A Warsaw protest in solidarity with Ameer Alkhawlany. The banner reads 'Free Ameer'. Credit: TV Kryzys

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Apr 8 2017 (IPS)

Ameer Alkhawlany moved to Poland in September 2014 to pursue a Master’s in biology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland’s second largest city. Two years later, the Polish state awarded him a scholarship to complete a PhD in the same faculty.

Pawel Koteja, his professor at the institute, told Polish media that Alkhawlany was “very committed to his scientific research, to which he dedicated a lot of time and effort, and was determined to pursue an academic career.”Law and Justice, the party governing Poland since 2015, has a nationalistic and ultra-Catholic discourse, presenting itself as a defender of embattled Poles against its various 'enemies': the European Union, globalisation, Islam.

According to activists in contact with Alkhawlany, the student had an uneventful life in Poland until last summer, when he was allegedly approached by Poland’s secret services (ABW) with the offer to inform on Muslims residing in Poland. He would have to report back from mosques and actively seek out contact with specific people.

Alkhawlany refused. He said he was an atheist so he didn’t attend religious services and that some of the people he was asked to contact were from non-Arabic speaking countries so he might not have a common language with them.
In July, when the man was allegedly approached by ABW, Krakow was hosting the annual Catholic ‘World Youth Day’, attended by the Pope and an estimated three million people. Polish authorities were tightening security.

On October 3, the student was suddenly arrested in the center of Krakow by officials from the Polish Border Guard. He was given no reason for his apprehension. Hours later, during which time he was not allowed to contact a lawyer, a court sentenced Alkhawlany to 90 days of detention followed by deportation to Iraq.

In a letter written from detention by Alkhawlany and published in March by website Political Critique, the man said the court justified its ruling by the fact that the Polish secret services considered him a security threat. Despite the man’s questions, the judge did not offer any explanations as to why he was considered a threat.

“I have been living and studying in Poland since 2014. I have never broken the law ever,” Alkhawlany said to the court, according to his published letter. “I never crossed at the wrong light, never been in the bus without ticket! I did my master’s degree and I started my doctoral studies without any problem. I don’t want to leave Poland!”

At the time of his deportation, Alkhawlany had been detained for six months without break in the detention center for foreigners in Przemysl, in the southeast of Poland.

Polish authorities never explained publicly the reasons why the man was considered a security threat. However, anonymous sources quoted by Polish media claimed the secret services had information that Alkhawlany had been in touch with ‘radicals’ from abroad monitored by other countries’ services.

“The provisions of Polish national law do not provide solutions for a foreigner to defend themselves when the decision of return has been issued on the basis of undisclosed circumstances,” commented Jacek Bialas, a lawyer with the Helsinski Foundation for Human Rights. “This raises doubts as to compatibility with the Polish Constitution, the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights.”

“It’s as if a controller gave a citation to someone waiting at the bus stop, being sure the person would go on the bus without a ticket,” Alkhawlany commented in a February interview with Wirtualna Polska.

At the time of his arrest, Alkhawlany had just renewed his residence permit in Poland, which was valid until January this year. During his detention, he applied for asylum in Poland arguing that it was unsafe for him to return to Iraq, where the Iraqi military is battling ISIS in the north. He was denied asylum (the final decision following an appeal came April 4) because of confidential information provided by the security services which indicated he was a security threat.

Yet on April 5, after reviewing the same evidence provided by the secret services, the regional court in Przemysl ruled that Alkhawlany should be released from detention as he had been residing legally in Poland and there had been no solid reason for his arrest. The ministry in charge of the secret services retorted that the court ruling ‘did not undermine’ the evidence presented by ABW.

To the surprise of his lawyer and those engaged in a campaign to get him released, Alkhawlany was not released from detention but instead deported on the evening of April 5. Neither his lawyer nor his brother also residing in Poland were informed about the deportation decision.

Alkhawlany himself called from Iraq upon arrival to inform he had been transported to Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Speaking to Polish media April 6, Marek Ślik, the student’s lawyer, said “The deportation is illegal because I have not yet received any notification about his deportation. The procedure of appeal (after asylum was denied) was never completed as I never got a final notification.”

The Polish Border Guard did not respond to a request to justify the legality of the deportation.

An image from the official website of the Polish Border Guard. It says: ‘We defend Polish men and women. We do not agree to the influx of Muslim migrants.’ Credit: Police Border Guard

“The way the Polish secret services dealt with this case was absurd: they just picked a random person because he came from a specific country and expected him to inform on the moves of others,” said Marta Tycner from leftist party Razem, who was engaged in the campaign to free Alkhawlany.

“They think that any person coming from a Muslim country is a suspect of anti-state activity,” Tycner told IPS. “They were incompetent and now they are trying to cover it up by deporting him fast.”

Law and Justice, the party governing Poland since 2015, has a nationalistic and ultra-Catholic discourse, presenting itself as a defender of embattled Poles against its various ‘enemies’: the European Union, globalisation, Islam. It has overblown fears of a potential terrorist attack by Islamists – although no incidents of this kind or actual threats of it were recorded in Poland – to strengthen its control over society.

Last year, Law and Justice adopted a new anti-terror law which gives authorities the power to fingerprint foreigners or listen to their phones and check their emails without any court order. It also imposed restrictions on the right to protest and online activity.

The right-wing and Catholic media, which are essential in harnessing popular support for the party, routinely associate Muslims with violence. The leader of Law and Justice, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, infamously declared last year that migrants carry ‘very dangerous diseases long absent from Europe’. Alongside Hungary, Poland has been staunchly opposed to hosting refugees under the European Union’s system of relocation quotas.

Poland is one of the world’s most homogeneous countries, with over 97 percent of the population declaring themselves ethnically Pole. Despite very low rates of migration to the country, the most recent ‘European Islamophobia Report‘ showed that over 70 percent of Poles want to see migration of Muslims to Europe restricted, the highest rate among all European countries surveyed. Negative attitudes to refugees increased significantly in the last years.

The post Poland, New Player in Islamophobia Game appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Former President Lech Kaczyński at an energy conference three years before his death. Credit: Archive of the Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland/GNU license

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Dec 23 2016 (IPS)

Despite the pain to victims’ families, critics say the Polish government is turning the Smolensk plane crash into a macabre reality show for political gain.

The remains of former president Lech Kaczyński and his wife Maria were exhumed Nov. 14 from Wawel Castle in Krakow as part of a state-sponsored investigation into whether the plane crash that killed them in Apr. 10, 2010 was an accident or foul play."This catastrophe ...initially united us in mourning [and] later became a tool in the political fight between Law and Justice and Civic Platform.” --Barbara Nowacka, whose mother Izabela Jaruga-Nowacka, a former deputy prime minister, died at Smolensk.

A state-owned Tupolev plane went down while taking Lech Kaczyński and top Polish military and political figures to Russia to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre in which more than 20,000 Polish soldiers and intellectuals were killed by the Stalinist secret police. Ninety-six people died in the crash.

An investigation conducted under the previous government — the center-right Civic Platform — concluded that the crash was an accident caused by adverse weather conditions and pilot error.

But Jaroslaw Kaczyński, leader of ruling party Law and Justice and twin brother of Lech, has an alternative reading. “The one interpretation that clarifies everything is an assassination,” Kaczynski said, as quoted by the web portal natemat.pl. “If that’s not 100 percent sure, then it’s 99 percent.”

Victimisation

Since the Kaczynski twins founded the party in 2001, Law and Justice has represented a counterbalance to the pro-European, liberal direction of the Polish post-communist transition. Law and Justice are Euro-skeptic and nationalist, Catholic and socially conservative, and advocate for a statist economy.  They speak to those left behind by the transition.

To build up political support, Law and Justice relied on a vision of a Poland under persecution by foreign enemies (especially Russia and Germany) and of Poles as victims of political elites at home, an alleged alliance of communists and liberals.

The Smolensk plane crash happened right at the start of the campaign for the 2010 presidential elections in which incumbent Lech Kaczynski faced Civic Platform’s Bronislaw Komorowski. During the previous three years, Lech’s presidency had been marked by conflicts with Donald Tusk, the head of Civic Platform and prime minister since 2007.

The shock of the tragedy was absorbed into the Law and Justice grand narrative, answering the needs of the campaign: Lech Kaczyński, claimed Law and Justice, was a national hero who fell victim to a lurid alliance between his foreign and domestic enemies, as had happened to Poles many times before.

While Jaroslaw Kaczyński did not win the 2010 presidential election (he ran instead of his brother) nor did his party win the parliamentary election in 2011, Law and Justice spent the next four years in opposition building up a cult of Smolensk which contributed to it winning last year’s election.

The party organised monthly commemoration events and its message was echoed by the Polish Catholic Church and the influential media empire centered around Radio Maryja.

Civic Platform’s strategy of waiting it out and letting Law and Justice politicians make fools of themselves by endorsing a conspiracy theory was a mistake.

According to an October poll by Ipsos, 27 percent of Poles believe Smolensk was not an accident, at least twice as many as five years ago.

Ireneusz Krzeminski, from Warsaw University’s Institute of Sociology, who has looked into responses to Smolensk in Polish society, said the Law and Justice version of the air crash resonated with Poles who “felt unhappy in their lives for different reasons.”

The feeling of perceived injustice was fertile ground for Law and Justice’s rhetoric about a Poland martyred by its enemies, said Krzeminski. The result was hatred towards the alleged enemies, especially Russia and Civic Platform.

Escalation

Since it got to power in 2015, Law and Justice intensified the instrumentalisation of Polish history. Sociologist Krzeminski notes that commemorations of historical events where Poles have suffered (like the 1944 anti-Nazi Warsaw uprising) are a bigger deal now. School curricula have changed to include more on the traumatic episodes. Krzeminski argues that Law and Justice keeps Poles “in a state of permanent mourning” – it brings support for the party.

This year, Poland announced that it would not back Donald Tusk for a second mandate as President of the European Council. Law and Justice members have mentioned the possibility of putting Tusk on trial for treason over Smolensk, once his Brussels term finishes. With Law and Justice moving to control the justice system in Poland, Tusk’s prospects if prosecuted could be bleak.

The focus on Smolensk is a useful distraction from socio-economic woes. Law and Justice remains popular among its voters because of measures such as subsidies for families with children or lowering the retirement age, but the economy has been slowing down this year and foreign investments are dropping.

Crossing the line?

In a country with a strong cult of the dead, unearthing bodies and examining them breaks the biggest taboo.

“The (planned) exhumation of my wife represents for me a big trauma and pain, it destroys the peace of my family, it affects our privacy, and it encroaches on our personal wellbeing, which is based on the cult of the memory of our dead,” said Pawel Deresz, whose wife Jolanta Szymanek-Deresz, a lawyer and politician, died in the crash.

Before answering a single question, Deresz pulled out a large photo of his wife and a copy of the Polish Constitution, before reading out Article 47 about “the right to the legal protection of private and family life.”

Deresz had written to Poland’s prosecutor general Zbigniew Ziobro asking him not to exhume his wife. He said he was prepared to sue the Polish government if needed.

He’s not the only relative angered by the decision.

Last month, Izabella Sariusz-Skąpska, the daughter of Smolensk victim Andrzej Sariusz-Skąpski, published an open letter to President Andrzej Duda, asking for the exhumations to be halted.

“We stand alone and helpless against this ruthless and cruel act: our beloved are to be dragged out of their graves despite the sacred taboo of not disturbing the dead,” Sariusz-Skąpska wrote in the letter, which was signed by 238 family members of 17 victims.

Other families, however, want their loved ones dug up and given a proper burial. In six of the nine exhumations carried out under the previous government, there was evidence that Russian authorities had mixed up body parts or coffins in the chaos after the crash.
 Others share the government’s suspicions that the crash was no accident.

“This catastrophe …initially united us in mourning [and] later became a tool in the political fight between Law and Justice and Civic Platform,” said Barbara Nowacka, whose mother Izabela Jaruga-Nowacka, a former deputy prime minister, died at Smolensk.

“What is most difficult for me is that now Smolensk has become a kind of religion for some core Law and Justice supporters and they would do anything to prove it was more than a plane crash,” said Nowacka. “And on the other hand the majority of society is either getting tired or trying to get rid of the topic by turning it into a joke, which is painful.”

The Ipsos poll in October showed that only 10 percent of Poles are in favour of the exhumations.

The government is treading carefully and has sought the official backing of the powerful Polish Catholic Church. The unearthing of Lech and Maria Kaczyński was accompanied by a religious mass.

However, the Catholic Church warned that Smolensk should not be exploited for political purposes. Some individual priests have publicly objected.

The government wants to unearth all the bodies by the end of next year, but the investigation could last years.

Unearthing the remains of those whose families think the dead should rest in peace will be hard to justify to the public, especially if nothing suspicious is found upon inspecting the first coffins.

The post Poland’s Morbid Politics appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Anti-coal human chain crossing the Niesse river which separates Poland and Germany, August 2014. Credit: Courtesy of Greenpeace Poland

By Claudia Ciobanu and Silvia Giannelli
GRABICE, Poland / PROSCHIM, Germany, Aug 26 2014 (IPS)

“People have gathered here to tell their politicians that the way in which we used energy and our environment in the 19^th and 20^th centuries is now over,” says Radek Gawlik, one of Poland’s most experienced environmental activists. “The time for burning coal has passed and the sooner we understand this, the better it is for us.”

Gawlik was one of over 7,500 people who joined an 8-kilometre-long human chain at the weekend linking the German village of Kerkwitz with the Polish village of Grabice to oppose plans to expand lignite mining on both sides of the German-Polish border.“It's high time to plan the coal phase-out now and show the people in the region a future beyond the inevitable end of dirty fossil fuels" – Anike Peters, Greenpeace Germany

They were inhabitants of local villages whose houses would be destroyed if the plans go ahead, activists from Poland and Germany, and even visitors from other countries who wanted to lend a hand to the anti-coal cause. The human chain – which was organised by Greenpeace and other European environmental NGOs – passed through the Niesse river which marks the border between the two countries, and included people of all ages, from young children to local elders who brought along folding chairs.

At least 6,000 people in the German part of Lusatia region and another 3,000 across the border in south-western Poland stand to be relocated if the expansion plans in the two areas go ahead.

In Germany, it is Swedish state energy giant Vattenfall that plans to expand two of its lignite mines in the German states of Brandenburg and Saxony; state authorities have already approved the company’s plans. In Poland, state energy company PGE (Polska Grupa Energetyczna) plans an open-cast lignite mine from which it would extract almost two million tonnes of coal per year (more than from the German side).

On the German side

Germany has for a long time been perceived as an example in terms of its energy policy, not in the least because of its famous Energiewende, a strategy to decarbonise Germany’s economy by reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80-95 percent, reaching a 60 percent renewables share in the energy sector, and increasing energy efficiency by 50 percent, all by 2050.

Today, one-quarter of energy in Germany is produced from renewable sources, and the same for electricity, as a result of policies included in the Energiewende strategy.

Expanding coal mining as would happen in the Lusatia region contradicts Germany’s targets, argue environmentalists. “The expansion of lignite mines and the goals of the Energiewende to decarbonise Germany until 2050 do not fit together at all,” says Gregor Kessler from Greenpeace Germany.  “There have to be severe cuts in coal-burning if Germany wants to reach its own 2020 climate goal (reducing CO₂ emissions by 40 percent).

“Yet the government so far is afraid of taking the logical next step and announce a coal-phase-out plan,” Kessler continues. “So far both the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats keep repeating that coal will still be needed for years and years to provide energy security. However even today a lot of the coal-generated energy is exported abroad as more and more energy comes from renewables.”

Proschim, a town of around 360 people, is one of the villages threatened by Vattenfall’s planned expansion. Already surrounded by lignite mines, this little community has one feature that makes its possible destruction even more controversial: nowadays it produces more electricity from renewable energy than its citizens use for themselves.

Wind farm in Proschim, Lusatia, Germany. Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

But Vattenfall’s project to extend two existing open cast mines, namely Nochten and Welzow-Süd, would destroy Proschim along with its solar and wind farm and its biogas plant.

“It is such a paradox, we have so much renewable energy from wind, solar and biogas in Proschim. And this is the town they want to bulldoze,” says former Proschim mayor Erhard Lehmann.

The village is nevertheless split on the issue, with half of its citizens welcoming Vattenfall’s expansion project, including Volker Glaubitz, the deputy mayor of Proschim, and his wife Ingrid, who came from Haidemühl, a neighbouring village that was evacuated to make room for the Welzow-Süd open-cast mine. The place is now known as the “ghost-town”, due to the abandoned buildings that Vattenfall was not allowed to tear down because of property-related controversies.

Abandoned buildings in Haidemühl, Lusatia, Germany. Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

Lignite undoubtedly played a major role in Lusatia’s economic development, creating jobs not only in the many open-cast mines spread over the territory, but also through the satellite activities connected to coal processing. Lehmann himself was employed as a mechanic and electrician for the excavators used in the mines. Ingrid Glaubitz was a machinist at ‘Schwarze Pumpe’, one of Vattenfall’s power plants and her son also works for Vattenfall.

“There must be renewable energy in the future, but right now it is too expensive and we need lignite as a bridge technology,” Volker Glaubitz told IPS. “The mines bring many jobs to the region: without the coal, Lusatia would be dead already.”

Johannes Kapelle, a 78-year-old farmer of Sorb origin and at the forefront of the battle against Proschim’s destruction, sees coal in a completely different way: “Coal is already vanishing, it something that belongs to the past.”

His house, right in front of the Glaubitz’s, is covered in solar panels, and from his garden he proudly shows the wind park that provides Proschim with an estimated annual production of 5 GWh.

Johannes Kapelle in his courtyard, with roof covered in solar panels, Proschim, Lusatia, Germany. Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

According to Kapelle, lignite extraction has been threatening the Sorb culture, which is spiritually connected to the land, since the beginning of industrialisation over a hundred years ago. “When a Sorb has a house without a garden, and without farmland, without forests and lakes, then he’s not a true Sorb anymore, because he has no holy land.”

On the Polish side

Poland is Europe’s black sheep when it comes to climate, with 90 percent of electricity in Poland currently produced from coal and the country’s national energy strategy envisaging a core role for coal for decades to come. The Polish government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk has over the past years tried to block progress by the European Union in adopting more ambitious climate targets.

For Polish authorities, the over 100,000 jobs in coal mining in the country today are an argument to keep the sector going. Additionally, says the government, coal constitutes a local reserve that can ensure the country’s “energy security” (a hot topic in Europe, especially since the Ukrainian-Russian crisis).

Coal opponents, on the other hand, note that the development of renewables and energy efficiency creates jobs too (according to the United Nations, investments in improved energy efficiency in buildings alone could create up to 3.5 million jobs in the European Union and the United States). Environmentalists further argue that coal is not as cheap as its proponents claim: according to the Warsaw Institute for Economic Studies, in some years, subsidies for coal mining in Poland have reached as much as 2 percent of GDP.

“In Poland, the coal lobby is very strong,” says Gawlik. “I also have the impression that our politicians have not yet fully understood that renewables and energy efficiency have already become real alternatives and do not come with some mythically high costs.”

The future of coal in Europe

In Europe as a whole, coal has seen a minor resurgence over the past 2-3 years, despite the European Union having the stated goal to decarbonise by 2050 (out of all fossil fuels, lignite produces the most CO₂ per unit of energy produced).

Access to cheap coal exports from the United States, relatively high gas prices, plus a low carbon price on the EU’s internal emissions trading market (caused in turn by a decrease in industrial output following the economic crisis) led to a temporary hike in coal usage. Yet experts are certain that coal in Europe is dying a slow death.

“In the longer term the prospects for coal-fired power generation are negative,” according to a July report by the Economist Intelligence Unit. “Air-quality regulations (in the European Union) will force plant closures, and renewable energy will continue to surge, while in general European energy demand will be weak. The recent mini-boom in coal-burning will prove an aberration.”

“Additional coal mines would not only be catastrophic for people, nature and climate – it would also be highly tragic, as beyond 2030, when existing coal mines will be exhausted, renewable energies will have made coal redundant,” says Anike Peters, climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace Germany.

“It’s high time to plan the coal phase-out now and show the people in the region a future beyond the inevitable end of dirty fossil fuels.”

* Anja Krieger and Elena Roda contributed to this report in Germany

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The post The Time for Burning Coal Has Passed appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Organic farmer Slawek Dobrodziej with volunteers from Warsaw helping on his farm. Credit: Courtesy of Malgosia Dobrodziej

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Aug 21 2014 (IPS)

Polish farmer Slawek Dobrodziej has probably the world’s strangest triathlon training regime: he swims across the lake at the back of his house, then runs across his some 11 hectares of land to check the state of the crops, and at the end of the day bikes close to 40 kilometres to and back from a nearby town for some shopping.

That Dobrodziej would still want to enter the triathlon, despite working daily in the fields from dawn until well into the night, speaks volumes about his supra-human levels of energy.

But it takes this kind of stamina to succeed as an ecological farmer in Poland.Community-supported agriculture “could help promote farm biodiversity because consumers buy different types of vegetables and products in this scheme, and it could also help to spread the certified organic model, which is only marginally developed in Poland today” – organic farmer Sonia Priwieziencew

Today, around 3.5 percent of Poland’s agricultural land is taken up by organic farms. Their number has been growing steadily over recent years, yet farmers complain of obstacles. Of the country’s some 1.8 million farmers, just 26,000 have organic certification (though some of these farms are just meadows and do not necessarily produce food), and only 300 of these are vegetable producers.

Under the most recent national policies (adopted in parallel to the new European Union’s 2014-2020 budget, which will finance Polish agriculture), Polish authorities have been cutting subsidies for medium and large organic farms, and they have practically eliminated public support for organic orchards.

Smaller organic producers have to struggle with complicated bureaucratic procedures in place for obtaining national or European funding.

Slawek Dobrodziej and his wife Malgosia clearly have the determination to penetrate these procedures. Over the past eight years, the couple have managed to build up a successful organic farm in the village of Zeliszewo, near the western city of Szczecin. They sell some 100 types of fruit and vegetables to consumers in several Polish major cities, including the capital Warsaw.

According to Malgosia, the book-keeper of the family farm, the first years were particularly rough. Selling large quantities of one product to food processing companies did not pay off: organic farming, which uses no pesticides, is labour-intensive, and the prices paid by the companies were not enough to cover costs.

The family managed to access some national and European funds, but the amounts were barely sufficient to buy some basic machinery. European money must often be co-financed by the recipient, meaning that obtaining more funds would be impossible without becoming heavily indebted to banks.

The Dobrodziej’s fortunes improved once they diversified their vegetable production and found opportunities to sell their produce directly to consumers in big cities. Selling to a bio bazaar in Warsaw was a turning point.

Additionally, for the first time this year, they started selling to consumers via two community-supported agriculture (CSA) schemes in the cities of Szczecin and Poznan, through which the roughly 30 consumers in each scheme pay them in advance for vegetables they will receive weekly throughout the summer and autumn months.

The CSA model is based on the idea that consumers share risks with the farmers: consumers enter the scheme agreeing to take whatever vegetables the farmer is able to produce given weather conditions. They are also able to volunteer on the farm, which provides an understanding of seasonality and farm work that few city inhabitants have. Malgosia says that CSA is an excellent way of offering financial stability to a small farm.

The first CSA was created in Poland in 2012 in Warsaw, and this year six such schemes are operational in the country, including the two served by the Dobrodziej. More schemes are expected to be launched next year, given the warm welcome the model has received from city consumers and the farming community.

At the moment, the Dobrodziej’s week is a mad rush among various cities in Poland, with night-long drives to deliver fresh products, followed by days in the field. Yet Malgosia hopes that next year, once the bank credits are paid, they will be able to rely only on the two CSA schemes and sales to bio bazaars in Warsaw and Katowice. Meanwhile Slawek dreams of setting up an organisation to promote the model nationally.

“We do absolutely too much work right now, and we spend too much time packaging half kilos of vegetables to sell to small organic shops,” explains Malgosia. “The CSA model seems very promising, because we get rid of the packaging ordeal and we also get money in hand at the start of the season from which we can make investments in the machinery we need.”

“I think many Polish farms could go this way, because the model is really economically viable for farmers,” says Sonia Priwieziencew, who together with her partner Tomasz Wloszczowski, runs a 6 hectare organic farm in the village of Swierze Panki, 120 km northeast of Warsaw, which has been serving the first CSA in Poland for three years.

Priwieziencew and Wloszczowski had been active for years in NGOs promoting organic farming in Poland and they wanted to put theory into practice.

“CSA could help promote farm biodiversity because consumers buy different types of vegetables and products in this scheme, and it could also help to spread the certified organic model, which is only marginally developed in Poland today,” says Priwieziencew.

After years of experience with advocacy work and promotion of the organic model among farmers, Priwieziencew is quite critical of the authorities’ approach to ecological farming. According to her, despite the fact that the vast majority of farmers in Poland today have small plots of land, the policies issued both by the Polish government and the European Union are more favourable to large-scale industrial farming.

Despite the new Common Agricultural Policy adopted this year in Brussels, which is supposed to provide guidance to farming in the European Union for the coming years, paying much lip service to organic farming and small-scale agriculture as means to ensure food security, limit climate change and preserve biodiversity, national policies and financing do not necessarily follow this direction, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe.

Yet, over recent years, citizens in these regions have become increasingly aware of the faults of industrial food production and numerous initiatives intended to safeguard small farming and promote ecological agriculture have been created across both regions.

This month, Warsaw saw the opening of the first cooperative shop bringing vegetables and other foods directly from producers, most of them local, and selling them at a discount to members of the cooperative who volunteer work.

Cooperatives and vegetable box schemes exist in most big Polish cities and are even developing at the level of neighbourhoods. A newly discovered passion for urban gardening in the country has led museums in Warsaw and other cities to open up their green areas to local inhabitants who want to grow vegetables.

Other countries in the region are not lagging behind. At least 15 CSA initiatives exist in the Czech Republic and, in addition, vegetable box schemes and urban gardens are continually appearing. In Romania, CSA groups exist now in at least six different cities, with some of the farms explicitly employing people from marginalised social categories.

”Every such new initiative gives small-scale ecological farmers a new chance to sell more and develop in Poland,” says Warsaw-based food activist Piotr Trzaskowski, who set up the first CSA in Poland. ”These farmers must survive because they are real caretakers of the land and the environment, unlike large-scale conventional producers who commodify the land, buying it, using it up and ignoring the impact on biodiversity, people and the environment.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The post Organic Farming Taking Off in Poland … Slowly appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Polish conservatives protesting against a reading of Golgota Picnic in Warsaw. Credit: Maciej Konieczny/Courtesy of Krytyka Polityczna

By Claudia Ciobanu
WAESAW, Jul 8 2014 (IPS)

A mix of conservative Catholicism and nationalism has become the predominant view in Polish public debate, with some worrying effects.

These were the values around which the opposition to communism led by trade union Solidarity built itself up in the 1980s but, after the fall of communism, opinion makers in the media and politicians continued to depict them as part and parcel of being Polish.

Observers note that the Polish Catholic Church has also grown increasingly conservative since 1989, in apparent contrast to an opening up of the Church worldwide.Conservative Catholicism and nationalism were the values around which the opposition to communism led by trade union Solidarity built itself up in the 1980s but, after the fall of communism, opinion makers in the media and politicians continued to depict them as part and parcel of being Polish.

Last month, the director of a theatre festival in the city of Poznan decided to cancel showings of a play fearing he could not ensure the safety of viewers in the face of threats by conservative and far-right groups. The play – “Golgota Picnic” by Argentinian director Rodrigo Garcia – describes the life of Jesus using striking depictions of contemporary society, including some with a sexual meaning.

Among those asking for play to be cancelled were representatives of Poland’s main opposition party, Law and Justice, the main trade union Solidarity, and the far-right Ruch Narodowy (National Movement), all of which stand for traditional Catholic values. The Church also voiced its opposition to the play.

In itself, protesting against the play was unremarkable (it has also been met with opposition from Catholics in other countries, for example in France), but the Polish response was interesting: even if the festival was largely financed from public sources, the show was cancelled and there was hardly any resistance from public authorities to the decision. The public, however, made itself heard and readings of the play were organised in major Polish cities, with hundreds attending.

Meanwhile, the dynamics surrounding “Golgota Picnic” are being replicated over other issues in Polish society, among which the most striking is women’s reproductive rights. Poland is one of only three countries in the European Union where abortion is prohibited, unless the pregnancy is a result of rape or incest, there is a serious threat to the mother’s health or foetal malformation has been detected.

Abortion had been legal in communist Poland but was outlawed in 1993 after pressure from the Catholic Church. Ever since, attempts to make abortion legal have failed. In 2011, the Polish parliament came close to further tightening the law on abortion by prohibiting it no matter the circumstances.

At the time, it was not only the political forces explicitly standing for Catholic values that endorsed a total ban, but also many members of the governing centre-right Civic Platform, which depicts itself as Poland’s main liberal political force.

De facto, even the current restrictive law is not being implemented. In a series of high profile cases over the years, Catholic doctors in public hospitals have refused to perform abortions even if girls were pregnant as a result of rape, had serious health conditions or malformation had been detected in foetuses.

In May, in an escalation of the situation, over 3,000 Polish doctors, nurses and medical students signed a “Declaration of Faith” in which they rejected abortion, birth control, in vitro fertilisation and euthanasia as contrary to the Catholic faith. Signatories included employees of public clinics and hospitals. One of them was the director of a Warsaw maternity hospital who said he would not allow such procedures to take place in his institution.

The “Declaration of Faith”, which has been endorsed by the Polish Catholic Church, is contrary to Polish law and Prime Minister Donald Tusk has spoken out against it.

State authorities have been carrying out check-ups at those institutions in which signatories of the Declaration work to establish whether the law is being respected, and one fine has been imposed on the Warsaw maternity hospital whose director prohibits legal abortions. Yet more determined measures are still pending.

“Lack of massive resistance [to the Declaration] is not a sign of approval on the part of the general public,” comments Agnieszka Graff, writer and feminist activist. “It is rather a question of resignation: for 20 years we have seen politicians court the Church while ignoring public opinion on matters that have to do with reproductive rights. The pattern of submission has emboldened the radical anti-choice groups.”

Political power in Poland is firmly in the hands of conservatives. Law and Justice, the party with the best chance of winning next year’s parliamentary elections, is staunchly pro-Catholic and nationalist, and has in the past allied in government with far-right politicians. The governing Civic Platform, the choice of many liberals in this country, is bitterly divided between social conservatives and liberals, meaning it cannot enforce the constitutional secularity of the Polish state.

As Graff explains, in this political context, those who oppose the Catholicism-nationalism nexus find it difficult to coalesce into a strong movement. And ultra-conservatives continue to advance.

Far-right elements breeds in this environment and, in an ethnically and racially homogeneous country, their main targets are feminists, the LGBTQ community and leftists (the same groups that the Church condemns). Their strength is most visible in Poland during the annual Independence March on November 11, when tens of thousands of far-right youth take to the streets of Warsaw and other cities wreaking havoc.

According to June polls, the third strongest political force in Poland is the New Right Congress, which has a neo-liberal far-right agenda. The party, whose leader Janusz Korwin-Mikke has declared that women have lower IQs than men and that they enjoy being raped, gathered 7.5 percent of the vote in the May elections for the European Parliament.

“There is no clear demarcation between the Polish extreme right, the populist right and the mainstream right,” notes political scientist Rafal Pankovski of anti-racist group Nigdy Wiecej (Never Again). “The notion of a cordon sanitaire against the far-right does not seem to have been accepted in Polish politics and the media.”

Over recent years, civic mobilisation by progressive forces has nevertheless grown, and political parties with a strong liberal, secular and anti-nationalist message have been forming, but they still lack consolidation. Faced with the constant accusation of being “communists”, leftist forces that might counterbalance the conservative, nationalist and far-right trend are slow to grow in Poland.

The post Conservatives and Nationalists At Centre Stage in Poland appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Crossing the border from Turkey into Bulgaria. Credit: Graneits, CC 2.0 on Flickr

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, May 15 2014 (IPS)

Since November last year, Bulgaria has virtually closed its borders to an inflow of Syrian asylum seekers and other migrants trying to enter the country from Turkey, while EU institutions concerned appear to have acquiesced to this. 

Faced with a massive inflow of asylum seekers in 2013 – around 11,000 people lodged asylum applications in the country in 2013 compared with 1,000 on average in previous years – Bulgaria implemented a plan in autumn last year “to manage the crisis resulting from the enhanced migratory pressure.” Its main elements included building a 33 kilometre fence on the border with Turkey and increasing by 1,500 units the border police contingents patrolling that border.

"HRW believes that the Bulgarian government has, since November 6, 2013, embarked on a systematic practice to prevent undocumented asylum seekers from crossing into Bulgaria to lodge claims for international protection.” - HRW report from April 29
It seems to have paid off: just over 100 asylum seekers managed to enter Bulgaria each month in the first part of this year, while at the start of the implementation of the plan, as many as 100 people on some days were being prevented from entering the country, according to statements of the Ministry of Interior. Svetozar Lazarov, Secretary General in the ministry, told Bulgarian media at the end of April that, since the beginning of 2014, 2,367 people have been prevented from crossing the border into Bulgaria.

The influx last year, which frightened Bulgarian authorities, came about in the context of a tightening of Greece’s borders and consequent shift northwards of land migrant routes from Turkey. Over half of the asylum seekers lodging claims in Bulgaria last year came from war-torn Syria. Over two million Syrians are currently seeking protection abroad, half of them children. Turkey alone is currently hosting over 700,000 Syrians.

Human Rights Watch published a report on April 29 in which it documents how, as part of implementation of the Bulgarian plan, people crossing the border from Turkey into Bulgaria were being summarily pushed back into Turkey, without being given a chance to lodge asylum applications and sometimes suffering abuse from border guards. The evidence of pushbacks comes from 177 interviews HRW conducted with migrants in Bulgaria, Turkey and Syria, during which 44 cases of summary return involving 519 people were reconstructed.

“From the situation in the countries of origin of most of the irregular border crossers – Syria and Afghanistan – it is reasonable to believe that many are seeking protection, yet the people we interviewed who were rejected at the border or from within the territory of Bulgaria were not given the opportunity to lodge asylum claims upon apprehension,” Bill Frelick, Director of HRW’s refugee programme, told IPS.

“HRW believes that the Bulgarian government has, since November 6, 2013, embarked on a systematic practice to prevent undocumented asylum seekers from crossing into Bulgaria to lodge claims for international protection,” says the report.

According to the rights group, this strategy by the Bulgarian government breaches the non-refoulement principle (not returning or expelling people to places where their lives and freedoms could be threatened) included in the 1951 Refugee Convention that Bulgaria has ratified, as well as in EU legislation that Bulgaria is bound to implement (the EU’s Return Directive, the Schengen Border Code and the EU Charter of Fundamental Human Rights).

“The border pushbacks documented in this report follow no proper procedure and carry a negative presumption that irregular border crossers are not seeking asylum when the presumption, at least with regard to people fleeing Syria and Afghanistan, ought to be that they are,” explains the report.

The study was lambasted in Bulgaria, including by the head of the State Agency for Refugees and the director of the Bulgarian Red Cross – one of the non-governmental bodies that works most closely with authorities – though both individuals have admitted to not having read the analysis. While critics focus on the fact that conditions for migrants in Bulgaria have improved since last year – a fact that the HRW report mentions anyway – no one addresses the main allegation, that the country has been implementing a systematic refoulement plan.

Bulgaria’s Minister of Interior Tsvetlin Yovchev, the main figure behind the plan, disputed claims by HRW that violence had been committed by border police against migrants entering the country. He told Bulgarian media that a guarantee of proper behaviour by Bulgarian police is the constant presence in border areas of specialists of Frontex, the EU border management agency.

That Frontex lends credibility to the Bulgarian government, at least in front of domestic audiences, is further hinted at by the fact that the Bulgarian Ministry of Interior tends to play up the numbers of Frontex troops present in the country. According to Frontex, only 40-50 Frontex officers have been present in Bulgaria at a time since 2011, and the Bulgarian Ministry of Interior is adding up numbers to report for example that, “in 2013, 3 joint operations were conducted on Bulgaria’s external borders which are also external for the European Union, with a total number of 216 experts and 30 translators from Frontex.”

Asked by IPS about Frontex’s participation in the plan implemented by the Bulgarian authorities, Frontex spokesperson Ewa Moncure replied that Frontex is an operational agency which merely implements border surveillance and second line activities (such as interviewing of migrants) agreed with the government in Sofia. According to Frontex, whatever measures the Bulgarian government has taken since November, even if Frontex was involved in implementation, are Bulgaria’s primary responsibility. Frontex also says that it investigates any complaints received about human rights abuses but that it had not received any in Bulgaria that refer to the violations cited by the HRW report.

In November last year, the European Ombudsman rejected “Frontex’s view that human rights infringements are exclusively the responsibility of the Member States concerned,” invoking as a case in point the deployment of EU border guards to Greece where migrant detainees were kept in detention centres under unacceptable conditions..

Given that refoulement is contradictory to EU legislation, human rights groups have said the European Commission could potentially start infringement procedures against the country (this can lead to legal action in front of the European Court of Justice and sanctions), but no decisive steps have been taken so far. Michele Cercone, spokesperson for the EU Commission on Home Affairs, responding to claims in the HRW report, told IPS that “the Commission is closely monitoring the asylum situation in Bulgaria and is in regular contact with the Bulgarian authorities.”

He said a so-called “pilot letter” has been sent to Bulgaria with a request for information, on the basis of which the EC will decide on the next steps; this, however, does not constitute the start of an infringement procedure, which would require a “letter of formal notice” coming only if the Commission were unsatisfied with the performance of the Bulgarian authorities.

3,000 people crossing the Bulgarian border in October 2013 compared with 99 in January 2014 are “figures which speak for themselves,” Ana Fontal from the European Council on Refugees and Exile, a pan-European alliance of 82 migrant rights groups, told IPS.

“The European Commission should examine without delay border practices at the Bulgarian/Turkish border to investigate possible breaches of relevant provisions in EU asylum and migration law and consider initiating infringement proceedings if Bulgaria fails to take action to remedy the breaches identified,” said Fontal. “Other EU countries should not send asylum seekers back to Bulgaria until conditions there improve and authorities comply with international and EU law.”

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Environmentalists protesting against coal outside the Polish Ministry of Economy. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS.

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Apr 20 2014 (IPS)

A European ‘energy union’ plan proposed by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk as an EU response to the crisis in Ukraine could be a Trojan horse for fossil fuels.

On account of Poland’s proximity and deep historical ties to Ukraine, the country’s centre-right government led by Donald Tusk has assumed a prominent position in attempts to ease the crisis in Ukraine. Notoriously, Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski helped negotiate a February deal between then Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych and opposition leaders of Euromaidan, the name given to the pro-EU protests in Kiev.Asking for a prominent role for coal and shale gas is mostly a Polish game.

The Polish government’s assertiveness came with quick electoral gains. According to a poll conducted in early April by polling agency TNS Polska, Tusk’s Civic Platform for the first time in years took a lead in voters’ preferences over the conservative Peace and Justice Party of Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

“Not only is Civic Platform back in the lead, but also more Poles are ready to vote and vote for the government,” Lukasz Lipinski, an analyst at think tank Polityka Insight in Warsaw, told IPS. “All opposition parties now want to move the debate [ahead of the May 25 European elections] to domestic issues because on those it is much easier to criticise the Civic Platform after six years of government.”

Yet Tusk’s executive insists on Ukraine because of the benefits the topic can still bring. In the last weekend of March, the prime minister announced a Polish proposal for a European energy union that would make Europe resilient to crises like the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.

“The experience of the last few weeks [Russia’s invasion of Ukraine] shows that Europe must strive towards solidarity when it comes to energy,” said Tusk speaking in Tychy, a city in the southern coal-producing Silesia region.

He went on to outline the six dimensions of the ‘energy union’: the creation of an effective gas solidarity mechanism in case of supply crises; financing from the European Union’s funds for infrastructure ensuring energy solidarity in particular in the east of the EU; collective energy purchasing; rehabilitation of coal as a source of energy; shale gas extraction; and radical diversification of gas supply to the EU.

“It is very disappointing to note the total absence of energy efficiency measures from this vision, even though it featured centrally in the March European Council on Crimea conclusions,” Julia Michalak, EU climate policy officer at the NGO coalition Climate Action Network (CAN) Europe, told IPS. “If the Crimea crisis did not make the government realise that energy efficiency is the easiest and cheapest way to achieve real energy security for Europe, I’m not sure what would.”

While some of the measures proposed by Tusk would indeed lead (assuming they could be implemented) to increased European solidarity in the energy sector, asking for a prominent role for coal and shale gas is mostly a Polish game.

At the moment, the EU has no common binding EU policies on shale gas – various EU countries such as France and Bulgaria even have moratoriums on exploration. And the EU’s long-term climate objectives, primarily the 2050 decarbonisation goal, make a true coal resurrection unlikely.

According to Michalak, the coal and shale gas elements of the Polish six-point plan must be understood, on the one hand, as aimed at domestic audiences who want to see their government play hard ball and, on the other, as a negotiating tool meant to draw some specific gains out of Brussels.

The Tusk government has made herculean efforts to persuade foreign companies interested in shale gas to stick to the country, including firing environment minister Marcin Korolec during the climate change talks COP19 last year for reportedly not being shale gas friendly enough. Nevertheless, in April this year, France’s TOTAL became the fourth company to announce dropping exploratory works in Poland, as shale gas here is proving more scarce than initially thought.

The Polish national consensus on coal too is starting to show minor cracks.

Nearly 90 percent of electricity used in Poland comes from coal, and the government’s long-term energy strategy envisages a core role for coal up to 2060. Tusk’s executive has been unsuccessfully trying to torpedo the EU’s adoption of decarbonisation targets, so at the moment it is unclear how authorities will reconcile EU commitments with a coal-dependent economy.

Last year, the chief executive of state energy company PGE resigned, arguing that an expansion by 1,800 MW of Opole coal plant in south-western Poland is unprofitable. The government chose to go ahead with expansion plans anyway.

Despite the generalised perception in Poland that coal is a cheap form of energy, this month saw leading newspapers (including the conservative Rzeczpospolita) discussing externalities of coal following a study by think tank Warsaw Institute for Economic Studies showing that, between 1990-2012, Polish subsidies for coal amounted to 170 bn PLN (40 billion euros).

In 2013, a series of international financial institutions, including the World Bank and the European Investment Bank, announced significant restrictions to their financing of coal – lending to Polish coal, for instance, would be impossible for these institutions under the new guidelines.

Poland also has to implement the EU’s Industrial Emissions Directive which calls for stricter pollution standards at energy producing units as of 2016 or closure of plants which do not comply. And it is potentially in this space that some of the benefits of Poland’s tough game on coal in Brussels could be seen.

In February, the European Commission allowed Poland to exempt 73 of its energy producing units from the requirements of the Directive, including two outdated units at Belchatow coal plant in central Poland, Europe’s largest thermal coal plant (5,298 MW) and biggest CO2 emitter.

Additionally, it has emerged this month that Poland intends to use regional funds meant for tackling urban air pollution from the next EU budget (2014-2020) to finance modernisation measures at the country’s biggest coal and gas producers, both private and state-owned.

The post Poland Uses Ukraine to Push Coal appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Fifty Greenpeace activists were arrested on Dec. 9 during a symbolic action of "digging for gold" in front of the Romanian parliament. Credit: Courtesy of Greenpeace Romania

By Claudia Ciobanu
BUCHAREST, Dec 10 2013 (IPS)

Authorities in Romania have been attempting to bulldoze through public opposition to push through controversial extractive projects such as gold mining at Rosia Montana and shale gas drilling at Pungesti.

However, amendments to the national mining law, which would have given Rosia Montana Gold Corporation extraordinary powers to implement its project to build Europe’s biggest gold mine in the Apuseni mountains, failed to be passed by the Romanian parliament Dec. 10 mainly because of a lack of quorum.

Tuesday’s vote was part of a long-term strategy by the Romanian government to give the project a green light despite public opposition and legal objections.

While the parliament voted, hundreds of protesters occupied the headquarters of the ombudsman in Bucharest and camped outside the offices of political parties in the western city of Cluj.

If the law had been adopted, projects involving the extraction and processing of mineral resources could have been declared “of exceptional public interest” allowing project promoters to receive extraordinary powers, such as the right to conduct expropriations, skip permitting procedures for working on archaeological sites, and be reissued permits within 60 days if they were cancelled by courts.

The new law represented a means for the authorities to push the Rosia Montana project – and potentially others like it – in a less than transparent manner after a previous attempt to give special powers to Gold Corporation had been dropped due to public pressure.

In August, the Romanian government led by Social Democratic Prime Minister Victor Ponta proposed a draft law that declared the Rosia Montana gold project one “of national interest” and gave Gold Corporation extraordinary powers – expropriations, automatic reissuing of permits, etc.

The draft law sparked massive protests in Romania starting Sept. 1, with tens of thousands taking to the streets for weeks in a row across the country.

Faced with such discontent, the special parliamentary commission analysing the Rosia Montana law rejected the text in November, arguing that the project would be illegal on multiple counts.

In appearance, the decision by the special commission meant the project had been rejected.

Yet as the commission announced its conclusions, the Romanian parliament – dominated by Ponta’s party – was preparing amendments to the mining law which meant potentially giving all mining companies the same controversial extraordinary powers intended to be granted to Gold Corporation.

The political bet was that the amended mining law would be passed under the radar, as the text did not single out Rosia Montana and some of the public thought the project dead with the rejection of the first law.

It was only on Monday Dec. 9 that the public learned that the mining law would be voted on by parliament the next day. The full text of the new law was not available to the public at the time of the Tuesday Dec. 10 vote.

On Monday, the mining law was debated by parliamentary commissions. According to Stefania Simion, a lawyer who has been working for years on the Rosia Montana case and who observed the proceedings, most of the parliamentarians did not have a chance to study the amendments and there was virtually no debate.

In the Rosia Montana case, Romanian authorities are using secrecy and legal artifice to try to push through a project facing significant public opposition.

In the case of drilling for shale gas at Pungesti, in the eastern county of Vaslui, they are relying instead on policing.

During the months of battle over Rosia Montana, at the other end of the country a new campaign was born: in October, as U.S. energy giant Chevron was preparing to start exploratory works for shale gas in Pungesti, locals mobilised to stop the company’s operations. They set up a camp next to the land where Chevron was preparing to install exploratory drills and tried to block access by machinery to the site.

The villagers, mostly farmers, were worried about the impacts that fracking – hydraulic fracturing, the technique used to extract natural gas from shale – on a perimeter inside their village could have on their lands and water. Some told the Romanian media they had seen movies about the negative effects of fracking in U.S. communities.

Opposition to shale gas exploration – albeit not massive – has grown gradually in Romania over the past two years as successive governments gave exploration permits to several companies; rejecting fracking was one of the themes brought up by protesters during the January 2012 anti-austerity protests and this year’s Rosia Montana demonstrations.

When locals in Pungesti started protesting against Chevron in October, anti-Rosia Montana activists were already mobilised in major cities and ready to offer some support.

The villagers’ attempts to block Chevron operations and the police response were broadcast live on the internet from the early days. The national media also reported on Pungesti, after being criticised for failing to properly cover the anti-Rosia Montana mobilisation.

In their turn having learned from the Rosia Montana case, Romanian authorities responded decisively from the start to prevent the opposition from escalating. For weeks now, the hundreds of villagers protesting at Pungesti are outnumbered by military police deployed on the ground. Tens of people have been arrested. Protesters complain of police brutality and systematic harassment.

“As I camped at Pungesti last Friday, I saw the police attacking people, I witnessed at least four people who had to be saved by the crowds from police abuse,” retired engineer Gherghina Vladescu told IPS.

Responding to the accusations of police brutality in Pungesti, Romania’s minister of interior, Radu Stroe, told the national media Dec. 8: “Others were violent too, they broke down fences…Everyone is free to protest in this country as long as they do it peacefully.”

The minister was referring to the protesters’ tearing down Dec. 7 of a wire fence protecting the area for which Chevron was granted the exploration permit.

In November, villagers from Pungesti submitted an official complaint to the National Anti-Corruption Agency in which they accuse the mayor of Pungesti, who leased land to Chevron, of obtaining property rights over it through an illegal land exchange.

Since protests began at Pungesti, Chevron has suspended operations repeatedly saying that it “is committed to having constructive and positive relations with communities where it conducts operations”. Each time, it resumed works; this month, it filed criminal complaints against villagers for destruction of property.

On Dec. 8., Romanian authorities declared Pungesti “a special public safety zone”. This was needed to justify the ongoing police practices of checking all cars coming into Pungesti, keeping guard outside homes, ID-ing people at will and removing protesters from the site.

Claudiu Craciun, one of the prominent figures in the Rosia Montana and shale gas protest movements, said the situation in Pungesti brought to mind a dystopian future: “Imagine for a second a country where hundreds of industrial perimeters are permanently guarded by tens of thousands of police and private contractors.”

Resistance will continue, he said, adding, “The more the government tries to appear in charge of things, the weaker it is. Legitimacy and the use of force are in an inverse proportionality relation to one another.”

The post Battling Extractive Industries in Romania appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The G77+China group of 133 developing countries negotiating a new international deal at COP19 in Warsaw to combat climate change walked out of the talks in the wee hours of Wednesday morning to protest developed countries’ reluctance to commit to loss and damage.

“Today at 4 a.m. the delegation of Bolivia and all delegations of G77 walked out because we do not see a clear cut commitment by developed countries to reach an agreement,” said Bolivian negotiator Rene Orellana speaking on Wednesday morning at the COP19 climate summit.

What seems to have happened at the closed night-time session of the so-called contact group of loss and damage is that Juan Hoffmaister, the Bolivian negotiator on loss and damage, who was representing the entire G77 + China group, walked out in the name of developing countries. The walk-out has a strong symbolic value and is unprecedented in the last decade of climate talks.

Orellana further explained that the walk-out was sparked by the attitude of developed countries, among them Norway, which proposed that loss and damage be discussed not under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as developing countries requested but under the looser Rio+20 sustainable development framework.

“G77 put forward a very constructive proposal on loss and damage and have been engaging meaningfully with all countries, but [during the loss and damage session taking place into the early hours of Nov. 20], Australians were behaving like high school boys in class, their behaviour was rude and disrespectful,” commented Harjeet Singh from the NGO ActionAid International on Wednesday.

“On top of that, in the middle of the night, Norway came up with a proposal whereby they rejected everything, they rejected discussing socioeconomic losses, non-economic losses, rehabilitation, compensation,” added Singh. “But these are the crucial elements of loss and damage; if you do not discuss these, how can you discuss loss and damage?”

Developing countries negotiating at COP19 have repeatedly stated that creating an international mechanism under UNFCCC to address loss and damage is the biggest expectation they have of the Warsaw meeting.

G77+China last week proposed a text meant to provide the basis of negotiations for creating such an international mechanism for loss and damage, which called for this issue to be treated as a third, separate, pillar in the UNFCCC process, in addition to mitigation and adaptation.

The super-typhoon Haiyan which hit the Philippines right before COP19 started brought even more to the fore the fact that some countries are already suffering the deadly impacts of climate change, having moved into the so-called “post-adaptation” phase. For these countries, assistance to deal with the loss and damage already caused by climate change would be crucial, argued G77+China.

But developed countries have been reluctant to give such a prominent role under UNFCCC to loss and damage.

According to a U.S. document outlining Washington’s negotiating position at COP which was leaked to the media during the first week of the Warsaw meeting, accepting loss and damage as a third pillar would mean “focusing on blame and liability”. That is, developed countries would have to accept historical responsibility for emissions causing climate change and commit to paying the price.

Australia and Norway appear to have carried this reluctance towards loss and damage into the midnight session.

Speaking on Wednesday, UK negotiator Ed Davey confirmed his country’s support for the developed countries’ resistance. Davey said, “We do not accept the argument on compensation. I don’t think the compensation analysis is fair and sensible, but that does not mean we are not committed to helping the poorest countries adapt.”

EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard stated that it was concerning that developing countries took such a tough stance and made an appeal for countries not to backtrack on talks.

While the walk-out makes developing countries vulnerable to the accusation of being responsible for holding back the Warsaw negotiations, developing countries and NGOs are pointing out that it was the attitude and behaviour of developed countries that forced them to issue such an ultimatum in the first place.

“We are very disappointed by the slow process on negotiations on loss and damage, the most important measure of success here in Warsaw,” said Philippines negotiator Yeb Sano on Wednesday.

“The walk-out happened because a very strong proposal for a loss and damage mechanism put forward by G77 and China did not receive enough traction,” explained Meena Raman from the NGO Third World Network. “This is a postponing tactic by developed countries in order not to make a decision on loss and damage here in Warsaw.”

Since COP19 began on Nov. 11, developed countries have given few signs of being committed to a meaningful international climate deal.

This week, Japan announced that it would cut a previous commitment of reducing CO2 emissions by 25 percent by 2020 to a three percent cut only. Australia recently announced an intention to scrap an existing carbon tax, while Canada indicated it might not meet a pledge to reduce emissions made at the Copenhagen 2009 COP.

Developing countries have indicated that they are ready to discuss more if developed countries take a more serious stance. As an example, Indian Minister of Environment Jayanthi Natarajan declared Wednesday upon arrival in Warsaw that her country would be open to temporarily using the existing Green Climate Fund for doing immediate disbursements for loss and damage, until a proper international mechanism is set in place.

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Environmentalists protesting Monday morning outside Polish Ministry of Economy as the coal summit kicks off inside. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Nov 18 2013 (IPS)

An International Coal and Climate summit organised by the Polish Ministry of Economy and the World Coal Association kicked off Monday in the Polish capital Warsaw in parallel to the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP19, amid outcry from environmentalists who accused COP host Poland of bias in favor of the coal industry.

The presence of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres at the coal summit was also broadly criticised.

Speaking at the opening of the summit on the morning of Nov. 18, Figueres said the coal industry must clean up if it wants to have a future.

“I am here to say that coal must change rapidly and dramatically for everyone’s sake,” Figueres said to a room full of industry representatives. “By now it should be abundantly clear that further capital expenditures on coal can go ahead only if they are compatible with the two degrees Celsius limit.”

Coal is the dirtiest of fossil fuels, accounting for over 40 percent of global CO2 emissions coming from fuel combustion, according to the International Energy Agency.

During the coal meeting on Monday morning, the Polish Ministry of Environment and the World Coal Association collected endorsements and formally presented to Figueres a document called The Warsaw Communiqué.

It contains three main calls: “for the use of high-efficiency, low-emission coal combustion technologies wherever it is economically and technically feasible at existing and new coal plants”; for governments to push for moving the industry towards state of the art technology and support research and development in that direction; and for “development banks to support developing countries in accessing clean coal technologies.”

The document adds up to a call for public support for an industry that is feeling the heat from climate policies adopted around the world.

While the fate of the coal industry varies globally, in Europe and the U.S. coal producers are certainly under pressure. In the EU, revenues from coal have been plummeting over the past years, on account of diminished demand during the crisis and rising supply of electricity from wind and solar as the block is moving ahead on its target to have 20 percent of its energy needs met from renewables by 2020.

At a global coal industry conference that IPS attended in October in Berlin, Germany, the mood was gloomy: coal plant operators in Europe were complaining of severe losses, while utilities in the continent spoke of plans to shut down coal units and move increasingly towards gas and renewables.

During 2013, the two biggest international financial institutions, the World Bank and the European Investment Bank, have significantly tightened their lending to coal, and the U.S. administration and Nordic countries in Europe decided to put an end to financial support for coal plants abroad.

Poland is one of the few countries in Europe to maintain a bombastic pro-coal rhetoric. Less than two months before COP, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk infamously declared, “The future of Polish energy is in brown and black coal, as well as shale gas. Some wanted coal to be dispensed with, but energy independence requires not only the diversification of energy resources, but also the maximum use of one’s own resources.” Almost 90 percent of the country’s electricity comes from coal.

Yet, even in Poland, the reality is shakier than the rhetoric. Speaking in November to news agency Bloomberg, Krzysztof Kilian, head of the Polish state power company PGE which plans to add two 900 MW units to its existing 1,500 MW Opole coal plant in the southwest of the country, said there was one way for PGE to avoid making losses from the new units: if it secures state-backed guarantees for prices of the type nuclear producers in the UK are obtaining – in practice, that would mean that the state would guarantee as much as twice the market rate.

The coal industry, at least in Europe, has of late engaged in an offensive for drumming up public support and for diminishing the amount of public resources going to renewables. But given the ascension of climate policies around the world, for public support for coal to continue one crucial argument needs to be made: that coal can be clean. And this is the focus of the Warsaw coal summit.

“This summit is not an attempt to distract from the important work done during the COP negotiations,” said Milton Catelin, World Coal Association chief executive, during the opening of the conference. “We want to figure out ways in which the world can retain the benefits of coal but at the same time reduce and even eliminate the costs in terms of CO2 emissions.”

On the agenda of the coal summit were three main ways put forward so far for “cleaning up coal”: carbon capture and storage, underground gasification, and efficiency improvements at plants.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) – the biggest hope of the industry and mentioned by Figueres herself in the coal summit speech as a way forward for coal – would involve capturing CO2 from coal units before it is emitted into the atmosphere, and storing it underground.

Yet despite significant investments being made in the development of CCS, its deployment on a commercial scale has to date not been proven feasible. This September, Norway gave up a large-scale CCS project at Mongstad deeming it too risky; the country’s auditor general had criticised Norway’s spending over one billion dollars on CCS projects between 2005 and 2012.

Another “clean coal” scenario involves what is called underground coal gasification. The technology is based on partially burning coal underground instead of extracting it. Yet the combustion process used in this method results in high carbon emissions, not only of CO2, but also of methane, which has 23 times the warming potential of CO2. As a consequence, underground gasification would still need CCS deployment.

Another idea for cleaning up coal involves improving the efficiency of plants. Yet existing coal plants are generally less efficient than gas ones, and making them more efficient (46 percent efficiency for a coal plant is considered the best possible, compared to 60 percent for gas) is costly – given the current energy price context in Europe, this does not yet make business sense.

Co-generation – that is, using the heat released when burning coal for electricity to produce heat – would be another way to improve efficiency. In this scenario, however, units would have to be smaller and closer to communities – which raises the dilemma of social acceptability.

“The fact that the industry is here right now handing in a plea for subsidies to COP in a way shows that they are not as strong as we may have thought, that without subsidies there may not be any future for coal,” Mona Bricke from the German NGO Klimalianz commented in Warsaw. “The Warsaw Communiqué is in a sense the coal industry’s last big plea: they know that if they want to have a future they have to say that coal is clean – which is a lie – and they have to ask for money to build new expensive plants.”

The post Coal Tries to Clean Up Its Image appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Youth activists organising a mock lemonade sale to get money for the Green Climate Fund to highlight the lack of serious commitments. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Nov 14 2013 (IPS)

The U.S. delegation negotiating at the U.N. international climate change conference in Poland is pushing an agenda of minimising the role of “Loss and Damage” in the UNFCCC framework, prioritising private finance in the Green Climate Fund, and delaying the deadline for post-2020 emission reduction commitments, according to a State Department negotiating strategy which IPS has seen.

The document, which has been leaked to a pair of journalists covering the Nov. 11-22 COP in Warsaw, outlines the U.S. strategy for the negotiations to diplomats at their various embassies as well as ‘talking points’ for them to push with their respective countries before the talks began.

The paper makes it clear that, despite President Barack Obama’s progressive stances on climate issues over the past year, the U.S. continues to pose difficulties to closing an international global climate deal by strongly resisting the concept of historical responsibility for emissions and positioning itself in opposition to developing countries on the main issues at stake.

COP19 started this year under the shadow of the Haiyan typhoon in the Philippines which put a tragic emphasis on what was anyway going to be one of the main issues to be debated here in Warsaw: the so-called “Loss and Damage” – that is, assistance for countries that are already hit by the devastating effects of climate change (what is already “beyond adaptation”).

Loss and Damage is a relatively new issue on the public agenda of COP meetings: it was in Doha at COP18 last year that negotiators decided to establish in the future a mechanism for dealing with LD.

On Nov. 12, the developing countries’ group G77+China made a public submission to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) with their proposal for what an international mechanism for Loss and Damage under the UNFCCC framework could look like and how it could function. This would now constitute the basis for further negotiations here.

But according to the U.S. State Department position, any work on Loss and Damage should be done under the already existing framework for dealing with adaptation to climate change, not as a third, separate pillar (in addition to the two existing ones, mitigation and adaptation), as the G77+China submission requests.

“A third pillar,” says the U.S. position, “would lead the UNFCCC to focus increasingly on blame and liability which in turn could be counterproductive from the standpoint of public support for the conference.

“We are strongly in favour of creating an institutional arrangement on loss and damage that is under the Convention’s adaptation track, rather than creating a third stream of action that’s separate from mitigation and adaptation,” writes the leaked U.S. document.

The U.S. fears an increased “focus on liability” during the international negotiations on climate because that would de facto translate into an admission of historical responsibility by developed countries for emissions leading to climate change and a subsequent legal obligation to pay a price for this responsibility.

The issue of historical responsibility for emissions has been one of the main bones of contention, if not the main one, over successive COP meetings.

Yet for most developing countries coming to Warsaw, particularly for small island states and the least developed countries, making solid progress on Loss and Damage is a key point on their agenda.

“And if we have failed to meet the objective of the Convention [i.e., preventing anthropogenic climate change], we have to confront the issue of loss and damage,” said Philippine head of delegation Yeb Sano in his emotional introductory speech at the COP.

“Loss and damage from climate change is a reality today across the world. Developed country emissions reductions targets are dangerously low and must be raised immediately, but even if they were in line with the demand of reducing 40-50 percent below 1990 levels, we would still have locked-in climate change and would still need to address the issue of loss and damage,” he said.

“Loss and Damage has been causing very intense discussions,” said Chinese negotiator Su Wei during a briefing Nov. 14. “It will all depend on the political will of developed countries, if they are going to take action to assume responsibility for the emissions they historically produced.”

When it comes to the Green Climate Fund, meant to assist developing countries with adaptation and mitigation and on whose set-up and financing progress is expected in Warsaw, the U.S. position writes, “We’re also working to intensify our coordination in the context of the Green Climate Fund board to shape an institution that could leverage private investment more effectively than any other multilateral climate fund.”

Yet some developing countries are extremely wary of financial assistance promised by developed countries being translated into private investments as opposed to grants and aid.

“Already in the pre-COP summit organised by Poland, one and a half days out of three were dedicated to companies which were there to present to developing countries technology which they could buy to help with mitigation,” said Rene Orellana, head of the Bolivian delegation, on the first day of the COP. “Linking markets to the financial provisions [under UNFCCC] means a diluted responsibility for developed countries.”

Finally, the U.S. position might turn out to pose problems to the European Union as well, because when it comes to post-2020 emission reductions, it says, “There is divergence [among the parties negotiating] on when Parties will put forward initial commitments and the timing of the conclusion of the future agreement, with the U.S. pushing for early 2015 while the EU wants commitment on the table in September 2014.”

COP19 in Warsaw is supposed to advance negotiations both when it comes to setting up a mechanism for post-2020 emission reductions by countries across the globe and to tightening current emission targets of developed countries (2020 targets are deemed insufficient to keep the world on track for two degrees as a target maximum temperature rise).

On post-2020 emissions, a consensus is emerging that countries would present emission pledges before COP21 in Paris 2015 (when a new international climate agreement is expected to be signed) which would then be assessed for appropriateness in light of what is needed to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius.

Coming forward with emission pledges in early 2015, for which the U.S. is pushing, would mean giving less time for an international review of the appropriateness of the pledges, especially a review that could happen at the COP20 in Peru, a host that could potentially be tougher on developed countries.

Responding today to the leaking of the draft, the U.S. delegation in Warsaw told the Indian newspaper The Hindu: “The U.S. is dedicated to achieving an ambitious, effective and workable outcome in the UNFCCC and in Warsaw, and our positions are designed to further this goal. We are engaging with all countries to find solutions that will give momentum to the effort to tackle climate change.”

The post U.S. Fights G77 on Most Counts at Climate Meet, Leaked Doc Shows appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The coal-fired thermoelectric plant in Belchatow, Poland, the largest of its kind in Europe. Credit: Pibwl de Pl:Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Nov 12 2013 (IPS)

These are busy days in the Polish capital Warsaw, even if it doesn’t show. The United Nations Climate Change Conference COP 19 has opened at the National Stadium, while on the other side of the river Wisla the Polish far right gathered for their annual march on Independence Day on Monday.

But bar a large banner on the National Palace of Science and Culture in the centre of the city, one of the venues for the COP, hardly any signs inform local residents that an important meeting about the fate of the planet is taking place these days in their city.

Poland is organising this year’s COP because it is the only country in Central and Eastern Europe interested in the job when the region’s turn came to host the U.N. conference. Yet many question Poland’s ability to play a constructive role in the negotiations given the country’s recent history of blocking EU progress on climate targets.Poland is this year hosting COP because it is the only country in Central and Eastern Europe interested in the job when the region’s turn came to host the UN conference.

In the spring of 2012, Poland single-handedly blocked the adoption of an EU low-carbon roadmap for 2050, meant to introduce across the bloc a 40 percent cut in carbon emissions by 2030, a 60 percent cut by 2040 and an 80 percent cut by 2050, compared to 1990 levels.

This fall, Poland announced its intentions to also prevent Europe from setting 2030 climate goals. A bigger emissions cut commitment from the EU could play a positive role in the advancement of climate negotiations.

The reason for Poland’s stance is coal. Almost 90 percent of the electricity used in Poland comes from coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, and the country’s energy strategy does not envisage a significant shift away from this source of energy.

Speaking in September at a mining fair in the southern city of Katowice, Prime Minister Donald Tusk famously said, “The future of Polish energy is in brown and black coal, as well as shale gas. Some wanted coal to be dispensed with, but energy independence requires not only the diversification of energy resources, but also the maximum use of one’s own resources.”

Controversially, the Polish Economy Ministry is organising Nov. 18-19, in parallel to the COP and together with the World Coal Association, an International Coal & Climate Summit. The Warsaw Communique, a document co-authored by the coal lobby group and the Polish ministry, will be delivered to U.N. representatives during the event; it contains a call to invest public resources in ’clean coal’ technologies in order to maintain high coal use around the globe.

Despite sticking strongly to its pro-coal agenda, the Polish government insists it is not opposed to the progress of climate talks. “I am not sceptical about climate change, I am sceptical about some European ways to address it,” twitted Polish Environment Minister Marcin Korolec in the run-up to the COP.

The Polish government’s current attempts to prevent the EU from heightening its own climate ambitions is much to the liking of the Polish and European far right, it was revealed Nov. 10 during an ’anti-climate summit’ organised in Warsaw by the Polish far-right party Ruch Narodowy (Polish National Movement), the Solidarity trade union and the U.S. climate-denialist think tank Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).

According to Greenpeace research, CFACT has been receiving almost half of its funding over the past years from the Donors Trust, a secretive funding vehicle which between 2002 and 2011 has channelled 146 million dollar to climate denialist groups.

While many of the figures financially propping up the Donors Trust are unknown, Greenpeace has been able to establish that two foundations linked to Charles Koch, the oil and chemical industry baron infamous for bankrolling climate sceptic voices, have been putting money into the Trust.

During the Warsaw conference, CFACT representatives Craig Rucker and David Rothbard made presentations arguing that climate change is not caused by human activity and claiming that climate policies would mean further impoverishment of the poor around the world.

Against this background, the Polish far right represented by Ruch Narodowy outlined their vision of Poland’s climate and energy policy, having at its core a concept of sovereignty understood as rejection of EU and U.N. policies and a reliance on domestic coal.

“We are against de-carbonisation because the Polish economy is a carbon-based economy and we are against climate regulations in the EU,” Michal Putkiewicz, an energy expert at Ruch Narodowy, told IPS. “The Polish government first signed the EU climate and energy package and now they want to prevent the EU from making it more ambitious. The policy of the Polish government now is correct, but we think it should go further and get rid of any EU regulations on emission reductions.”

The EU’s climate and energy package stipulates that by 2020 the block must reduce emissions by 20 percent compared to 1990 levels, give renewables a 20 percent share in the energy sector and improve energy efficiency by 20 percent. Poland’s two biggest political parties, the governing Civil Platform and conservative Peace and Justice party, have been recently engaged in a public game of throwing responsibility on to one another for committing to the package.

On Nov. 11, far-right groups attending the anti-climate conference joined the Independence March organised by two of the most important far-right organisations in Poland, the All-Polish Youth (Młodzież Wszechpolską) and the National-Radical Camp (Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny), which in 2011 joined to form Ruch Narodowy. Over 10,000 people joined Monday’s march. The demonstration has become a yearly show of strength by the Polish far right.

Some of the participants got involved in scuffles with one another and the police; a squat in the centre of Warsaw was attacked by participants; and a rainbow flag symbolising diversity was burnt.

“Climate change denialism is becoming a new part of the identity and narrative of right-wing extremists in Poland,” Polish climate activist Michalina Golinczak told IPS. “So the Polish climate movement should start to collaborate not only with trade unions but also with other progressive social movements, anti-fascist, anti-war, LGBT, feminists etc., to push back the alarming rise of right-wing extremists.”

The post For Poland the Right Way Is Coal appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Eugen David, former miner turned farmer and inhabitant of Rosia Montana, speaking to protesters in Piata Universitatii in Bucharest. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS.

By Claudia Ciobanu
BUCHAREST, Sep 17 2013 (IPS)

Street protests are snowballing in Romania against a Canadian-led gold mining project in the Rosia Montana area in the Apuseni Mountains. More than 20,000 people joined a protest march in Bucharest on Sunday, and thousands in other Romanian cities took to the streets.

The Sunday marches represent the third major countrywide weekend mobilisation to oppose the project since Sep. 1. They drew the biggest numbers of participants so far. Smaller numbers of people have been protesting daily in Bucharest, in the western city of Cluj, and in others cities.

The protests erupted after the Romanian government proposed a draft law Aug. 27 that gives extraordinary powers to the project promoter, Rosia Montana Gold Corporation (in which Canadian group Gabriel Resources is the majority stakeholder). “It is also about the right of people to keep their properties, about our duty to safeguard a patrimony that belongs not only to us, but also to the world and to future generations." -- Claudiu Craciun, an active participant in the protests

According to the text, the company can relocate people whose homes are on the perimeter of the mine. Additionally, the law asks state authorities to grant the company all necessary permits within set deadlines regardless of national legislation, court rulings or public participation requirements.

Gold Corporation plans to build Europe’s largest gold mine at Rosia Montana to extract 300 tonnes of gold and 1,600 tonnes of silver over 17 years. The operation would involve the destruction of three villages and four mountains.

In all, 12,000 tonnes of cyanide would be used yearly and 13 million tons of mining waste produced each year, according to a project presentation submitted by the company to the Ministry of Environment.

The proposed law is meant to give the project a definitive green light after over 14 years in which Gold Corporation has not been able to secure all necessary permits.

In 2004, the Romanian Academy of Science – the most authoritative scientific body in the country – called for the project to be scrapped because environmental and social costs far outweigh benefits. Apart from environmental risks and displacements, the large-scale mining proposed by Gold Corporation would threaten the cultural heritage in Rosia Montana, a mining area since Roman times.

Hundreds of people in the 3,000-strong village have been opposing the project for years, setting up the NGO Alburnus Maior and successfully battling the corporation and state authorities in courts.

Contributing to the growth in public sympathy for the movement has been the seemingly close alliance between Gold Corporation, politicians across the political spectrum and mainstream media.

Political arch-rivals, such as centre-right President Traian Basescu and Socialist Prime Minister Victor Ponta, have at various points declared themselves in favour of the project.

Most major media outlets in the country have run Gold Corporation advertisements while failing to cover arguments against the exploitation. In a country where corruption is a big feature of public life, this consensus in favour of gold mining at Rosia reeked of backroom deals.

The predominant discourse about Rosia Montana in the public sphere has been that gold mining would create employment and enrich state coffers. According to the most recent agreement between the Romanian government and the company (annexed to the Aug. 27 draft law), Gold Corporation would employ 2,300 people during the two-year construction phase and 900 during the 17 years of exploitation. Over the duration of the operation, the Romanian budget is set to win 2.3 billion dollars while other benefits for the Romanian economy are estimated at 2.9 billion dollars.

The popular mobilisation now targets the Parliament, whose vote will effectively decide the fate of Rosia Montana. If the law is approved, even if it is challenged as unconstitutional in the Constitutional Court (the premises for such a procedure exist since a judicial committee in the Senate issued a negative opinion on the draft law), construction could begin immediately, pending the supreme court ruling.

“We cannot tell what will happen with this project, but all that we can say is that we keep fighting, that united we will save Rosia Montana,” Eugen David, leader of Alburnus Maior told IPS. “We are under siege right now in Rosia Montana, but in the end we will manage to lift it.”

The protests that began on Sep. 1 are remarkably strong for Romania. Since their start, misinformation in the public space has been abundant: the main television channels originally failed to cover the protests despite their size; on Sep. 10, media wrongly announced that the draft law had been rejected by the Senate; and Ponta declared that the project could not go ahead against popular will, only to later express again support for the project.

In spite of this, protesters – who function according to a non-hierarchical structure and have no official leaders – have skillfully kept the public informed and engaged via Facebook. The weekly hours-long marches go through neighbourhoods with the goal of spreading the word about opposition to the project and showing that protesters are not hooligans as depicted on TV.

Their strategy seems to have worked since numbers this Sunday were bigger than ever. The first days of mobilisation brought mostly youth to the streets, but older participants and youth-parent couples are increasingly visible. After two weeks of well-mannered street actions, police presence on Sunday can be considered symbolic.

“It is very interesting that such a revolt began with a case of protecting the environment, but this is not only about the environment,” Claudiu Craciun, an active participant in the protests, told IPS. “It is also about the right of people to keep their properties, about our duty to safeguard a patrimony that belongs not only to us, but also to the world and to future generations.

“The Rosia Montana case – in which you see legislation custom made to serve the interests of a corporation – highlights some failures of both democratic institutions and of the economic system, capitalism in a broader sense,” Craciun added.

“Rosia Montana is the battle of the present and of the next decades,” the activist said. “It illustrates the end of post-1989 cleavages [communist vs anti-communist, European vs. non-European] and the emergence of new ones. People today confront a corrupted political class backed up by a corporation and a sold out media; and they ask for an improved democratic process, for adding a participatory democracy dimension to traditional democratic mechanisms.”

The post Street Power Takes On Gold appeared first on Inter Press Service.

French support for the protests in Bulgaria has inspired street scenes to recreate the iconic painting by Eugene Delacroix to mark the revolution in France in 1830. Credit: Vassil Garnizov/IPS.

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Jul 29 2013 (IPS)

For more than six weeks now, Bulgarians have been on the streets demanding an end to oligarchy and corruption.

Under the label DANSwithme, inhabitants of Bulgarian capital Sofia have been taking to the streets every day since Jun. 14. The protests were sparked by the Socialist government’s decision to appoint 32-year-old media mogul Delyan Peevski head of the national security services (DANS).

Despite Peevski’s snap removal following the public outcry, Bulgarians have continued protests to demand resignation of Prime Minister Plamen Oresharski. On peak days, crowds are in the tens of thousands.

Urbanites, often youth and professionals, have vented their anger and also celebrated the rather new experience of street action. They are a colourful bunch, bringing along kids, often wearing theatrical costumes, using art installations to send political messages, and broadcasting it all on social media.They’re a colourful bunch, bringing along kids, often wearing theatrical costumes, using art installations to send political messages, and broadcasting it all on social media.

As if to reflect participants’ desire for a well-functioning society, people have gathered in the centre of Sofia in the mornings “to have a coffee with parliamentarians” (coffee cups were collected as proof of participant numbers) and then gone to work. In the evening, they have returned to the streets, for more elaborate marches and performances.

Remarkable for their endurance, size and creativity, the protests represent the culmination of public resentment with a political class perceived to be closely tied to business and crime groups, and with dysfunctional democratic institutions.

In Bulgaria more than in other post-socialist members of the European Union, a nexus between organised crime, businesses and the political class cemented in the early 1990s remains a feature of public life. The country is also the poorest of EU member states.

Over the past years, Bulgarians have been reacting. Environmentalists often took issue with the sell-off of natural parks or pristine beaches for tourism or sports projects by prominent business figures with a murky reputation.

It took until February this year, however, for the discontent to boil over. At the start of 2013, Bulgarians were on the streets for weeks complaining about rising electricity and heating costs, and calling for re-nationalisation of the energy system.

Those protests were led by the poor who could not afford to pay the heavy bills. There were several public suicides in cities across the country during the weeks of action.

The protests were backed by others frustrated with Bulgaria’s ruling class. The centre-right government of Boiko Borisov resigned as a result.

Following elections in May, Bulgaria is now run by a coalition of Socialists and the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (a maverick party representing the country’s Turkish minority which usually allies with winners of elections to form governments). Further support from the far-right party Ataka was needed to form this government.

“The situation is very unstable at the moment, with pressure on the government increasing all the time because recently even trade unions expressed their support for the protests,” Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Sofia based Centre for Liberal Studies tells IPS. “The question seems to be no longer if but when we will have early elections again. This government has clearly lost its ability to govern.”

On Tuesday last week (Jul. 23), the protests turned tense for the first time. Crowds blockaded the parliament in the evening, trapping politicians gathered for an extraordinary session to vote amendments to the budget. Those amendments sought an increase in budget deficit to finance outstanding debts to private contractors and some social spending.

Oresharski is refusing to resign, promising that the government has “a clear plan of stabilisation” and plans “urgent measures to improve the social situation.” No details were given.

President Rosen Plevneliev has meanwhile been expressing sympathy for the protesters.

As have representatives of the EU and its member states, including EU Commissioner for Justice Viviane Reding and the French and German ambassadors to Sofia. Unlike Greek or Spanish protesters targeting the EU as a main driver of austerity measures, many of the Bulgarians on the streets today still hold on to EU ideals.

Thankful for the supportive French and German ambassadors, protesters have been putting on live re-enactments of French painter Eugene Delacroix’s canvas Liberty Leading the People (strongly associated with the French Republic) and of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The French painting became iconic of the July revolution of 1830 in France. In the painting a woman personifying Liberty leads people holding up the French flag. The scene is being recreated in Sofia inspired by French support for the protests.

“In a way, these protests are producing an ideology that fits fully into the master signifiers of the post-socialist transition: anti-politics, technocratic experts, civil society, transparency, anti-communism, free market competition (an economy free from the meddling of the political class which is considered to be conducive to the mafia) – as the timing of the protests suggests,” Jana Tsoneva, a doctoral candidate from the Central European University attending the protests tells IPS.

Tsoneva adds that this mindset that distinguishes the Bulgarian movement from Greek or Turkish protests or the Occupy movement, is not necessarily shared by all participants but promoted by more prominent figures.

“As compared to the protests in February which were much more critical, for example in the stance towards foreign investors, these ones have a much more typical modernisation agenda,” Ivan Krastev tells IPS.

“Unlike in other places, like Greece, where people protested the European project, Bulgarians see Brussels as a natural ally. Therefore, officials in Europe are able to side with protesters against elites, not vice-versa.”

Both caution against symplifying the reading of these protests by linking them to one agenda or one class.

“We see on the streets people who are much more on the left, anti-capitalist, people who in the West would join Occupy, but also people with more classical liberal views who say liberals never got a chance because of the oligarchs,” adds Krastev. “This is an interesting coalition and it is interesting to see on what they agree and disagree.

“It is important that we are witnessing a big process of politicisation of the middle class and youth,” he adds, “even though the weakness of the broad, classical civic agenda of the protests is that it is unclear whether any political party can emerge from them.”

The post Bulgarians Set Out to Overhaul Politics appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Villagers from Zurawlow protesting in Warsaw. The banner says "Shale gas = the death of farming". Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS.

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Jul 24 2013 (IPS)

Since Jun. 3, inhabitants of the village Zurawlow in Grabowiec district in southeastern Poland have been occupying a field in their locality where the U.S. company Chevron plans to drill for shale gas. The farmers’ resistance is just the latest blow to shale gas proponents in the country.

Chevron, one of the world’s top five publicly owned oil and gas companies (the so-called “Big Oil”), owns four out of the 108 concessions for exploration for unconventional gas currently awarded by Poland (data from Jul. 1, 2013).

Over the past years, Poland has been perceived as one of Europe’s most promising locations for shale exploration. The U.S. government’s Energy Information Administration estimated two years ago that the country holds 187 trillion cubic feet shale gas resources, 44 trillion of which are in the Lubin Basin where Zurawlow lies. This year, the body revised those estimates downwards, to 148 trillion cubic feet for the country and nine trillion for the Lubin region, after applying tighter methodology.“If they go ahead with drilling thousands of metres underground, our water will be affected and there will be no more life in our fields." -- villager Stefan Jablonski

Given Poland’s annual gas consumption (currently over 600 billion cubic feet annually), the original EIA estimate has been translated to mean that shale gas resources would be enough to meet the country’s needs for 300 years, a figure often quoted by media and politicians.

The Polish centre-right government headed by Prime Minister Donald Tusk has been depicting shale gas as a way to both reduce Poland’s dependency on Russian gas imports (two-thirds of Polish gas demand is covered from Russian imports) and to make a transition away from dirty coal, which at the moment covers 60 percent of energy demand in the country.

Past the political rhetoric, facts on the ground are less rosy. Despite around 40 wells being drilled in the country since 2010 (including by Halliburton contracted by Polish state company PGNiG S.A.), no company has to date announced that it can extract gas for commercial purposes.

Over the past year, ExxonMobil and two other companies, Marathon Oil and Talisman, announced they would withdraw from Poland, doubting the gains they could make. The government appears to be in damage control mode, telling international media that Exxon still holds on to one out of six concessions and that Marathon has not yet submitted official requests to pull out.

Tusk’s team is also working on legislative changes to make the companies’ lives easier: in addition to tax breaks until 2020, firms would have the possibility to turn exploration licences into production licences automatically as well as to increase the depth of drilling without extra permits.

Yet the shale gas lobby thinks changes do not go far enough. According to the Polish Exploration and Production Industry Organisation (OPPPW), clearer wording is needed to ensure those who explore can automatically exploit (without the fields being put up for tender if gas is discovered), longer exploration permits are necessary, and too big a role is envisaged for a state company which is planned by Poland to have a stake in all exploitations.

“OPPPW members all wish to progress their projects in Poland,” Marcin Zieba, the industry group’s executive director told IPS. “But, as demonstrated by ExxonMobil, Talisman and Marathon stopping their operations. they can change their minds. We have yet to see a project in Poland that has demonstrated commercial flow rates – so this activity remains high risk, with no guarantee of success.”

Meanwhile, local opposition to fracking (pumping water and chemicals into the underground to release gas from rocks) is posing unexpectedly strong obstacles.

In 2012 already, Chevron had to stop operations in Zurawlow because locals successfully argued in courts that the company’s operations at the time were breaching the EU Birds Directive.

The occupation this year started when the company renewed attempts to begin work, beginning with trying to fence off one area. Protesters say that Chevron is treating the concession like private property while according to them “the concession was awarded for public purposes – searching for hydrocarbons – and activities in the area must be conducted with the knowledge and acceptance of society.”

In a controversy that might be telling of the murkiness of the Polish legislative framework, villagers argue that while Chevron has the concession, it has not received supplementary approvals from local authorities to do anything more than seismic testing in the region. Chevron retorts that they do have all necessary approvals.

In a response to protesters, the ministry of environment says the right to build (including wells) on the concession land must be further regulated by state authorities and does not derive automatically from the concession.

The legalistic battle, however, is just a facet of the fundamental conflict between villagers and Chevron: in the predominantly farming area of Zurawlow, people fear fracking will forever destroy their water and lands, endangering their livelihoods.

“If they go ahead with drilling thousands of metres underground, our water will be affected and there will be no more life in our fields,” villager Stefan Jablonski told IPS during a protest in Warsaw last week. “Not to mention that we might end up with no gas and no water too.”

Villagers complain that an assessment of environmental impacts for shale exploration has not been conducted for Zurawlow. According to Polish legislation, state authorities can decide on a case by case basis if such an assessment is required.

Asked to respond to the claims of the protesters by IPS during a press conference Jul. 15, Polish Minister of Environment Marcin Korolec said: “Shale gas constitutes an enormous opportunity for Poland. The majority of environmental issues are extremely emotional, as we see with the people of Zurawlow, but we have to keep our route and realise our policy.”

“Unfortunately, our ministry of environment is behaving like a representative of companies,” Agnieszka Grzybek from the Polish Green Party told IPS. “In the legislative pack discussed at the moment, there is a proposal that says that new NGOs cannot send comments and engage in the debate unless they have existed for more than a year. This would effectively exclude groups like the farmers from Zurawlow from having a say on shale gas.”

The post Poland’s Shale Gas Bubble ‘Bursting’ appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Antonio Onorati. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Claudia Ciobanu
ROME, Jun 21 2013 (IPS)

The International Planning Committee for Food Security (IPC) is the largest organisation of small food producers in the world, representing 300 million people, including La Via Campesina with its 200 million members.

It has been keeping an eye on FAO for over two decades. According to Onorati, the U.N. body has made significant progress in this period.

“In the 1980s, you couldn’t have imagined entering to the conference of FAO as civil society unless you maybe knew someone who brought you to a reception,” he tells TerraViva. “Now we are participants in the World Committee on Food Security and we are starting to have a say in the FAO technical committees. It is another world.”

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Why did IPC focus its work on FAO?

A: At FAO, the decision is made according to one state – one vote rule, which is very important, because in other places, such as the World Bank, the rule is one dollar – one vote.

In places like the World Bank or the World Trade Organisation, if you are a small producer, you have no chance: you can be an expert, you can be an observer, but when it comes to deciding you have no chance. Here, at least, you have a voice, you have the opportunity for conflict, because our members from organisations all over the world get to speak to their elected representatives.

Q: What important changes do you note in the organisation?

A: One interesting change we are seeing now is the increase in financial contributions from BRICS countries [Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa]. More important than the money they put into FAO is the fact that large developing countries are breaking the powerful dominant position of the OECD countries.

And this is important because the model of OECD countries is not able to bring new solutions, while we are seeing interesting things coming from developing countries: Brazil’s Fome Zero programme is famous, but what is less known is that China too has managed to cut the number of its food insecure people to half.

Another welcome change is that regional conferences are coming before the international one in Rome, so regions have a bigger word to say in setting priorities.

Q: What do you think of Da Silva’s programme for reforming FAO?

A: The reform is a necessity. Reducing staff and establishing clear chains of command was welcome. The food systems approach proposed by FAO is something we very much favour but might be resisted by some of the member states.

When it comes to the money, it is important to pay attention to the distinction between the regular budget made up of obligatory contributions, and the voluntary contributions, or the trust funds. The regular budget is the only money whose use is decided by the plenary, that is, democratically.

Trust funds, on the other hand, are a way for governments to condition FAO’s work: when a donor gives an amount, that donor can indicate the use of the money [the regular budget was 1.005 billion U.S. dollars for 2012/13 and voluntary contributions stood at a similar level]. It would be important to break the conditionality between the donor money and FAO’s work, but we are far from that step.

Q: How substantial do you feel is FAO’s engagement with civil society?

A: The real breakthrough was becoming participants in the World Committee on Food Security [the Committee is the part of the FAO structure focused on food security policies]. When it comes to FAO itself, the technical committees represent the essence of the work and there is where we have to have more space. In the biennial conference, we get to speak at the end of the end of the end and as NGOs.

FAO was set up after Yalta, which was a deal between big powers and big men, and in the spirit that peasants do not understand anything. But the reality is different and there is an increased recognition now that we have to be a part of the decision-making process because we are a part of the solution. If you don’t speak to the peasant, with whom do you speak?

The current DG and the previous one have been very supportive of this change. Governments too must understand that they should not be afraid of the small food producers, who are their citizens.

The post Q&A: “Do Not Fear Small Farmers” appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Marcela Villareal, Director of the Office for Communication, Partnerships and Advocacy, FAO. Credit: ©FAO/Giulio Napolitano

By Claudia Ciobanu
ROME, Jun 20 2013 (IPS)

Under the leadership of Brazilian Director General (DG) José Graziano da Silva, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has been engaged in a process of deep reform meant to make the organisation leaner and more effective in the fight against hunger. 

“One transformational element in the vision of the new DG is to seek  synergies among the various aspects of our work, so that we can be more focused and efficient in eliminating hunger,” explains FAO’s Marcela Villarreal, director of the Office for Communication, Partnerships and Advocacy. “I have been working for this organisation for 16 years and I can say that we are best when we take a multi-sector and multi-disciplinary approach: it is this kind of approach that will allow us to find innovative ways to solve age-old problems.” Excerpts from the interview follow:

Q: What are the core elements of the programme of work proposed by Graziano da Silva for FAO?

A: We are proposing five strategic objectives, the first of which is the elimination of hunger – we are no longer speaking just about reducing it. It is important to note here that, if years ago we thought that by increasing food production we could eradicate hunger, today we know that it is not only about production levels but also about access to food.

The second objective refers to increasing food production in a sustainable manner and the third calls for the eradication of rural poverty.

A strategic thinking process laid down the foundations of the current programme of work.  The MDG targets and indicators are very much focused on urban areas, despite rural poverty being one of the main challenges today.

In FAO’s work on rural poverty, we will focus on three rural populations at risk of poverty: the smallholders, whom we will help become more productive; those who sell their labour in rural areas, for the benefit of whom we will help countries generate decent employment increasing incomes and  access food; and, finally, for those who get left out altogether we need to advise countries on the creation of social safety nets, but in a way that is not just giving out of money but that eventually supports production and /or employment."If we in the U.N. systems can make [big corporations] be more mindful of their impact on the environment, labour, on issues around gender, then we have come a long way." -- Marcela Villarreal

Finally, last two strategic objectives refer to offering farmers better and more equitable access to markets and, respectively, building people’s resilience, thus lowering vulnerability to threats and crises.

It is our member states that will have to meet these objectives. Our role will be to contribute in a strategic and measurable way to their meeting of these objectives.

Q: How much leverage does FAO actually have on member states that might not be fully behind this vision of sustainable food systems proposed by the organisation?

A: We are very optimistic that we can implement this vision. We already see big progress happening: on Sunday, 38 countries were awarded for halving hunger levels, so the fact that we already got halfway gives us a good indication that we can work to achieve the real target, which is zero hunger.

At this conference, it is clear that governments across the board support the vision and the programme of work of the DG. Of course, a good measure of political will is to see budget allocated to these issues.

Q: Over the past years, FAO has expressed an increased willingness to engage with civil society. Have they been involved in the drafting of the five strategic objectives?

A: We cannot achieve any of these objectives without partnerships with civil society, the private sector, farmer’s organisations, cooperatives, research institutes and others.

The involvement of civil society is crucial in national policy dialogue processes, where their voices need to be heard and we are helping to facilitate their participation.

When it comes to the international level, civil society has been fully  involved in the World Committee on Food Security [the Committee is the part of the FAO structure focused on food security policies].

If we speak about partnerships, it is important to say that the private sector is also very important to us, from the smaller producers to the bigger ones, as they are the biggest investors in agriculture in the world, bigger than governments, international development aid, or foreign investors. Private actors can bring to the table a lot of knowledge and innovation.

Q: When it comes to the private companies, are you selective in choosing the ones you deal with, to make sure you avoid those whose business models hurt small farmers or the poor for example?

A: Yes! We have very clear mechanisms for assessing risk and dealing with it. When it comes to companies, we first run a due diligence process to see whether they have had problems with labour, human rights issues, environmental protection or other issues. Then we have a subcommittee on partnerships that analyses all the possible risks, and finally we have a committee on partnerships headed by the DG in person. So we take this issue very seriously.

We cannot ignore big corporations, they are big players in the world, but if we in the U.N. systems can make them be more mindful of their impact on the environment, labour, on issues around gender, then we have come a long way.

Q: When it comes to governments and national policies then, how can we expect FAO to react when a government allows for problematic practices to take place on its territory (e.g., land grabbing) or when it engages in problematic practices itself?

A: We are an intergovernmental organisation belonging to the U.N. system, so we work with governments who are our members. Our role is to ensure that they have the best knowledge and the best technical assistance so that they can meet the objectives set out above.

We promote good governance, which involves transparency, participation and accountability. Here, let me quote the words of Amartya Sen, who said that “by generating a public discussion, we have a part of the solution”.

The post Q&A: “The Real Target Is Zero Hunger” appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Nepal has one of the highest rates of malnutrition in the world. Over 41 percent of the country’s children suffer from chronic malnutrition, predominantly in rural areas. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Claudia Ciobanu
ROME, Jun 19 2013 (IPS)

In addition to the world’s 870 million hungry, many others are suffering from inadequate nutrition that does not allow them to live full lives, or find their fates highly vulnerable to price shifts on global food markets.

Published during FAO’s 38th biennial conference taking place Jun. 15-22 in Rome, Italy, the FAO Statistical Yearbook 2013 combines national statistics from all over the world to paint a global picture of food security and nutrition.

It is already well known that 12.5 percent of the world population, or 870 million people, were undernourished in 2010-2012, 852 million of whom live in developing countries.

Even though significant progress has been made in combating hunger over the past decade, the global economic crisis has put a break on this positive transformation in many places around the world.

While the focus of the first Millenium Development Goal is halving world hunger by 2015, FAO’s Yearbook draws attention to the need to look beyond the number of undernourished, to the number of those who suffer from “food inadequacy”. These are people who might not be considered undernourished under normal circumstances, but do live on a diet that prevents them from adequately conducting physical activities that require significant effort.

Countries such as Bangladesh, India, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Swaziland or Kenya have large populations suffering from food inadequacy while not being on the list of states where chronic undernourishment is widespread.

To take India as a case in point, undernourishment reached 17.4 percent in 2010-2012, or 217 million people, while the food inadequacy rate was 27.5 percent in the same period.

As many of the less-well-off people rely on physical work for survival, governments need to pay attention to this additional indicator, argues FAO.

The statistics compilation also makes it clear that increasing food production will not necessarily bring about a decrease in hunger, unless accompanied by other policies, as Nobel prize winner Amartya Sen stressed in his lecture kicking off the FAO Conference.

While in many countries and regions high food availability is positively correlated with proper nourishment, this is not necessarily the case everywhere. For instance, Egypt’s dietary supply adequacy (indicative of the caloric value of the food available in the country) is 45 percent more than what is deemed necessary for proper nutrition. Yet 31 percent of children under the age of five suffer from stunting, often the result of prolonged periods of inadequate nutrition.

Similar situations occur in Benin, Malawi, the Niger, Kazakhstan or Nicaragua, proving that ensuring adequate nutrition depends significantly on the ability to distribute available resources equitably, without allowing for pockets of poverty to be created.

The world’s poor are not only constantly struggling to meet their nutrition needs, but they are also the most likely to be affected by fluctuations of food prices. This is because the poor spend the highest share of their disposable incomes on food, making them very vulnerable to sudden food price increases or decreases in revenues.

The FAO Yearbook notes several countries around the world are particularly exposed to world food markets: Mexico when it comes to maize, the Philippines for rice, Egypt for wheat and bread.

In many places, food price increases have led to increased hunger rates over the past years: for instance, in Uganda, food prices increased by 25 percent between 2003-2005 and 2010-2012, which came together with a rise in undernourishment rates of 30 percent.

But this is not always the case: rising food prices brought reductions in hunger rates in countries such as China, Nepal and Pakistan. The difference is made by the extent to which the vulnerable populations are net food producers or consumers, and by national policies which may buffer domestic markets from price changes on international markets.

The post A Closer Look at Nutrition appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Water scarcity features among FAO's five new strategic objectives. Credit: Bigstock

By Claudia Ciobanu
ROME, Jun 19 2013 (IPS)

The Middle East and North Africa is the region most affected by water scarcity in the world, and for the moment, the situation seems set to worsen.

“In Yemen, we do not have many sources of fresh water and rain water is certainly not enough for our needs,” Gunid Ali Abdullah, planning director at Yemen’s Ministry of Agriculture, tells TerraViva in Rome. “We are all the time having to dig deeper and deeper to get water from aquifers.”"The potential of the region is not being met." -- FAO's Mohamed Bazza

In Yemen’s capital Sana’a, tap water is rationed, and farmers close to the city have deepened their wells by tens of metres over the past decade but are nevertheless extracting less water than before.

Yemen is certainly not unique in a region where per capita water consumption in many countries stands well below the U.N.’s water scarcity mark of 1,000 cubic metres yearly. To compare, the global water consumption average is above 6,000 cubic metres.

Countries in the region are already tapping non-replenishable water resources, or fossil aquifers.

“At the end of this year, we should be able to start using water coming from the Al-Disi Basin, at the border with Saudi Arabia, which we hope will come a long way in meeting the needs of our capital, Amman, which hosts 3.5 million people, almost half of our total population,” Feisal Alargan, deputy permanent representative of Jordan to FAO, tells TerraViva.

The Al-Disi aquifer is thought to be about 320 kilometres long, the largest of its type in the Arabian peninsula. It has already been exploited by Saudi Arabia, and its resources are thought to be non-renewable.

Jordan is ranked third in the world when it comes to water scarcity, relying mostly on rain and underground water as well as on a supply quota of the river Jordan agreed with Israel.

In such conditions, figuring out how to use non-replenishable water resources, despite the unsustainability of the solution and despite some doubts over the quality of the water, seems like a miraculous way out for Jordanian leaders and others in the region.

Yet such approaches resemble a race to the bottom: a NASA report published in March this year showed that, between 2003 and 2009, the Middle East lost a quantity of water equivalent to the volume of the Dead Sea.

And things might get worse: the World Bank predicts that water demand in the region is expected to grow by 60 percent by 2045.

The region’s water problems are caused by a natural lack of water resources combined, according to experts, with poor management of the existing resources at both the national level and regionally.

The lack of intra-regional cooperation is most noticeable when it comes to sharing water from transboundary rivers: outdated accords make it so that Egypt uses most of the Nile’s potential; Turkey, upstream from other countries on the course of the Euphrates and the Tigris, is sucking up most valuable resources via its intensive use of dams; the use of river Jordan remains an issue of controversy between Israel and neighbouring Arab countries.

Governments in the region are of course struggling to find solutions to the problem of water scarcity.

“We’re working on the construction of small dams in the highlands in order to harvest water,” explains Yemen’s Gunid Ali Abdullah. “We’re also trying to modernise irrigation methods in order to use less water for agriculture, which currently takes up about 90 percent of our precious water resources.”

But the challenges are high and cooperation is key to overcoming water scarcity in the region.

International organisations have been trying to tackle water issues in the region in the past with technical assistance programmes and grants, with limited success.

This year, the U.N. FAO is attempting to change the approach to the issue: throughout 2013, it is conducting a thorough assessment of water resources and use in the whole region, trying both to treat the region as a whole and to pay close attention to the multiple interactions between water and all other aspects of human life.

“The Near East region has to meet half of its food needs via imports because of lack of water to produce enough food itself,” explains Mohamed Bazza, FAO’s focal point for national drought policies.

Bazza stresses that the central role of water for achieving food security makes water scarcity issues crucial for FAO, which explains why water scarcity features among the five new strategic objectives to be pursued by the institution.

“Numerous efforts have been made in the past to improve food security in the region on different aspects, including water use, but something has not been working, meaning that the potential of the region is not being met,” Bazza says.

FAO’s comprehensive assessment will this year look for the reasons behind the region’s water crisis, as well as try to identify what should be priority areas of action to address these problems.

Solutions not emphasised much until now could become more prominent: for instance, shifting  agricultural production towards less water-intensive crops or even reducing food waste on the fields as wasted crops also mean wasted water.

The post The Great Water Challenge appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Soybean field near Eldorado in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. Credit: Gerson Sobreira/IPS

By Claudia Ciobanu
ROME, Jun 18 2013 (IPS)

“We do believe that it’s perfectly possible to end extreme poverty in Brazil by 2015,” Antonino Marques Porto, Brazil’s ambassador to FAO, tells TerraViva in Rome.

Brazil is currently implementing the Brasil Sem Miséria programme — a continuation of the successful Fome Zero— which aims to do just that, Marques Porto says. Initiated in 2003 by former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Fome Zero is credited with having taken 30 to 40 million Brazilians out of poverty.

“It involved among others cash transfers to the poorest families, conditioned on children going to school and getting vaccines,” the ambassador says,” but also rural credits and investments in small farms.”

One of the core actions of the programme was providing poor children with free school lunches, which were purchased by the state from family farms. In this way, support to local small farmers was provided at the same time as offering quality nutrition to children from low-income families.

According to Marques Porto, supporting family farms – which currently provide 70 percent of the food eaten by Brazilians – is central to poverty alleviation.

The success of Fome Zero was due to three elements, thinks Oxfam International’s Luca Chinotti: the strong leadership provided by President Lula; the broad partnership involved in devising and implementing the platform, which included ministries, civil society, representatives of small farmers and rural workers; and shifting most public sector food purchases to family farm suppliers.

Brazil is sharing its experience with family farm produce purchases for poverty alleviation with other countries around the world, as part of the World Food Programme’s Purchase for Progress framework, says Marques Porto.

Over the past decade, Brazil has been deriving much of its wealth from food exports. Yet its large-scale soy and beef production for export are also responsible for deforestation and biodiversity loss in the Amazonian region. Furthermore, clearing of land for industrial agriculture is threatening livelihoods of local communities.

“Across the world, rural communities rely on land, forests and fisheries for their food security,” says Oxfam’s Chinotti. “If policies and projects reduce their access to those natural resources, the outcome will be more hunger.”

Last year, FAO published a set of “Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries, and Forests in the Context of National Food Security”, offering guidance to countries around the world on just systems of tenure, that are compatible with every person’s right to adequate food

Oxfam and other NGOs are now calling on all countries around the world to implement those guidelines in order to secure smallholders’ access to land and natural resources.

This year, the U.N.’s High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda proposed that clear targets on land tenure are included in the development framework that will replace the Millennium Development Goals after 2015. If adopted, such targets could play an important role in preventing land grabbing and protecting the food security of local communities.

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