Feed aggregator

The sufi shrines, which are scattered around the country, feed large numbers of people on a regular basis. Credit: Daud Khan

By Ahmed Raza and Daud Khan
ROME, Nov 26 2018 (IPS)

The new government in Pakistan has now been in office for over 100 days and has started work on its reform and socio-economic agenda. There is a growing realization that being in government is far more difficult than it first appeared, and that in order to move forward there is an urgent need to build national and international partnerships.

Of the challenges facing the country, food insecurity and malnutrition are high on government’s priority as was evident from the Prime Minister’s inaugural speech. The focus on food security and nutrition is warranted. Nearly half of children under the age of five in the country are suffering from stunted growth, which implies that they will most likely not reach their full physical and mental potential. In addition, approximately 60 percent of the population is vulnerable to food insecurity.

Given the scale of the food insecurity and malnutrition problem in the country, government and donor assisted schemes will not be sufficient and there is a need to look for innovative and low cost mechanisms that would strengthen partnerships with private initiatives. One such partnership could be with the Sufi shrines in Pakistan

Past governments and donor agencies have been making strong efforts to address food insecurity and malnutrition. The United Nations’ agencies,  in particular the World Food Programme, has been working on the malnutrition problem by providing supplements to children, pregnant and lactating women, in addition to leading a wheat and oil fortification programme.

The government, on the other hand, has focused on augmenting incomes of the poorest households and providing affordable flour and bread.  The Benazir Income Support Programme provides cash support to poor families with the aim of meeting basic needs; the Sasti Roti programme provided inexpensive bread to urban dwellers; and the government continues a long standing subsidy, albeit a rather inefficient one, to flour mills to supply affordable wheat flour to the public – a programme that could be replaced by allowing imports of cheaper foreign wheat.

However, given the scale of the food insecurity and malnutrition problem in the country, government and donor assisted schemes will not be sufficient and there is a need to look for innovative and low cost mechanisms that would strengthen partnerships with private initiatives. One such partnership could be with the Sufi shrines in Pakistan.

The sufi shrines, which are scattered around the country, feed large numbers of people on a regular basis. One of the largest and most important of these shrines of that of Lal Shabaz Qalandar in the province of Sindh – not far from Karachi, the country’s main port, financial center and largest city – where hundreds of thousands of pilgrims visit every year.

At Sehwan Sharif, there are a number of charity-funded kitchens where food is prepared for free distribution.  At one of the bigger kitchens, about 1,600 kgs of flour is baked into bread every day – enough to feed 5,000 people.

Charitable activities are an integral part of Pakistani culture and take many forms. For example, ordinary families routinely pay for food, as well as school fees and medical expenses for employees, helpers and poorer relatives. Many hotels and restaurants will distribute leftover food to the poor; a number of industrial units, more commonly the larger and more organized ones, will provide a free lunch to their workers; and successful business houses will set up charitable foundations.

The amount of help provided increases during times of national emergency and crisis.  After the 2005 earthquake which killed over 80,000 people and the floods in 2010 which caused damages of around US$10 billion, a large part of the relief effort was taken on by ordinary citizens on an individual or collective basis.  They provided money, clothing, food and medicines while skilled professionals such as doctor and engineers travelled to affected areas to help.

Inter country studies confirm the importance of charity in Pakistan.  In a review done by the Charities Aid Foundation (the World Giving Index 2017) with the help of Gallup, Pakistan stands 78 out of 137 countries in the global ranking of countries by how much they give to charity. While this is a respectable ranking, a more detailed look at the statistics shows that some 41 million Pakistanis donated money for charity (5th largest number among all countries) and 61 million helped a person they did not know directly (7th largest number in the world).

There is a lot that the government can do to improve the impact of these charitable works.  In the case of the free kitchens at the Sufi shrines there a couple of very quick and simple things that would improve impact:

• Hygiene and food safety.  The nutritional benefits of the food provided are severely diminished due to contamination by bacteria and parasites at all stages of storage, preparation and serving. The cloths used to cover the food are often filthy; plates and other utensils are poorly washed; there are a large number of flies and other insects that deposit contamination; and often rats, mice and cockroaches infest the areas where food is stored.  Simple training and awareness-raising are low cost methods to address this. Local officials, or university or high school students, should be drawn upon to help.
• Food Fortification.  In Pakistan various micronutrient deficiencies are highly prevalent and cause problems such as anemia, especially among women. Fortifying wheat and other foods served at the shrines is a very low cost way to raise levels of nutrition. Additives could be provided through local public health staff or by involving local doctors and pharmacies.

As in the case of food, better government guidance and oversight would considerably improve the impact of private initiatives in many other areas.  For example, following natural disasters, providing guidelines on what is needed by impacted populations would improve effectiveness; providing psychiatrists and psychologists to charitable institutions providing homes to the mentally ill or to orphans; and helping build providing specialized teacher training to working with handicapped children.

The Government has access to top quality expertise and international best practices – it should use to leverage the work of others rather than trying to do much itself.

 

Ahmed Raza Gorsi works in international development specializing in food, agriculture and nutrition. Views expressed here are his own.

Daud Khan has more than 30 years of experience on global food security and rural development issues. Until recently, he was a staff member at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. He has degrees in economics from the LSE and Oxford – where he was a Rhodes Scholar; and a degree in Environmental Management from the Imperial College of Science and Technology.  

 

The post Sufi Shrines: Public-private Partnership to Improve Food Security and Nutrition appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The UK and European Union reached a deal on the UK's withdrawal from the Union at a weekend summit but the opponents of Brexit have not lost hope. On the contrary,  Andrew Adonis, a former Labour cabinet minister and member of the House of Lords, told EURACTIV.com that “It’s now very likely that Brexit will be stopped”.

EU-Kommission sieht keine "friedliche Alternative"

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A panel discussion on the politics of peace. Credit: SIPRI

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 26 2018 (IPS)

When the United Nations began publishing annual reports on arms expenditures, starting in 1981, not all 193 member states voluntarily participated in the exercise in transparency– primarily because most governments are secretive about their defense spending and their weapons purchases.

The original goal of the reports, according to the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA), was to facilitate reductions in military budgets, particularly in the context of the trillions of dollars in annual global military spending– reaching a staggering $1.7 trillion in 2017.

The United Nations has vociferously – but unsuccessfully – long campaigned for a significant diversion of military budgets into development aid, including a much-needed $100 billion by 2020 to curb carbon emissions and weather the impact of climate change.

According to UNODA, a total of 126 UN Member States have submitted reports to the UN Secretary-General regularly or at least once.

But only a minority of States report in any given year, while a small number of States consistently report every year. In addition, there are significant disparities in reporting by States among different regions.

Transparency in armaments, according to the UN, contributes to international security by fostering trust and confidence among countries.

And in a rare exercise in transparency, countries in sub-Saharan Africa have consistently reported on their military expenditures, according to a new report released last week by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)

Asked to single out the most transparent, and the least transparent, of the African countries, Dr Nan Tian, Researcher at SIPRI’s Arms and Military Expenditure Programme, told IPS that based on SIPRI’s analysis, countries with relatively high transparency include Burkina Faso, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Namibia, South Africa and Tanzania, among others.

He said the least transparent include Eritrea, Ethiopia, Malawi, Lesotho, Gambia, Equatorial Guinea and Djibouti.
According to UNODA, information on military matters, particularly transparency on military expenditures, helps build confidence between countries.

At the same time, it can also help governments determine whether excessive or destabilizing accumulations of arms are taking place.

The new SIPRI report says transparency in military spending in sub-Saharan Africa is higher than expected.

Between 2012 and 2017, 45 of the 47 states surveyed published at least one official budget document in a timely manner online.

‘Contrary to common belief, countries in sub-Saharan Africa show a high degree of transparency in how they spend money on their military,’ says Dr Tian.

He says citizens everywhere should know where and how public money is spent. It is encouraging that national reporting in sub-Saharan Africa has

In a joint statement Dr Tian and Pieter Wezeman, Senior Researcher in SIPRI’s Arms and Military Expenditure Programme, told IPS global participation in reporting of military expenditure to the UN, on the other hand, has decreased to a very low level.

“The latest information we have is that in 2018, only 32 countries submitted data about their military spending in 2017.”

In the period 2008–17, only five states in sub-Saharan Africa reported at least once, and no reports were submitted during the years 2015–17.

“2018 has not yet ended but, as far as we know, no African country reported this year.”

Still, SIPRI data shows that governments in 45 countries in the region made either military expenditure budgets or figures on actual military expenditure publicly available in the period 2012–16, said Dr Tian and Wezeman.

These states could have opted to simply use this information in a submission to the UN using either their own format or the simplified form.

Dr. Natalie J. Goldring, a Senior Fellow with the Security Studies Program in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, told IPS the latest SIPRI report contains good news for analysts and advocates concerned about global transparency on military expenditures.

She said SIPRI has documented the publication of military spending reports in 45 of 47 countries in sub-Saharan Africa for at least one year between 2012 and 2017.

The United Nations has a long-standing instrument that is intended to collect information on UN members’ military expenditures.

Unfortunately, participation in that instrument has been low in recent years. And the vast majority of the countries that reported on their 2017 budgets in 2018 are countries in Europe.

The other regions of the world are vastly underrepresented.

“It’s ironic that so many countries in Africa are publishing their individual reports on military spending, but are choosing not to report the same data to the United Nations,“ said Dr Goldring, who also represents the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy at the United Nations, on conventional weapons and arms trade issues.

She pointed out that UN Member States regularly describe “reporting fatigue,” with numerous – and sometimes overlapping – reporting requirements imposing burdens on agencies and departments that are chronically understaffed.

“One possible solution would be to try to reduce the number of reports and to create standard forms to gather data that would otherwise be submitted in multiple reports.”

“Although the inclusion of virtually all sub-Saharan countries in the SIPRI report is good news, knowing the monetary value of military budgets only gets you so far. Military budget numbers are often not good proxies for countries’ military power”.

For example, the horrendous destructive power of the small arms and light weapons that are being used in conflicts all over the world is completely out of proportion to their relatively modest cost, she added.

Asked how most Asian, Latin American and Middle Eastern countries compare with transparency by African countries, Dr Tian and Wezeman told IPS they do not make any comparisons in the report, nor an extensive assessment of other regions in the past few years.

“Still based on SIPRI’s continuous monitoring of military spending in the world we can sketch the situation in other regions.”

Military spending transparency in Latin America is relatively high, for all countries useful and often detailed information is available, they said.

In Asia, transparency varies a lot. In India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Malaysia, Kazakhstan and Indonesia, very useful military spending data is published by the governments.

However in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, North Korea, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, military spending is kept secret, while military spending data in China is incomplete.

Also in the Middle East transparency varies highly.

Turkey, Israel, Iran and Jordan publish quite detailed information, but public reporting on military spending in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Egypt and Iraq is low to minimal, “whereas we have not found any useful military spending data for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar.”

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@ips.org

The post African Nations Show Rare Transparency in Military Spending appeared first on Inter Press Service.

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A man in northern Armenia remembers the victims of the Spitak earthquake. Credit: Jodi Hilton

By Armen Grigoryan
Nov 26 2018 (IPS)

Thirty years ago, a powerful earthquake ripped through my home country of Armenia, leaving 25,000 dead, 500,000 homeless and annihilating an estimated 40 percent of the national economy.

The northern city of Spitak and many other villages around it were wiped out completely.

I was 20 and felt helpless, angry and at the same time eager to act. The police and army were clearly overwhelmed. Ordinary people tried to remove the rubble, while soldiers stood outside the central bank to prevent people from looting it.

Rescue teams and humanitarian cargo started to pour into Armenia three days after the earthquake. Cars blocked the incoming aid on some of the main arteries. There was no reception center at the airport and no available transport from Yerevan to the affected areas. The government came under heavy criticism for its lack of coordination of the aid response.

Two years earlier, Soviet authorities had been accused of covering up Chernobyl. This time around, they decided to publicly announce the disaster. The outspoken Armenian diaspora in the West also put pressure.

As a result, this was the first disaster within the Soviet Union where foreign aid was allowed to intervene. The entire world descended on the quake zone: Russians, Italians, French, Germans, Czechs and Georgians, all with their cranes and tractors, food and medical supplies.

I took the road with several university friends, most of us fresh out of military service. We didn’t take any bags with us.

We had to walk the last twenty kilometers to finally reach Spitak. What I saw there was unimaginable. An army friend of mine died in the rubble just within five days of returning, like us, from military duty. Fifty-three children died in that same building. “We cried and worked, hoping to find someone alive”, his family said.

After helping out for three days, I left as the French arrived. We had become a burden, needing food, water, shelter and clothes as temperatures plunged to minus 20 degrees at night. And though we thought of ourselves as strong young folks, physical and mental strength turned out to be very different things.

The aftermath

The earthquake in Spitak triggered the first wave of Armenian emigration in modern history. In total, 500,000 left, having lost their jobs, homes and in many cases friends and relatives.

The event brought seismology and earthquake preparedness in Armenia to new heights. The population also became intensely aware of its surroundings. For instance, the nearby town of Kirovakan was known for its chemical factory. While there were officially no major leaks, people felt insecure as the plant broke down and lay in disrepair.

Quickly, the cemeteries around Spitak outgrew nearby villages. There were villages built by the Italians, a hospital staffed by Norwegians, a residential block erected with money from Uzbekistan, schools and hospitals from Russia and Ukraine and even a street rebuilt by Georgia.

To make matters even worse, a conflict with neighboring Azerbaijan erupted that year. That and the collapse of the Soviet Union slowed down recovery efforts as Western teams departed. In the midst of war, Armenia prioritized security over reconstruction.

Preparedness and recovery

One of the by-products of the earthquake was the creation of a United Nations mechanism that immediately deploys national search and rescue teams to disaster sites. That system has served hundreds of disasters and saved thousands of people.

Having experienced a devastating earthquake at first hand and noticed how long-lasting its consequences were, I became a disaster expert at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), focusing on preparedness and long-term economic recovery.

Nowadays, preparing for natural disasters is not just a science and a practice. It is part of every international development framework: Because economic investments and living standards can be razed to the ground within a few minutes, as was the case in Armenia, then how do we limit the possible impact of such a disaster?

Governments, which are primarily responsible for protecting people, need to work on risk maps, early warning mechanisms, building standards, insurance mechanisms and many other important measures.

Today, Armenia has among the best seismic building codes and has all the laws in place to enable a quick emergency response. It even sends experts abroad.

These efforts cannot bring back the people we loved. But should the worse come to worst, they could protect many more down the line.

The post Why I Became a Disaster Expert appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Armen Grigoryan is team leader for Disaster Risk Reduction at UNDP’s regional bureau for Eastern Europe and Central Asia

The post Why I Became a Disaster Expert appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Friedrich Merz' Aussagen zum Asylrecht stoßen auf viel Widerspruch. Zu Unrecht, regt er doch eine wichtige Debatte an. Ein Kommentar.

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Trafic d'êtres humains : l'Albanie, une plaque tournante
Lettre ouverte à Silvio Berlusconi, au nom des « jolies filles albanaises »
Traite des êtres humains : en Albanie, les enfants sont exploités
Traite des êtres humains : les pays des Balkans « peuvent mieux faire »
Le trafic d'êtres humains entre les Balkans et la France
Trafic des êtres humains : une menace pour l'Europe entière

/ Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Albanie, Défense, police et justice

Trafic d'êtres humains : l'Albanie, une plaque tournante
Lettre ouverte à Silvio Berlusconi, au nom des « jolies filles albanaises »
Traite des êtres humains : en Albanie, les enfants sont exploités
Traite des êtres humains : les pays des Balkans « peuvent mieux faire »
Le trafic d'êtres humains entre les Balkans et la France
Trafic des êtres humains : une menace pour l'Europe entière

/ Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Albanie, Défense, police et justice

Quelle : © Europäische Union, 2018 - EP

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