Anote Tong, the president of Kiribati, claims to have created a marine protected area, but fishing is banned in just three percent of the reserve. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS

A growing chorus of politicians, scientists and environmentalists are urging President Anote Tong of Kiribati to actually do what he claims was already done in 2008: create the world’s most effective marine protected area in a remote archipelago in the Central Pacific Ocean.

For years, Tong has been saying that under his leadership, Kiribati created the California-sized Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA), “making it off limits to fishing and other extractive uses” – a quote that gets about 500 hits on Google, all Tong’s or his government’s. In speeches at climate change conferences and other venues, he has repeatedly called PIPA his country’s great gift to the world.

But what Kiribati actually did in 2008 was ban fishing in the three percent of the reserve that wasn’t being fished in the first place: the area around the islands, which are uninhabited. In the rest of the reserve, as in the rest of Kiribati’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), industrial tuna fishing has been steadily increasing as prices and profits soar.

In an interview with IPS in the capital island of Tarawa, Tong, who was first elected a decade ago, said that he had no intention of closing PIPA to fishing anytime soon. “It’s got to be done gradually,” he said, declining to set a date.

“President Tong has been misleading the world about the true status of the Phoenix Islands marine reserve,” Seni Nabou, an oceans campaigner with the environmental organisation Greenpeace, said in an e-mail from Fiji.

“While the world has hailed Kiribati for its conservation efforts, it seems the reserve has only served to bankroll the Spanish tuna fleets fishing in its waters. President Tong now needs to deliver on the talk.”

Misleading claims

For the creation of PIPA, Tong received several prestigious awards from organisations whose officials said in interviews that they had believed the entire reserve was closed to fishing. These awards include a Benchley Award for Excellence in National Stewardship of the Ocean in the United States and a Hillary Leadership Award in New Zealand.

In Tarawa, the skinny atoll home to more than half of Kiribati’s population of 100,000, most people queried, including several members of parliament, said they believed that PIPA had long ago been closed to fishing.

Teburoro Tito, Tong’s predecessor, was scathing about the current president’s descriptions of PIPA.

“The people of Kiribati will be disappointed to learn that their president had lied to the world and particularly those who were led to believe that he deserved prestigious awards” for closing PIPA, said Tito, who is still a member of parliament, now in the opposition. “He must close PIPA [to all fishing] immediately to salvage the country’s honor.”

An estimated 50,000 tons of tuna were taken out of PIPA last year at a time scientists say fishing levels should be decreasing, not increasing.

“Closing PIPA  would be the single most effective act of marine conservation in history” and a big step in preventing the world’s last major population of skipjack tuna from becoming as depleted as those of the Atlantic and Indian oceans, said Daniel Pauly, a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

In the interview, Tong said no progress had been made toward banning fishing in PIPA in the last five years because Kiribati requires millions of dollars in financial compensation to do so.

Kiribati earns between 30 and 50 percent of its budget from selling the right to fish in its waters to foreign fleets. Tong insisted that the doubling last year of Kiribati’s income from these licences means that the current demand for compensation – 50 million dollars for the PIPA Trust Fund – should be increased.

“Would we lose any money as a result of closing PIPA?” he asked rhetorically. “We would.” Dismissing the notion that it would be hard to ask international donors for money to protect tuna at a time when Kiribati’s tuna income is soaring, he insisted that that revenue would increase by a slimmer margin if PIPA were closed, adding, “So there is that lost opportunity cost,” which he casually estimated at “an extra two, five million dollars” a year.

But experts disagreed with Tong and raised the question of whether he ever intended to close PIPA in the first place. They said that while the closure would inconvenience foreign fleets, the mobility of both the tuna and the drifting fish-aggregating devices the fleets use meant that they could easily fish around the reserve and catch the same amount of fish.

And with profit margins for purse seiners now exceeding 100 percent, or 1,000 dollars a ton, the fleets would be unlikely to leave Kiribati’s waters, of which the reserves makes up 11 percent, if PIPA were closed, experts pointed out.

“I’m sure foreign fishing interests will use the closure as a tool when they negotiate their fishing contracts, so the loss of revenue for Kiribati will depend on how well they negotiate,” said John Hampton, the region’s chief fisheries scientist.

Overlooking the dispute

Kiribati’s senior partner in PIPA, Conservation International of Arlington, Virginia, never challenged Tong’s compensation claims. With a staff of nearly 1,000, CI is one of the largest conservation organisations in the world. Its executive committee chairman is Wal-Mart’s head, Rob Walton, and its vice chair is the film star Harrison Ford.

CI’s senior vice president and chief scientist for oceans, Gregory Stone, who dived the Phoenix in 2000, proposed the idea of a giant reserve to Tong and helped Kiribati build a legal and financial infrastructure for PIPA.

Today, PIPA is CI’s biggest project, while Tong sits on CI’s board. CI’s website says the president “has gone further than almost anyone to protect the planet’s most pristine waters for the global good” and until recently called PIPA “completely off-limits to commercial fishing”.

In a series of phone calls, Stone brushed aside any questions of dishonesty and insisted that small countries like Kiribati needed sympathy and understanding to espouse conservation, not criticism. He said the negotiations over compensation were “progressing” and added, “Creating marine reserves takes time and patience.”

The management plan on PIPA’s website calls for CI to raise 13.5 million dollars by the end of 2014, after which another 25 percent of PIPA will be closed to fishing, for a total of 28 percent. Stone said he was optimistic he could raise the money, even though nearly a decade after fundraising began, the PIPA trust fund is still empty.

Jay Nelson, who recently retired as head of Pew’s Global Ocean Legacy program and was involved in creating several giant no-take reserves, said attracting such donations in today’s economic climate is unrealistic, especially since most people think the reserve is already closed.

“CI needs to admit that they won’t be able to raise that kind of money and tell President Tong to close it immediately so it lives up to its claim as a world-class marine reserve,” he said.

Members of the Pukobjê-Gavião indigenous people in the Governador indigenous territory. Credit: Courtesy of CIMI

The powerful tractors and other farm machinery that landowners recently used to block roads at a dozen points from north to south in Brazil illustrated the economic clout of big agriculture, which rose up against the demarcation of indigenous reserves.

The presence of lawmakers in the protests also indicated the growing political influence of the “ruralistas” – the bloc of large landowners in the Brazilian Congress that frequently deals blows to the left-leaning government of Dilma Rousseff, which nominally holds a broad majority in the legislature.

The “national strike” organised Friday Jun. 14 by the Agricultural Parliamentary Front mobilised a few thousands of farmers in some places and a few hundred in others. But the protests and roadblocks were only part of an ongoing offensive by landowners and agribusiness against the creation of new indigenous territories and the expansion of existing ones.

The main objective of the ruralistas is to modify the 1988 constitution, which guarantees indigenous groups the exclusive right to land that they have traditionally lived on, and a large enough area to provide for their “physical and cultural” survival.

In 2012, the rural bloc managed to get the country’s forest code overhauled, to their own benefit and at the expense of the environment.

Other measures that they are demanding, like the participation of the ministries of agriculture and agrarian development, and agricultural research centres, in the process of demarcation of native lands, are aimed at hindering the recognition of new indigenous reserves.

The ruralistas represent “a major step backwards,” said Marcos Terena, an official at the government’s indigenous affairs agency, FUNAI, and a veteran activist for native rights.

The ruralistas see it as a dispute over land ownership, said Marcio Santilli, an expert with the non-governmental Socioenvironmental Institute and a former head of FUNAI. According to him, the landowners want to expand agribusiness as usual, taking over public lands, whether they are unoccupied or form part of indigenous or nature reserves.

Areas that have officially been recognised as traditional indigenous territory often contain pockets of private property, which are illegal and are subject to expropriation to incorporate them as part of the reserve.

Santilli said the landowners are trying to depict such situations as mere conflicts over land.

A number of such private properties were illegally acquired. But in the western state of Mato Grosso do Sul, many landowners have valid title deeds, granted by previous governments. In that area, a large number of conflicts over land have dragged on for decades, and many have become violent.

The ranching and soy-growing state accounted for 57 percent of the 560 murders of indigenous people documented between 2003 and 2012 in Brazil, according to the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI), linked to the Catholic Church.

Although not all of the killings were over land disputes, the number of murders of indigenous people in such conflicts reflects the asymmetry in the clash between the ruralistas and Amerindians.

The 2010 census counted nearly 900,000 indigenous people in this country of 198 million – three times the number found in 1991, when the category of native people was incorporated into the census, for people to self-identify their ethnic origin.

The recognition of the rights of ethnic minorities in the 1988 constitution helped boost the sense of indigenous identity, leading to more people identifying themselves as native people, even outside of their home villages and reserves.

Of the nearly 900,000 people who identified themselves as indigenous in the 2010 census, 36 percent lived in towns and cities. There are large native communities in some cities, such as Campo Grande, the capital of Mato Grosso do Sul.

The resurgence of indigenous identity and cultures also helped lead to advances in education among indigenous people, including the rescue of native languages and the incorporation of new technologies.

Terena, the FUNAI official, predicted that within about a decade, “a new factor” would give a boost to development in indigenous communities and their relations with mainstream society: “indigenous doctors” who are now being trained in the country’s universities “without losing their own cultures,” especially in southern Brazil, he said.

This phenomenon has represented a reverse in Brazil’s history of ethnocide since the arrival of the Portuguese colonisers in 1500, when there were an estimated five million indigenous people in the territory that is now Brazil. But it is now facing new threats.

Besides the ruralistas, which are seeking to tie the hands of the institutions that have fomented the resurgence of indigenous identity, major infrastructure projects in the Amazon jungle are modifying the living conditions and territories of indigenous communities.

Plans for the construction of dozens of hydroelectric dams on rivers in the Amazon basin have led to growing tension and battles between indigenous communities, dam-building companies and the government.

Police repression has been stepped up as indigenous activists have repeatedly invaded the Belo Monte hydropower plant under construction on the Xingu river, a major tributary of the Amazon river, in the northern state of Pará.

An indigenous protester, Oziel Gabriel, died during a May 30 police operation in the town of Sidrolandia in Mato Grosso do Sul.

He was apparently killed by a police bullet during a court-ordered eviction of hundreds of indigenous people who had occupied part of a large landed estate officially identified as part of the traditional territory of the Terena people 13 years ago.

The demarcation of the territory has been delayed by lawsuits, legal rulings and difficulties in indemnifying the owner of the land.

The correlation of forces and the government’s strong emphasis on economic development are totally negative for indigenous people.

But in their favour are the constitution, international conventions and international public opinion that defends diversity and native rights.

With the awareness and values that have been built up, “Brazilian society today would not allow the country to move backwards in terms of rights enshrined in the constitution,” said Paulo Maldos, head of the National Secretariat for Social Articulation in the Brazilian presidency, whose work has taken him into dangerous negotiations with indigenous groups that have occupied land.

Negative repercussions have discouraged anti-indigenous actions. Every indigenous person who is killed, like Gabriel, becomes a martyr and strengthens the resolve of the communities. For that reason this latest death might moderate the ruralista offensive against indigenous territories.

According to FUNAI, there are more than 450 indigenous territories in Brazil in the process of being demarcated, covering more than 100,000 hectares, while another one hundred or so are in the initial stage of being identified.

A typical Canaan hillside, with many houses under construction. Credit: HGW/Milo Milfort

Three years after its star-studded launch by President René Préval, actor Sean Penn and other Haitian and foreign dignitaries, the model “Corail-Cesselesse” camp for Haiti’s 2010 earthquake victims has helped give birth to what might become the country’s most expansive – and most expensive – slum.

Known collectively as “Canaan”, “Jerusalem” and “ONAville”, the new shantytown spread across 1,100-hectares is here to stay, Haitian officials told Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW). Taxpayers and foreign donors will likely spend hundreds of millions to urbanise the region and as much as another 64 million U.S. dollars to pay off landowners, who are threatening to sue the government and humanitarian agencies.

Three years after its launch, the multimillion-dollar model camp located 18 kilometres northeast of the capital of Port-au-Prince is today surrounded by tens of thousands of squatters’ shacks and homes that have become a source of embarrassment for local and international actors alike.

Before the earthquake, most of this arid, rocky expanse running from the outskirts of Port-au-Prince up to Cabaret was largely empty. Much of it is owned by the Haitian firm NABATEC S.A, which since 1999 had tried to develop it into an “integrated economic zone” (IEZ) called “Habitat Haïti 2020″.

The Habitat Haiti 2020 plan included industrial parks, single- and multi-unit housing for various income levels, schools, green spaces and a shopping mall. A Korean company and a U.S.-based humanitarian group had already purchased land within its perimeter, and on the eve of the quake, NABATEC was holding discussions with a number of foreign firms interested in setting up factories and was preparing to break ground.

“It was a 15-year, 2-billion-billion dollar project, and everyone had already given their approval, including the Haitian government and the World Bank,” according to Gérald Emile “Aby” Brun, an architect, the president of NABATEC and vice president of the TECINA S.A. planning and construction firm.

A 2011 World Bank study of potential IEZ sites ranked it best out of 21 possibilities around the country, calling it potentially “high-performing” and “the clearest application of the IEZ concept among any proposed project in Haiti”.

Model camp leads to disaster

Today, the plans have been shelved. The once empty landscape is now home to perhaps 100,000 people: 10,000 in the planned camps and the rest squatters. And they aren’t going anywhere.

“We can’t move them out,” Haitian government planner Odnell David told HGW in an exclusive interview. “The idea is to reorganise the space so that people can live.”

Urbanising about half of the wasteland will cost Haitian and foreign taxpayers “many hundreds of millions of dollars”, noted David, an architect and the director of the housing section of the government’s Construction of Housing and Public Buildings Agency. The price tag for initial infrastructure work already exceeds 50 million U.S. dollars.

Opened in April 2010 for earthquake victims evacuated from unsafe camps, the Corail-Cesselesse camp represented the reconstruction’s model resettlement. It sits on two sloping parcels of the 5,000 hectares of private land declared “of public utility” by the central government in March 2010.

But from the start, the choice to move people to the desert-like plain was controversial for two reasons.

First, some critics accused Brun and NABATEC of seeking to profit from the earthquake. Then, many said the land beneath the camps, and indeed much of the region itself, was not appropriate for settlement, whether temporary or permanent, for environmental and economic reasons. 

Despite the controversies, humanitarian agencies like the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), World Vision and American Refugee Committee (ARC) together spent over 10 million dollars to build about 1,500 small houses, schools, playgrounds, latrines and solar-powered street lamps.

Agencies had planned to build many more camps nearby, but as soon as the U.S. Army bulldozers cleared the first plots, tens of thousands of people invaded the surrounding area, “buying” parcels from racketeers, marking off plots and pitching makeshift tents.

No one in the central government said anything to prevent the incursions, which continue today. Many say the land was offered to supporters of President Préval’s “Inite” political party for 10 dollars per square metre.

The new “landowners” received fake titles in exchange for cash and their votes in the upcoming presidential elections, according to Brun and other sources, who asked not to be named.

Planned or not, and political scheme or not, today those tents have turned into houses built every which way, in what the UCLBP’s David calls a “savage urbanisation” with “no infrastructure, no water, no electricity, no sanitation”.

“People just appropriated land and are trying to accomplish their dreams of becoming homeowners,” he said.

NABATEC wants to be paid

At first, Brun and NABATEC hoped the government and major reconstruction actors would eject the squatters and camp residents, or to at least turn the camp’s temporary shelters into permanent houses so that they could become the beginning of Habitat Haïti 2020 (see Capitalising on Disaster?).

But as months passed, the NABATEC partners – some of them members of Haiti’s most economically powerful families – realised their project would no longer be possible.

“The country lost a great opportunity,” Brun said. “I have been working on that project for 16 years.”

Now, NABATEC wants to be indemnified according to the law and the Constitution. The company has submitted paperwork to the government tax office and to each of the three ministers of finance who have held office since the “public utility” declaration.

If the government reimburses NABATEC for that land and the land currently occupied by the camps and the squatters, the company is due 64 million dollars.

“We have submitted all the papers and titles,” Brun said in May. “Verbally, in conversations, they say, ‘Yes, we recognise it’s your land,’ and they say they are going to pay us, but… nothing on paper.”

In an effort to confirm Brun’s statements, HGW made almost a dozen requests for interviews with tax office officials, in writing and in person, over the course of three months. Raymond Michel, head of the property division, promised an interview, but warned, “This dossier is very, very sensitive,” and later reneged on his promise.

Brun, meanwhile, is growing impatient. NABATEC is open to the idea of negotiating, but the company is also thinking about suing both the government and the humanitarian agencies that are continuing to carry out projects at Corail or are helping the squatters in the areas outside the camps, for “infringing on property owners rights”.

“It’s been three years now,” Brun said.

Seeking funding from, and for, the promised land

While NABATEC lobbies the Ministry of Finance and the tax office for monetary compensation, the government’s Construction of Housing and Public Buildings Agency is also seeking funding, but not to pay the landowners. Instead, the agency hopes to carry out its own development: the urbanisation of about 500 hectares for the squatters.

According to David, an initial plan is ready.

“It is a very perfect plan. It has roads, it has water systems, it has sanitation,” David said, but he refused to share it with journalists, claiming it had not yet been approved.

But the proto-slum won’t turn into an organised neighbourhood any time soon. Among other challenges, the residents who have marked out “their” land will have to be convinced to move to make way for infrastructure.

“We will need a lot of resources, and the state doesn’t have all the funding it would need… We are seeking financing so that we can at least begin,” he said. “It won’t happen tomorrow.”

In the meantime, newcomers continue to arrive at the no man’s land with bundles of belongings, tent stakes and a few cement blocks.

Read the second article in this two-part series here. Original story at http://www.haitigrassrootswatch.org.

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

Joel Monfiston next to his shed in Sector 3 of Corail-Cesselesse Camp. Credit: HGW/Milo Milfort

Despite the unforgiving sun and its sweltering heat, Joel Monfiston is working, hammering a piece of worn plywood, watering flowers and picking the weeds out from between rocks and pebbles.

Monfiston, a 34-year-old father and husband, is one of about 10,000 people who live in what was publicised as the model settlement for the 1.3 million Haitians displaced by the January 2010 earthquake.

Monfiston lives at the Corail-Cesselesse camp, inaugurated in the spring of 2010 by Hollywood actor Sean Penn, then-Haitian President René Préval and other officials. The settlement is 18 kilometres from the capital in the middle of an almost lunar landscape.

Soon after it opened, tens of thousands of squatters set up tents, huts and houses on over 1,000 hectares of land surrounding the camp, laying the groundwork for what will soon be Haiti’s largest slum. (See “Reconstruction of Haiti Slum to Cost Hundreds of Millions of Dollars”.)

At first, Monfiston and his family lived in a tent. Now they have a 24-square-metre “temporary shelter” built by the humanitarian agency World Vision for 4,500 U.S. dollars and made mostly of plywood and sheet metal. Like most Haitians, he survives with day jobs here and there and with help from friends and family. He also tries his hand at commerce.

“Things are not easy. Imagine: they put you here, but there’s no work,” he said.

Monfiston has dreams. He hopes to set up a shop in the little shed he is building. He would like to grow more in his garden. But those remain dreams. For now, all he has are a few flowers and a few walls for his “store”, which has no shelves, no door, no cooler, no products.

And, like other Corail residents, while he does have access to latrines, some electricity (solar-powered street lamps), playgrounds, a clinic and schools, water is not so easy to find.

In 2011, the United Nations and international humanitarian agency Oxfam promised that a new system of cisterns and kiosks would soon provide residents with water from the state water agency.

Two years later, the faucets remain dry. Residents buy water at five gourdes (about 12 U.S. cents) per bucket from private vendors or from the committees that manage the few still-functioning water “bladders” left from the camp’s early days, when water and food were free and when agencies provided “cash for work” jobs and start-up funds for entrepreneurs.

Today, all of the big agencies are gone. Trumpeting their successes and claiming to have prepared a “transition” to the local authorities, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), American Refugee Committee (ARC) and World Vision all pulled out (although World Vision still supports the Corail School, which it built).

“Mayor of Croix-des-Bouquets is the New Camp Manager“, a cheery article from the United Nations peacekeeping mission declared in a May 27, 2011 bulletin. But HGW found no evidence of any local authorities or assistance on two separate visits to the camp.

The “City Hall Annex” at the Corail camp was shuttered, and residents told journalists that they could not remember when they last saw anyone from the government.

“Nobody from the mayor’s office has set foot here for many months,” said Racide d’Or, a member of the Corail residents committee.

“They were only around when they knew there was land in the area they could ‘sell’, ” continued the mother of two, who lost her home in earthquake. “There is no ‘government’ or ‘state’ for those of us who live here. We have to figure out everything ourselves.”

The Croix-des-Bouquets City Hall annex in the nearby squatters’ settlement known as “Canaan” is sweltering at midday. The “office” is an empty container and a “conference room” of plywood and a blue plastic tarp roof. Two men there said they worked for City Hall but refused to give their names or allow their voices to be recorded.

“They just dumped us here,” said one, aged about 30. “We don’t have the means to work. Our supervisor never comes to see how we are doing.”

“I’d like to know what they were thinking when they put this office here,” said the other one, older, who was slouched in a plastic chair. “We don’t do anything.”

The absence of humanitarian agencies has one benefit. When agencies were handing out food, jobs and cash, gangs and “mafias” ran various parts of the camps. An Oxfam programme that handed out up to 1,000 dollars to some – but not all – small businesspeople led to disagreements, rumours, protests and eventually arrests.

“The NGOs divided us. People fought with each other,” Auguste Gregory told HGW as he sat with friends next to his telephone-charging business: a table covered with power strips and chargers.

“Some people went to prison. Others went into hiding. We were all there for the same reason, but they divided us,” he remembered.

For much of 2010, a gang calling itself “The Committee of Nine” threatened residents and aid providers alike, so much so that ARC Camp Manager Richard Poole quit his job and left the country.

“My three months at Corail were one of the most difficult periods I have experienced in my 30 years as a humanitarian worker,” Poole later told HGW in an email interview. ARC received about 400,000 U.S. dollars to manage the camp for eight months in 2010.

Still, some humanitarian actors say the Corail settlement was not a complete failure.

“It is important to look at where the families were at the beginning of the earthquake and where they are now,” World Vision told HGW in an email. The agency said it spent about 7 million dollars on 1,200 shelters, a school, playgrounds and various programs.

People “came from areas which were prone to flash flooding, mudslides and disease outbreaks, but now they are in a safer and more secure community”, the agency pointed out. “The families have homes and are protected.”

For Monfiston and his neighbours, however, the “outcome” has not yet produced a way that can pay for food and school for his children.

Alexis Roffy Eddiness Djoly Barns, an artist, is tired of waiting for work, for water and for an “outcome”. He is also nervous about the changing landscape of the region, which is now home to the 10,000 camp residents and perhaps 100,000 squatters.

“They are starting to build a slum right over there,” he said, indicating the expanse of small houses in Jerusalem and Canaan. “Each person is fighting for his little piece of land. The government should do what it’s supposed to do and say – ‘No, this must stop!’”

Read the first article in this two-part series here. Original story at http://www.haitigrassrootswatch.org.

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

An expulsion centre for asylum seekers in Estonia. Credit: Marian Männi/IPS

For asylum seekers, Estonia is the least attractive country in the European Union, so the numbers say. According to Eurostat only 75 people last year asked for protection in this country that borders Russia and Finland. Local human rights activists suspect that many of those in need for help are turned down at the border without getting a chance to ask for asylum.

“We are from Syria and we want protection,” a 28-year-old veterinarian (he withheld his name for security reasons) said at the border when Estonian guards pushed him on the floor. The Syrian recalls to IPS how they told him and his friend to return to Russia.

In desperation, he tore up his passport. By Estonian law, asylum seekers are obliged to apply for protection at the border. If they fail to do that or if they do not have a valid document, they are taken to an expulsion centre, where they can hand in their application.

The Syrian was lucky. “Those who apply for asylum in the expulsion centre at least get the chance,” Kristi Toodo, head of the Estonian Refugee legal aid clinic tells IPS. “But all the others who have documents and can be sent back to Russia – we don’t know anything about them.”

“This is manipulation,” says Shaheed, an asylum seeker from Pakistan. “They don’t take the application at the border and they don’t provide you with any paper or anything so you could write your request.” He says the very first word he spoke at the border was “asylum”, so there couldn’t have been any misunderstandings.

In court it is the asylum seekers’ word against that of the guards. “We cannot prove these incidents if we don’t have someone to monitor the border,” Kristina Kallas, head of the Estonian Refugee Council tells IPS.

For years the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has proposed independent observers to monitor Estonian borders, but without success. Three years ago they pointed out in a report on Estonia the “remarkably low number of registered asylum seekers at the border” and the “possible lack of access to the asylum procedure for persons in need of international protection who are being turned away at the border.”

Eight other Eastern European countries with the EU external border have concluded an agreement with the UNHCR for independent observers at borders. Estonia’s southern neighbour Latvia has had independent observers at the border for two years. The number of applications rocketed from 61 to 335 in the year the observers came along.

Anhelita Kamenska, director of the Latvian Centre for Human Rights, remains noncommittal. “Many of the State Border Guard facilities have not been monitored independently by anyone in the past. It takes time to build trust on both sides.”

There is no reason to distrust the administrators at the border, says Ruth Annus, head of the migration and border policy department at the Estonian Ministry. There is no evidence for stories of people turned away at the border, she tells IPS in her office in Tallinn. “Estonia has so few applicants, because it’s simply not an attractive country for them.”

Estonia’s living standards are lower than those of its neighbouring countries like Sweden or Finland, she says, and the country is not on the refugee route, like Malta or Italy.

Markku Aikomus, senior regional external relations officer at the UNHCR regional office for the Baltic and Nordic Countries tells IPS that it is each government’s right to secure its territory, especially as migration movements are getting ever more complex and involve millions of migrants. “But it is also vital that even the strictest border management does not prevent those seeking international protection in accessing their territory.”

The Syrian has been at the expulsion centre for two months now and has no idea when he will be freed. Some have second thoughts. After six months of waiting and no progress in sight Pakistani Naveed-ur-Rehmaan decided to take his application back.

“Yes, I will have problems with Pakistani terrorist groups, but at least in Pakistan I have freedom,” he tells IPS at the expulsion centre, where this correspondent met him, the Syrian and two other asylum seekers, who have been waiting for their court decisions for months. The building, surrounded with wire fence, looks like a jail located next to it. “They are just degrading us. I cannot take it any more.”

Last year 17 people left the country before their asylum decisions were made. For many, Estonia is just a transit country, a door to the EU.

Stories about how welcoming different countries are spread fast among asylum seekers. Human rights lawyer Toodo believes that this might be one of the reasons why Estonia is so unpopular. On the other hand, Estonia has the European Union external border. “We have a responsibility towards other EU countries,” Toodo says, adding that she can also understand the Estonian government’s stand.

Healthy soil looks dark, crumbly, and porous, and is home to worms and other organisms. It feels soft, moist, and friable, and allows plant roots to grow unimpeded. Credit: Colette Kessler, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service

Each year, 12 million hectares of land – where 20 million tonnes of grain could have been grown – are lost to degradation.

In fact, over the past four decades, one-third of the planet’s food-producing land has become unproductive due to erosion.

Here at the 38^th conference of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Rome, countries led by the Kingdom of Thailand are calling for an International Year of Soils (IYS) in 2015 to raise the profile of this critical yet endangered resource.

Soil degradation is estimated to cost the global economy 70 dollars per person every year, according to Arni Mathiesen, FAO assistant director-general for aquaculture and fisheries.

Meanwhile, healthy soils provide an estimated 1.5 to 13 trillion dollars in ecosystem services annually.

But with a necessary 60-percent rise in global food production in coming decades, Mathiesen says there will be “further pressure on soils”. This can also worsen global warming, as erosion puts carbon back into the atmosphere.

Supporting the call for an IYS is Namibia’s director of Aquaculture and Inland Fisheries Dr. Moses Maurihungirire, who says soil conservation does not get the attention it deserves.

“There aren’t many experts working on soil compared to water and other natural resources,” Maurihungirire tells TerraViva. “This is part of the reason why soil is marginalised compared to other natural resources.”

Coming from a semi-arid country where a vast amount of land area is desert, Maurihungirire says extreme weather patterns driven by climate change are stripping the scarce topsoil that exists, leading to further desertification.

Also throwing its weight behind Thailand’s proposal is Brazil, which is taking the lead in the preservation of soil and creating awareness in the Latin American region as the founder of the Global Soil Partnership.

Luiz Maria Pio Corrba, the alternate representative of Brazil to FAO, says creating awareness on soil is critical to promote agricultural production.

“Without soil, there is no agriculture because soil provides the link to all natural resources,” he tells TerraViva.

Thaliland and FAO are also asking the United Nations system to officially recognise a World Soil Day on Dec. 5 to coincide with the birthday of King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who is a soil scientist and has initiated programmes in his country aimed at soil preservation and rehabilitation.

Both proposals ultimately will have to be voted on by the U.N. General Assembly.

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

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.

South Asia's water resources are likely to fluctuate if temperatures continue to rise. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

The Monetary Board of Sri Lanka’s Central Bank, tasked with keeping the island’s economy on an even keel, does not only keep tabs on exchange rates, gold prices and inflation – it also has an eye on a less obvious indicator of economic stability: water levels in the country’s main reservoirs.

Central Bank Governor Ajith Nivard Cabraal last week told a group of journalists in the capital, Colombo, that the Board pays as close attention to water as it does to oil prices.

By August, hydroelectricity made up only 17 percent of the grid, whereas in a normal year the country expects to secure about 40 percent of its annual electricity needs through hydro, or even 50 percent in good years.

The drought forced the country to spend a colossal two billion dollars on imports of furnace oil for thermal generation, according to Finance Secretary Punchi Banda Jayasundera.

Cabraal told IPS that the government is “concerned” about these changing weather patterns and “will take steps well ahead of time, before they become an issue.”

Some say these promises offer too little, too late.

Erratic weather patterns are wreaking havoc across the country. In the last fortnight alone over 50 fishermen were killed at sea due to heavy winds, yet the Central Bank does not have an official or a desk that routinely keeps tabs on the weather and its impact on poverty levels, industrial output or even cargo handling at the island’s ports, which was badly disrupted during the recent storms.

But new research from leading international bodies suggests that countries like Sri Lanka will not be able to take a lax approach to climate change any longer, as extreme weather events are set to become the deciding factor in economic growth.

The World Bank today released its report entitled ‘Turn Down The Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer World Must be Avoided’, detailing how global warming could affect sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia.

The report paid particular attention to “the likely impacts of present day two-degree and four-degree-Celsius warming on agricultural production, water resources, and coastal vulnerability for affected populations” in South Asia.

In Bangladesh, land areas at risk of floods could increase by close to 30 percent if temperatures rise by two degrees. Two major industrial and financial hubs in South Asia, Mumbai and Kolkata, are meanwhile both threatened by sea-level rise.

In India, where over 60 percent of crops are rain-dependent, erratic monsoons and rising temperatures are likely to impact harvests and crop yields.

“With a temperature increase of two to 2.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels, by the 2050s reduced water availability for agricultural production may result in more than 63 million people no longer being able to meet their caloric demand by production in the river basins (of the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra),” according to the report.

The Bank also warned that if pledges made at the climate summits in Copenhagen and Cancun are not met, there is a greater-than-40-percent chance of “warming exceeding four degrees Celsius by 2100, and a 10-percent possibility of this occurring already by the 2070s, assuming emissions follow the…business-as-usual…pathway.”

In South Asia, whose population of 1.6 billion is expected to rise to 2.2 billion by 2050, the biggest issue is water scarcity or excess in the extreme.

The report predicted that even if action is taken and warming is reduced, the effects of a hotter climate would still be pronounced in the region, adding, “Many of the climate change impacts in the region, which appear quite severe with relatively modest warming of 1.5-2°C, pose a significant challenge to development.”

Major industrial and financial hubs like Colombo, Mumbai and India’s capital, New Delhi, are vulnerable to flash floods. Floods in May 2010 were estimated to have caused over 50 million dollars worth of economic damages in Colombo, while just last week New Delhi’s main airport was flooded due to the fast moving monsoon.

Darshani De Silva, environment specialist at the World Bank’s South Asia Sustainable Development Sector, told IPS that rapidly changing climate patterns could undo development gains in the region.

In countries like Bangladesh, which is struggling to move off a list of the world’s Least Developed Countries (LDCs), extreme weather events can set back a year’s worth of development in the course of a single day. On Nov. 15, 2007, Cyclone Sidr tore through Bangladesh, destroying 800,000 tonnes of rice, accounting for two percent of total annual production in 2007. The storm left in its wake a bill of 1.7 billion dollars, amounting to 2.6 of that year’s gross domestic product (GDP).

The South Asian monsoon, once as predictable as clockwork, now comes in fits and starts, either evading desperate farmers for months at a time or emptying in buckets on unsuspecting and vulnerable populations. Pakistan felt the weight of these changes in 2010 when torrential rain turned into rushing floods that claimed nearly 2,000 lives and affected 20 million people.

On Jun. 17, officials at the Indian Meteorological Department said that the monsoon arrived in New Delhi almost two weeks before predicted dates. The last instance of the monsoon moving so quickly over India and reaching the capital so fast was recorded in 1961.

Last year, Cyclone Nilam swept the Southern Indian coast, consuming half a million hectares of agricultural land and leaving over 1,300 small tanks and 7,000 km of roadways in dire need of repairs.

“An extreme wet monsoon that currently has a chance of occurring only once in 100 years is projected to occur every 10 years by the end of the century,” according to the World Bank report.

De Silva said that countries should also be worried about lack of water and the impact on agriculture. “It is expected that the southernmost tip of India and Sri Lanka will be affected, with 20 to 30-percent of summer months experiencing unprecedented heat with disastrous consequences on agriculture, livelihood and health,” she said.

The World Bank expert told IPS that attention paid to the issue is marginal compared to the damages caused, adding, “A change in thinking is urgently needed.”

She believes that all development and poverty reduction programmes, as well as urban planning, should have an in-built mechanism that factors in the impact of a changing climate, rather than waiting for disaster to strike before taking action.

Poor urban planning is now forcing the Sri Lankan government to spend 233 million dollars on a flood protection scheme in the capital. This economic burden will only increase until governments start taking seriously the reality of a much hotter world.

That is all in the past now, says Nigeria’s Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Akinwumi Adesina, who credits political support for helping Nigeria halve the number of hungry people in the last two years. The country was one of the 38 nations recently awarded by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) for meeting Millennium Development Goal One on reducing hunger and extreme poverty, from 19.3 percent in 1990-1992 to 8.5 percent today, according to Adesina, who became agriculture miniter in 2011.

Akinwumi Adesina, Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Nigeria. Credit: Busani Bafana/

“That means we have achieved the goal three years ahead of the schedule set for us,” he says. “Agriculture is the basis for making sure you have diversified and nutritious food.”

IPS’ Busani Bafana, asked Adesina –a trained economist and decorated food security advocate – about Nigeria’s new food fortunes. Excerpts from the interview follow:

BB: So what is your secret for turning the tide?

AA: We are using quite a lot of private sector investments to drive agriculture. Because at the end of the day, if you are a farmer and you have a lot of money, you cannot only buy supplementary food that you need but can also invest in housing, in sanitation and better nutrition for your kids.

BB: Political will comes with financial resources. Has Nigeria invested adequately in its agricultural productivity?

We made one fundamental paradigm shift on agriculture. Agriculture is not just a quantum of public sector funds that you put into agriculture, but agriculture is a business. In the last 18 months, we have been able to leverage about 8 billion dollars of private sector investment commitments in this. We are not looking at just increasing public finance, but also looking at leveraging a lot of private sector into agriculture, because agriculture is not a development programme.

BB: What challenges have you faced?

As minister of agriculture, my goal is to make sure that we are a net exporter of food. I am not satisfied that Nigeria has been importing food for a long time. We are already turning that around. We have produced 1.9 million metric tonne of rice in just one year. That is about 55 percent of what we need to be self-sufficient in rice by 2015. The secret: making sure that farmers get the inputs.

The challenge remains making sure that all farmers today get inputs and finance at affordable interest rates. Our President has approved that we recapitalise our Bank of Agriculture. We are using our own funds, not development funds, to leverage 3,5 billion dollars off the balance sheet of our banks for agriculture. Another thing is infrastructure, whether it is rural roads or making sure our irrigation facilities are well done.

BB: You launched a mobile facility for farmers to access vouchers. One of the reasons for this was to curb corruption. What impact has this made?

For 40 years fertilisers in Nigeria were bought and sold by government. As that happened, no more that 11 percent of the farmers were actually getting fertilizers and sometimes they were getting sand as fertiliser. This was creating a lot of disincentives for farmers. At the start of his administration, and with Mr. President’s support, it actually took 90 days to end corruption of 40 years. We decided to reach our farmers directly with inputs and that is why we did the electronic wallet: farmers could get their inputs on time and we could target them.  Some people said farmers will not be able to use the mobile phones, but the fact that you do not speak English does not mean you are illiterate. Out of the 4.9 million transactions that were done by mobile phone last year, 2.2 million were done in Hausa and 1.8 million of them were actually done in the Pidgin language. The impact has been massive. We cut out the corruption and cut out the middle men and saved government money. We saved 29 billion Naira [about 180 million dollars] just last year and that is money I would have [otherwise] signed away [to input suppliers] as Agriculture Minister.

Women farmers are taking the lead in managing leasehold forestry programmes in rural Nepal. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

Nearly 300 km from Nepal’s teeming capital, Kathmandu, in a small village dug into the steep slopes of the mountainous Palpa district, 35-year-old Dhanmaya Pata goes about her daily chores in much the same way that her ancestors did centuries ago.

Pata and the roughly 200 other residents in the scenic yet sparse Dharkesingh village, part of the Jhirubas village development committee (VDC), live off the surrounding forests, in bright red, thatched-roof mud huts.

Jhirubas is the most remote of the 3,913 VDCs scattered across 75 districts in Nepal, but it shares with its counterparts a high level of underdevelopment, food insecurity and poverty.

The road infrastructure is very weak and often gets washed away in the monsoon rains, making transportation of food very difficult – in fact, over half the population suffers from inadequate food consumption. The nearest water source is a three-hour walk away.

These villagers have no illusions of living in grand circumstances; their humble dreams consist only of ensuring a decent future for their children. And with the help of a massive leasehold forestry programme, they are doing just that.

Great swathes of the forests that cover 40 percent of Nepal’s territory have been degraded, prompting the government to embark on a project in collaboration with the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) to convert wasted land into economic opportunities, officials at the Department of Forests (DoF) told IPS in the capital.

In 2005, a 12.7-million-dollar Leasehold Forestry and Livestock Programme (LFLP) took flight in 22 mid-hill districts, stretching from the country’s easternmost extremity to its western border, covering 28,000 hectares of forest land managed by nearly 6,000 forestry leasehold groups involving 58,000 households.

Four years later the government began pilot projects – led by the DoF, with technical inputs from the FAO and financial assistance from IFAD – in five districts including Jhirubas, where locals have converted degraded forest areas into the country’s largest broom grass plantations.

Locally known as ‘amresu’, the grass now covers 246 hectares of the 350-hectare region. The grass requires little water and thrives on steep slopes, preventing landslides and helping to remediate the soil.

By turning the flowers of the plant into traditional brooms, which are then sold to a local retailer, villagers earn the money required to stock up on food for the monsoon months when the roads in their landslide-prone village become impassable.

“In the last 12 months we earned about 3.5 million rupees (roughly 37,000 dollars) and the income is growing every year,” Navindra Thapa Magar, a local farmer and secretary of a leasehold forestry cooperative in the Kauledanda village of the Jhirubas VDC told IPS.

Each of the 246 households in the village earned about 150 dollars in 2012, income that has proved to be indispensable in supplementing villagers’ diets during the nine months out of the year when production of maize, wheat, potatoes, millet and green vegetables comes to a standstill.

Amresu leaves also provide fodder for livestock, and the stems provide fuel.

Women run the show

Households surviving on less than 80 dollars per year quickly stood out as the target population for the project, which promised each family a 40-year free lease of one hectare of land.

DoF and FAO officials provided support by training farmers and initiating a shift away from slash-and-burn practices, known locally as ‘khoriya farming’, towards more sustainable agro-forestry techniques, in which crops are interspersed with trees and other plants, ensuring a longer and healthier life for the entire ecosystem.

What officials had not anticipated, however, was the level of women’s participation in the project.

A wave of male migration out of Jhirubas over the last few decades had pushed women into the dual role of labourer-housekeeper.

Daman Singh Thapa, chairman of the Kaule leasehold forestry cooperative, told IPS that when the scheme spread to their remote village, women quickly took up the challenge of planting and harvesting the grass, working long hours on the steep slopes.

DoF Official Govinda Prasad Kafley added that every participating household now involves equal numbers of trained men and women, who share decision-making power.

While FAO experts say income generation has led to developments like the installation of water pipes, which relieve women of having to walk several kilometres each day in search of water, others worry that the burden of farming and business operations heaped on top of household chores and care of livestock might end up hurting rather than helping the community.

Forty-year-old Bom Bahadur Thapa told IPS that the work, which includes hand-clearing shrubs in order to plant the grass, and then hand-picking the flowers for the brooms, is backbreaking.

“Let’s hope that men become more involved, instead of leaving to look for work elsewhere,” she said.

Indeed, news of the project’s success has already gone viral, prompting migrant workers to return to their village after pictures of thriving broom grass plantations and the smiling faces of their families replaced images of hardship.

Leasehold Forestry Brings a New Lease on Life from IPS Inter Press Service on Vimeo.

To reduce the drudgery of harvesting and carrying brooms on their backs to the local collection centre, several farmers in the community recently pooled their resources to purchase a tractor, becoming the first leasehold forestry group in the country to do so.

With the grass providing plenty of fodder, livestock herds have increased four-fold from roughly two to three goats to an average of 12 goats per family, said Hasti Maya Bayambu, chairperson of a leasehold forestry group in Dharkesingh. The community is even considering selling the excess fodder to markets outside their village.

Following the success of broom grass plantations, impoverished families from the traditionally marginalised janjatis (indigenous) and dalit (low caste) groups have also embarked on commercial ventures, producing cardamom and ginger using agro-forestry techniques, according to Palpa District Forest Officer Suresh Singh.

But even while celebrating the project’s success, government officials are gearing up for the next big challenge: what to do when aid from the FAO and IFAD expires at the end of 2013, leaving farmers without technical inputs like free seeds, savings schemes and marketing trainings that are integral to the proper functioning of the micro-economy that has developed around the programme.

Narayan Bhattarai, the hub officer and key field officer of the pilot districts, told IPS that farmers rely greatly on the presence of fulltime field officers, who, in addition to arranging trips for officials and donor representatives, boost locals’ confidence in the project.

By the farmers’ own admission, it will take at least five years to attain full self-sufficiency. Unless donor agencies step up their efforts, the future of one of Nepal’s most successful rural development programmes hangs in the balance.