerial positions are 26, 36, and 28 percent, respectively. Even in developed countries, such as the United States, women make up 27 percent of Congress, 30 percent of statewide elected executives, and 31 percent of state legislators.

The labor force participation of women is also considerably lower than that of men. Globally in ages 25 to 54 years, for example,  62 percent of women are in the labor force compared to 93 percent of men. Also, the majority of the employed women, or 58 percent, are in the informal economy earning comparatively low wages and lacking social protection.

In general women are employed in the lowest-paid work. Worldwide women earn about 24 percent  less than men, with 700 million fewer women than men in paid employment. 

Women perform at least twice as much unpaid care as men, including childcare, housework, and elder care. Unpaid care and household responsibilities often come on top of women’s paid work. 

Increasing men’s participation in household tasks and caregiving would contribute to a more equitable sharing of those important domestic responsibilities. Also, governmental provision of childcare to families with young children would help both women and men combine their employment with family responsibilities.

A global comparative measure of women’s standing relative to men for regions and countries is the gender parity index. The index considers gender-based gaps across four fundamental dimensions: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment.

The regions with the highest gender equality are Western Europe and Northern America with parity indexes of 78 and 76, respectively. In contrast, the regions with the lowest gender equality are South Asia and the Middle East and North Africa with parity indexes of 62 and 61, respectively (Figure 3).

 

Source: World Economic Forum.

 

With respect to countries, the top five countries with the highest gender equality are Iceland, Finland, Norway, New Zealand, and Sweden, with parity indexes ranging from 82 to 89. The bottom five  countries with the lowest gender equality are Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria, with parity indexes between 44 to 57.

 

Source: World Economic Forum.

 

In addition to the four fundamental dimensions of the gender parity index noted above, other important areas reflecting women’s subordination include misogyny,  sexual harassment, domestic abuse, intimate partner violence, and conflict-related sexual violence.

Worldwide it is estimated that 27 percent of women between ages 15 to 49 years had experienced physical or sexual violence by intimate long-term partners, often having long-term negative effects on the health of women as well as their children.

In addition, civil conflicts in countries, such as Ethiopia, Myanmar, South Sudan, and Syria, have all featured alarming reports of sexual violence against women. More recently, conflict-related sexual violence by the Russian forces in Ukraine is being reported, which has contributed to renewed attention by the international community to the sexual violence women face in conflict situations. 

The sexual harassment of women is a widespread global phenomenon. Most women have experienced it, especially in public places, which are often considered the domain of men with the home being considered the place for women. The reported percentages of women having experienced some form of sexual harassment in India and Viet Nam, for example, are nearly 80 and 90 percent, respectively. 

In addition to harassment, women in places such as India face risks from cultural and traditional practices, human trafficking, forced labor and domestic servitude. Moreover, the sexual harassment of women at the workplace is responsible for driving many to resign from their jobs.

Again, if men were experiencing misandry, discrimination, abusive treatment, harassment, and the subordination that women endure, they would be angry, intolerant, and no doubt turn to government officials, legislatures, courts, businesses, rights organizations, and even the streets to demand equality. Women should give serious consideration to the actions that men would take if inequalities were reversed.

With women continuing to lag behind men in rights, freedoms, and equality, the puzzling question that remains is:  why aren’t more women angry?

 

Joseph Chamie is a consulting demographer, a former director of the United Nations Population Division and author of numerous publications on population issues, including his recent book, “Births, Deaths, Migrations and Other Important Population Matters.”

The recent eviction debacle involving the Maasai community in the Loliondo division in Tanzania’s northern Ngorongoro District has elevated indigenous people’s concerns about losing their ancestral lands under the ‘30by30’ plan in the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). Bradford Zak/Unsplash

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Jun 23 2022 (IPS)

In early June 2022, more than 30 people from the Maasai community in the Loliondo division in Tanzania’s northern Ngorongoro District were reportedly injured, and one person died following clashes with security forces over the demarcation of their ancestral lands for a new game reserve.

According to human rights organisations, the Maasai community was blocking eviction from its grazing sites at Lolionda over the demarcation of 1 500km of the Maasai ancestral land, which the government of Tanzania has leased as a hunting block to a United Arab Emirates company.

The eviction of the Maasai is a realisation of fears indigenous communities have about the loss of their ancestral lands under the ‘30by30’ plan proposed in the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). The plan calls for conserving 30 percent of the earth’s land and sea areas. Close to 100 countries have endorsed the science-backed proposal to protect 30 percent of the planet by 2030, which is target 3 of the 21 targets in the GBF.

Indigenous communities worry that the current plan does not protect their rights and control over ancestral lands and will trigger mass evictions of communities by creating protected areas meant to save biodiversity.

The fourth meeting of the Open-Ended Working Group on the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework opened in Nairobi, Kenya, this week (June 21-26), hosted by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The meeting is expected to negotiate the final new pact for adoption at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference, which includes the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP 15) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to be held in Montreal, Canada in December 2022.

Human rights in the deal for nature

Indigenous groups are calling for a human-rights approach to conservation and strengthening of community land tenure. They emphasise that the international pact to stop and reverse biodiversity loss should include indigenous communities like the Maasai.

Jennifer Corpuz, Indigenous lawyer and global policy expert. Credit: J Corpuz

“We are highlighting the situation with the Maasai in Tanzania as an example of what should not be happening anymore, and the best way to avoid this is to ensure that there is a human rights language in the post-2020 framework,” Indigenous lawyer and global policy expert Jennifer Corpuz, a Kankana-ey Igorot from the Philippines and a member of the International Indigenous Forum for Biodiversity (IIFB) told IPS in a telephone interview.

“In particular, we identify target 3 of the framework, which is area-based conservation and the proposal to expand the coverage of the areas of land and sea that are protected. It is important to have the rights of indigenous people and local communities recognised,” Corpuz noted.

Corpuz said there is growing recognition among scientists about the importance of traditional knowledge and how it can guide decision-making on climate change and biodiversity, as well as the participation of indigenous people in biodiversity monitoring, which are the focus of targets 20 and 21 of the framework.

The CBD COP15 is expected to take stock of progress towards achieving the CBD’s Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020, as well as decide on a new global biodiversity framework negotiated every ten years. The CBD is an international treaty on natural and biological resources ratified by 196 countries to protect biodiversity, use biodiversity without destroying it, and equally share any benefits from genetic diversity.

Indigenous leaders say the evidence is clear about the role of indigenous communities in biodiversity protection following recent reports produced by the Nairobi-based UNEP and other conservation organisations like the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

“Achieving the ambitious goals and targets in the post-2020 global biodiversity framework will not be possible without the lands and territories recognised, sustained, protected, and restored by [Indigenous peoples and local communities],” the report noted.

Under siege worldwide, from the rainforests of the Amazon and the Congo to the savannahs of East Africa, indigenous communities could continue to play a protective role, according to their leaders and scientists whose work supports the quest of indigenous peoples to control what happens on their territories.

Biodiversity in extinction

A landmark report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES),  has warned that around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades. The assessment report noted that at least a quarter of the global land area is traditionally owned, managed, and used by indigenous peoples.

“Nature managed by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities is under increasing pressure but is generally declining less rapidly than in other lands – although 72% of local indicators developed and used by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities show the deterioration of nature that underpins local livelihoods,” the report noted. It highlighted that the areas of the world projected to experience significant adverse effects from climate change, ecosystem functions and nature’s contributions to people are also areas in which large concentrations of Indigenous Peoples and many of the world’s poorest communities live.

Experts have warned that the success of the post-2020 GBF depends on adequate financing to achieve the targets and goals in the framework.

The finance component needs more attention, political priority and progress, Brian O’Donnell, Director, Campaign for Nature, told a media briefing alluding to the last framework that failed to reverse biodiversity loss because of a lack of financial commitment.

“This is no time for half measures. This is the time for bold ambition by governments around the world… We think a global commitment of at least one percent of GDP is needed annually to address the biodiversity crisis, that is the level of crisis finance that we need to materialise, and parties need to commit to that level by 2030,” O’Donnell said. “We feel wealthy countries need to increase the support for developing  countries in terms of investing at least 60 billion annually into biodiversity conservation in the developing world.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Florencia Guimaraes, a transgender woman who two years ago got a job for the first time in her life, in the public sector, takes part in a demonstration in defense of the rights of the LGTBI collective. Lohana Berkins, whose photo she carries on the banner, was the founder of the Association of the Struggle for the Transvestite-Transsexual Identity, who died in 2016. CREDIT: Courtesy of Florencia Guimares

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Jun 23 2022 (IPS)

“At the age of 35, with a document that says who I really am, I went back to school and finished my studies, which I had left at 14 because I could no longer bear the bullying and mistreatment,” said Florencia Guimaraes, a transgender woman whose life was changed by Argentina’s Gender Identity Law.

The new law passed by Congress in May 2012 was a pioneer in the world, since it allows people to change their gender, name and photo on their identity document, without the need for medical tests, surgeries or hormone treatments.

One of the 12,665 people who did so was Florencia, who today is 42 years old. She was born a boy, but since childhood she felt she was a girl, and for this reason she says that she faced barriers to access education and the labor market, which drove her into sex work for years in order to survive.

“There is nothing special about my story. Exclusion was a direct springboard to prostitution, which most of us started to practice at a very young age. It has to do with the lack of opportunities,” she told IPS."The fact that transgender people have no alternative to sex work is slowly changing since the passage of the law, which gave visibility to a group that was discriminated against and hidden, but it is still very recent." -- Esteban Paulón

“The law and our identity documents were tools that empowered us. It’s true that before it was not written down anywhere that we could not study, but we were seen as ‘sick’ and there were mechanisms that expelled us from the educational system,” she added.

Official figures indicate that 62 percent of the 12,665 people who changed their national identity card (DNI) in the last 10 years chose to be female and 35 percent chose to be male. They thus began the slow road to the recovery of their rights in this South American country of 47 million people.

In addition, there are almost three percent (354 people) who recently opted to mark with an “X” the box on their document corresponding to their sex, thanks to a decree signed in July 2021 by President Alberto Fernández recognizing the “non-binary” gender.

Diego Watkins, a 28-year-old trans man who has been the visible face of the Association of Transvestites, Transsexuals and Transgenders of Argentina (ATTTA), says this recognition marked a “before” and “after”.

“I was a person with no identity, no future, no life plan. If I said I had a toothache, they sent me to the psychologist. Knowing and being known who I am gave meaning to my life,” he told IPS.

As a symptom of its current strength, the group has appropriated the term transvestite, traditionally used in Argentina as an insult or in a derogatory fashion. Today, being a transvestite is a political identity and the word is used, precisely, as a banner to vindicate the right to be trans, say members of the community.

Solange Fabián is a transgender woman and member of the board of directors of the Hotel Gondolín, which houses more than 40 transvestites, many of them sex workers, in Buenos Aires. At the top of the window you can see the aftermath of a fire that occurred this month and according to the residents of Gondolin was intentional and was a hate attack. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

The slow road to change

Florencia Guimaraes, who graduated in Gender and Politics at the National University of General Sarmiento, has headed for the last two years the Access to Rights Program for Transvestites, Transsexuals and/or Transgendered Persons at the Magistrates Council of the City of Buenos Aires, the body that administers the Judiciary of the Argentine capital.

“It’s the first time in my life that I’ve gotten a job and this, of course, would not have been possible without the law,” she said.

She is also president of the Casa de Lohana y Diana, a self-managed center for the transvestite community in Laferrere, one of the most populous and poorest suburbs of Buenos Aires.

“We offer training workshops with job opportunities, since most of them, despite the law, are still excluded and survive by means of prostitution,” says Florencia.

According to a 2019 study published by the Public Defense of Buenos Aires, entitled The Butterfly Revolution, only nine percent of the trans population is inserted in the formal labor market and the vast majority have never even gotten a job interview.

LGTBI rights organizations agree that the total transgender population in the country is between 10 and 15 percent higher than the 12,665 people registered.

Women from the Casa de Lohana y Diana, a self-managed support space for transgender women that operates in Laferrere, one of the poorest localities in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. In the Casa, courses with job opportunities are offered, with the aim of enabling women to leave sex work. CREDIT: Courtesy of Florencia Guimaraes

“The fact that transgender people have no alternative to sex work is slowly changing since the passage of the law, which gave visibility to a group that was discriminated against and hidden, but it is still very recent,” activist Esteban Paulón, who heads the Institute for LGTB+ Public Policy, a civil society organisation, told IPS from the city of Rosario.

Paulón was undersecretary of Sexual Diversity Policies in the northwestern province of Santa Fe, of which Rosario is the main city. He led a vulnerability survey there in 2019, which reached almost a third of the 1,200 trans people in that province.

The study found that only 46 percent finished high school and only five percent completed tertiary or university studies.

And the results were especially revealing in terms of emotional distress related to gender identity: 75 percent said they had self-harmed with varying frequency and engaged in problematic alcohol consumption; 77 percent had consumed other substances; and 79 percent had eating disorders.

Perhaps the harshest statistic is that, according to estimates by LGTB organizations, the average lifespan is between 35 and 41 years.

Paulón said that of the 1,200 trans people living in Santa Fe, only 30 are over 50 years old.

And he explained: “The chain of exclusion has made it impossible for transvestites to take care of their health. Many go to the hospital for the first time with an advanced infection caused by AIDS, a disease that today can be managed with medication.”

Valeria Licciardi, a trans woman who became well-known through her participation in the Big Brother reality TV show and now owns a brand of panties designed especially for transvestites, believes that the law is a starting point for social change.

“We were given our place as citizens and our right to identity, to be who we want to be, was recognized,” she told IPS.

But she warned about an undesired effect of the law: “The more we advance in rights, the more hatred and discrimination against us from one sector also grows.”

She cited the example of an arson attack that was reported this month at the so-called Hotel Gondolin, a shelter for the transvestite community that operates in a squat in the Villa Crespo neighborhood of Buenos Aires.

“It was in the early hours of the morning. The police told us that, according to the security camera footage, two men started the fire from the street,” Solange Fabián, a member of the Hotel Gondolín’s board of directors, told IPS.

Diego Watkins, a transgender man, received one of the first documents with a new identity in 2012, when the Gender Identity Law came into force in Argentina. A long-time activist of the Association of Transvestites, Transsexuals and Transgenders of Argentina, he is seen in this photo taking part in an assembly. CREDIT: Courtesy of Diego Watkins

Overcoming barriers

Seeking to improve labor inclusion, a presidential decree issued in 2020 established that one percent of jobs in the national public administration must be filled by trans people, and a registry of applicants was created.

“We are making progress in implementation and there are already 300 trans people working, which we estimate to be 0.2 percent of the total number of public sector positions,” Greta Peña, undersecretary for Diversity Policies at the Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity, told IPS.

“We also have 6,007 people listed in the registry, which indicates that there is a great desire among the trans community to go out and work,” she added.

This year, the Undersecretariat launched a one-time economic assistance plan for trans people over 50 years of age, consisting of six minimum wages, since this is the group facing the greatest difficulties in entering the labor market.

“Although no regulation resolves structural violence by itself, the gender identity law has been a milestone in the democratic history of this country, which has not only had an impact on trans people but on the entire population,” Peña said.

Women move food from a distribution site on the outskirts of Herat, Afghanistan in 2021. Credit: WFP/Marco Di Lauro

By Neil Turner
KABUL, Afghanistan, Jun 23 2022 (IPS)

Early estimates in the Afghan provinces of Khost and Paktika indicate that the earthquake took lives of over a thousand people, with the death toll likely to rise. Many more have been injured, lost their homes and everything they owned.

We still do not have the full picture of humanitarian needs among people displaced by the earthquake, but the Taliban authorities have already launched their own response and called for urgent humanitarian assistance, granting humanitarian agencies full access to the affected areas and conducting search and rescue.

Our teams are on the ground conducting a rapid needs assessment in the Spera district of Khost province. The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) will support the affected communities with cash and provide emergency shelter. We will also shortly send another team to Paktika to assess the situation there.

Environmental disasters such as earthquakes and droughts are regular occurrences in Afghanistan, remaining one of the key drivers of displacement. Cascading impacts of climate change and a deepening economic crisis make it more difficult to achieve durable, long-term solutions for displaced Afghans, despite a significant decrease in fighting since August 2021.”

Facts and figures:

• The Spera District in Khost Province; Barmala, Ziruk, Nika and Gayan Districts in Paktika Province are among the areas most affected by the earthquake.
• Khost Province is home to thousands of internally displaced Afghans, returnees, and refugees from Waziristan.
• 1,800 households are now confirmed to be destroyed, but the exact levels of damage and destruction are yet unknown.
• The number of casualties is rising as search and rescue operations continue to be led by the de-facto authorities. Helicopters are used to reach people in rural, hard-to-reach areas, take urgent medical supplies and food provisions.
• Most of the population affected by the earthquake has already experienced multiple displacements and has been severely hit by the economic collapse, following the financial restrictions placed on the country after the Taliban takeover.
• Last year 1.3 million people have been internally displaced nationwide. This is an unprecedentedly high number, due to a combination of conflict and natural disasters.
• Over 24 million people – more than half of the Afghan population – need humanitarian assistance to survive. That is an increase of 30 per cent from last year.
• The REACH mid year assessment for Afghanistan indicates a worsening economic situation for Afghans. Households are taking on more debt, primarily driven by the need to purchase food amidst rising prices and shrinking incomes.
• The FAO-WFP have now listed Afghanistan in the top six countries that have populations identified or projected to experience starvation or death, or at risk of deterioration towards catastrophic conditions, who require the most urgent attention.
• NRC has been present in Afghanistan since 2003. We have 1,400 Afghan employees and work in 14 provinces across the country. We assisted over 840,000 people in 2021

Neil Turner is Country Director for the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) in Afghanistan.

Footnote:

At the press briefing on June 22, UN deputy Spokesperson Farhan Haq told reporters that Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was saddened to hear of the tragic loss of life caused by the earthquake which struck Afghanistan near the city of Khost. Hundreds of people have reportedly been killed and injured, and this tragic toll might continue to rise. The Secretary-General said that his heart goes out to the people of Afghanistan who are already reeling from the impact of years of conflict, economic hardship and hunger. He conveyed his deep condolences to the families of the victims and wishes a speedy recovery to the injured.

“The Secretary-General said that the UN in Afghanistan is fully mobilized and that our teams are already on the ground assessing the needs and providing initial support. He added that we count on the international community to help support the hundreds of families hit by this latest disaster. Now is the time for solidarity, the Secretary-General stressed. On the humanitarian side, our colleagues tell us that numbers are expected to rise as search and rescue operations continue.”

IPS UN Bureau

 

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