Trafficking turns people into merchandise. Credit: Amnesty International

In contravention of international law, in Brazil trafficking in human beings remains invisible and unpunished, which encourages the practice of trafficking for sexual exploitation, forced labour, illegal adoption and the trade in human organs, according to experts.

Local laws punish drug trafficking more severely than human trafficking. The sale of drugs carries penalties of between five and 15 years, while trafficking of persons for sexual exploitation is punished with a maximum sentence of eight years, with work release allowed.

“Human trafficking is still an invisible crime. What we have here now is real impunity,” judge Rinaldo Aparecido Barros, a member of the National Council of Justice’s working group on human trafficking, told IPS.

An average of 1,000 persons a year are recruited in Brazil and sent abroad, the public prosecutor’s office said at a public hearing on “Tráfico de pessoas: prevenção, repressão, acolhimento às vítimas e parcerias” – Trafficking in persons: Prevention, repression, care of victims and (illegal) associations – that it held in this city on Friday, May 17.

The goal was to gather and share information about combating human trafficking and to organise joint action to prevent and crack down on the crime. The meeting focused on Brazil’s role as a source country of victims for other parts of the world.

Brazil is also a destination country for victims of human trafficking, and there is internal trafficking of Brazilians for exploitation within the country’s borders as well.

In the last three years, 3,000 Brazilians were transported abroad and subjected mainly to sexual exploitation and slave labour, participants at the meeting described.

“This is a significant number. A large group of people have been deprived of their dignity. The thousands of cases documented every year do not represent the total, because we do not know how many cases escaped our notice,” said federal deputy attorney-general Raquel Elias Ferreira Dodge.

The actual number of victims sent abroad by human trafficking rings is unknown, participants at the meeting agreed.

“We have to work more effectively so that these crimes are condemned without delay. The crime of trafficking in persons injures human dignity,” said Dodge, who is a member of the Higher Council of the federal public prosecutor’s office (MPF).

She said, “Slave labour negates the personhood of the individual and converts the victim into merchandise that can be smuggled and trafficked.”

But hindering the fight against human trafficking in Brazil is the fact that it is only a crime when it leads to sexual exploitation or slave labour, Erick Blatt, the representative of the federal police in Rio de Janeiro, told IPS.

“It is very hard to identify the crime; investigations can only be initiated on the basis of reports, without the certainty that illegality can be proved,” said Blatt, who is also the representative of Interpol, the international criminal police organisation, for the state of Rio de Janeiro.

Moreover, when it comes to international trafficking, “most people go voluntarily to the place where they are exploited: the majority do not know that their passports are going to be taken away,” he said.

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) defines human trafficking as “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, for the purpose of exploitation.”

The forms of coercion cited are “abduction, fraud, deception, the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person.”

People smuggling, on the other hand, is limited to profiting from covertly transporting migrants, at their request, from one country to another where legal entry would normally be denied at the border. This is illegal, but no deception may be involved.

Article 231 of Brazil’s criminal code defines the crime of sexual exploitation, and article 149 describes subjection to slave-like conditions. Both crimes are punished relatively leniently, with lighter sentences than for other offences.

The United Nations Convention against Transnational Organised Crime, adopted in 2000 and ratified by Brazil in 2003, specifically identifies human trafficking crimes and proposes wide-ranging punishments, which Brazil has still not incorporated in its laws.

“We are going against the flow of international legislation. In Brazil, the issue has been inadequately treated. Human trafficking is a crime against humanity that robs people of their human dignity,” Judge Barros complained.

He said the best measures for fighting human trafficking were those that block the assets of the trafficking rings, in order to attack their economic flank.

Trafficking in persons is run by complex international crime syndicates that, in Brazil, recruit poor women who have no opportunities for a better life, lawyer Michelle Gueraldi of the Trama Project, an umbrella group for NGOs that combat human trafficking, told IPS.

These women emigrate voluntarily, often out of the desire to improve their lives, and end up being exploited in Spain, the United States, Portugal and Caribbean countries, among others, she said.

Blatt added that Brazil, in turn, is a destination country for women victims of human trafficking from Eastern Europe, especially Hungary and Poland.

“Trafficking in persons is a violation of human rights. The Trama Project is working on prevention and on victim protection. We also receive denunciations of cases, and we find that the majority of recruiters are persons known to and trusted by the victims,” Gueraldi said.

In February the Brazilian government established its Second Plan to Combat Trafficking in Persons, but the challenge is to put these policies into practice, she said.

Blatt admitted that tracing victims of human trafficking across borders is difficult for the local police and for Interpol.

“If communications between the police and the prosecutors are slow here in Brazil, imagine what communications are like between police forces internationally,” he said.

Human trafficking is extremely lucrative. In Europe alone it generates some 3.2 billion dollars a year, according to speakers at the meeting.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) says there are at least 2.5 million victims of human trafficking worldwide. A survey by UNODC found that 58 percent of respondents were victims of sexual exploitation and 36 percent of slave labour.

Vandana Shiva, a scientist and environmental activist, presents plants to schoolchildren as part of the campaign "Gardens of Hope". Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

As the global agricultural sector is faced with ever-greater challenges, the question of how to reform and improve the sector is a controversial and difficult one. So Terra Futura, a three-day exhibition and conference on agricultural good practises held annually in Florence, brought the debate back to its roots: seeds.

Terra Futura (Future Earth) has been held for ten years as a network for institutions, associations and civil society, which gather in Florence and exchange ideas and experiences for alternative and sustainable environmental, economical and social development.

Vandana Shiva, a scientist and environmental activist, presented a series of initiatives to defend the survival of local and traditional seeds. The initiatives connected land, food sovereignty, biodiversity and environment.

Shiva presented the “law of the seed”, a campaign targeting intellectual property and patents claimed by agribusiness giants. The project aims to reaffirm the centrality of biological and natural rules against the logic of the agribusiness sector, which relies on genetically modified organisms (GMOs), monocultures and intensive agriculture.

“What we intend to achieve is to overturn the logic behind the criminalisation of ordinary seeds and protect the right of farmers to breed their own seeds,” Shiva told IPS.

Yet the current trend seems to be running in the opposite direction, with multinational companies trying to impose the use of patented, genetically modified seeds, with disastrous consequences for local farmers, especially in the third world.

“We have already seen what the entry of Monsanto [a multinational company in agricultural biotechnology and leader of genetically engineered seeds], has done to the cotton sector in India,” Shiva explained.

She added that “95 percent of cotton seed is currently owned and controlled by Monsanto, causing farmers to get into deep dept to pay the royalties”.

Staving off GMOs

According to Beppe Croce, the head of the non-food agriculture section of Legambiente, Italy’s biggest environmental organisation, Europe has managed so far to keep the cultivation of GMOs outside its borders. “From a legislative point of view, the local production is protected,” he said.

The problem lies instead in what European countries import from abroad, as Croce explained to IPS. “Most of our animal feed is integrated with imported products, such as soy and maize. More than half of the total maize cultivated in the world is transgenic,” he said. “This is why we need to strengthen and uniform the tracking system of imported products throughout Europe.”

Giovanni Fabris, national coordinator of Altragricoltura, a national farmers’ movement for food sovereignty, is similarly critical of Europe’s importation policies. During a workshop on access to land in Italian agriculture, he noted, “Europe is focusing on guaranteeing its citizens with the cheapest food possible, regardless of where it comes from.”

According to Fabris, this policy is undermining the production system of countries like Italy, which “have to face the competition of agroindustrial systems outside Europe that are obviously cheaper than ours”.

Under such circumstances, the odds of GMO cultivation not entering Europe seem all but impossible.

“The argument is always the same: the population is growing and we need GMOs to meet the future food demand,” Croce pointed out. “The truth is that production cannot be boosted indiscriminately everywhere, and most of all, it does not need to be done via GM techniques.”

But the lobbying efforts of agribusiness companies are finding new ways of breaking through. On May 6, the European Commission drafted legislation that prevents farmers from producing their own seeds.

“This draft is an example of criminalising the alternative to GMO,” Shiva told IPS. “They would like only patented seeds, all royalties flowing, farmers having no freedom to choose what to grow and consumers having no freedom to choose what to eat.”

People power

But citizens are rediscovering the value of good food, as demonstrated by phenomena and movements such as Slow Food, solidarity-based purchasing groups, and urban gardens. After a half-century of industry control, “people are experimenting [with] new solutions to have more control [over] what they eat,” Shiva said.

Another initiative, “Seeds of Future, Gardens of Hope”, is moving in the same direction. It is being promoted by Shiva’s non-profit organisation, Navdanya International. Through it, children in Florence’s primary schools are given plants of local species to grow in their gardens.

“We are not just talking about education. We are talking about them being the custodian,” Shiva told IPS.

“But everyone is a child in this matter,” she added. “Farmers have been made into children in the sense that they have been made to forget they are savers and breeders of seeds. Consumers have been made to forget that food begins with seed. So, in a way, this it is education for all, education for life.”

Coastal erosion exposes columns for lights leading to the runway of Vance Amory International Airport in Nevis. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

The Caribbean does not have the luxury of time for decisive action on climate change and global warming. In fact, it is on the brink of calamity, according to a prominent scientist.

Conrad Douglas, a Jamaican scientist who has published over 350 reports on environmental management and related matters, has warned that “urgent action at all levels [is] required now”, cautioning the region against complacency in dealing with climate change.

Noting that earlier models forecast that an atmosphere of 350 parts per million (PPM) of carbon dioxide would place the planet at a catastrophic tipping point for climate change, Douglas cited new information which put the new tipping point at 450 PPM.

“There are 445 million PPM of carbon dioxide, which is a mere five PPM of carbon dioxide away from the…limit that was projected for catastrophic global tipping points,” he told IPS.

With the projected loading rate at 2.5 PPM per year, Douglas said that within two years, the earth would reach a point where even more catastrophic events would wreak havoc on the planet, its societies and its economies.

“We’ve gotten to a juncture at which the entire planet is facing a precarious situation,” Douglas said. “We are heading towards a dangerous place on planet Earth.”

“Potentially irreversible consequences”

Last year was the warmest in recent history, including the highest temperatures since temperatures began to be recorded in 1895.

“We know about Hurricane Sandy…and the destruction which it caused in our region and the eastern seaboard of the United States,” Douglas said, noting that parts of the United States and the Caribbean are still recovering from that storm.

Douglas’ colleague, John Crowley, said that the planet’s nitrogen cycle had been severely thrown out of balance because of the massive overuse of inorganic fertilisers.

“That, according to the specialists, is having catastrophic and potentially irreversible consequences that require a major rethink of agricultural systems, including but not limited to fertiliser use,” he told IPS.

Both scientists are among dozens who gathered here from May 15 to 16 for a UNESCO-sponsored sub-regional meeting on environmental policy formulation and planning in the Caribbean region.

“It was clear already in 2011 when we [first took stock of] these issues that the knowledge about climate change in the Caribbean is insufficient and insufficiently connected to the real dynamics of Caribbean societies,” said Crowley, a UNESCO representative.

In 2009, a group of Jamaican artists launched a national public education campaign on climate change. It was part of a project implemented by Panos Caribbean, a regional organisation that helps journalists cover sustainable development issues, and Jamaica’s National Environment Education Committee (NEEC).

The artists produced a package of information designed to educate the Jamaican public. It consisted of a theme song titled “Global Warning”, a series of public service announcements, a mini album of songs on climate change, and a music video for the theme song.

A global issue

Even as deliberations continue here today, the general assembly of the United Nations in New York is meeting on sustainable development and climate change.

“I think we have finally awakened to the urgency of the situation, that we have tested and exceeded the globe’s capacity for absorbing and assimilating the pollutants that we make and discharge,” Douglas said.

“What we need now is nothing less than a Manhattan type project to rescue the planet.”

Marcus Natta, senior project analyst in the Ministry of Sustainable Development in St. Kitts, told IPS the meeting was very timely.

“What is important about this particular conference is that we are focused on action. I think unlike many other meetings, if we could truly achieve the action part after the planning and get the implementation, then we would have really achieved success,” he said.

The tiny island of Nevis is described as one of the few remaining unspoiled touches of paradise and one of the little-known wonders of the Caribbean. Douglas hoped that actions taken at the meeting would help preserve it as such.

“We hope that in the context of what faces us today – the phenomenon of climate change – that its beauty and charm will be preserved long into the future as we take wise and timely action to protect the habitat of mankind and all living creatures,” he urged his colleagues.

“This we must strive to do as we protect ourselves from ourselves. It’s our attitudes and values, our failure to change our behaviour that has led us to this critical point,” he warned, adding that the current path mankind is treading “threatens at the very least to plunge us into a perpetual cycle of poverty and misery”.

In January of this year, a French-led intervention ended more than a year of sectarian violence in the north of Mali. The intervention managed to stall the conflict, but the situation in the region remains tense.

More than 467,000 people, around one third of the population in the north, are currently displaced, and the United Nations announced on Tuesday that it needs at least 222 million Euros to address immediate food and other humanitarian needs.

Northern Mali is also facing its second food crisis in two years, the country’s economy is in decline, and over the last year it fell to one of the five poorest countries in the world, according to the United Nations (U.N.) Human Development Index.

The 3.25 billion Euros were pledged by the international community at a donor conference in Brussels yesterday for the reconstruction of this West African country. The high level meeting, organised by the European Union and France, together with Mali, welcomed 100 delegates from countries, regional organisations, U.N. agencies, EU member states and other development partners.

Pledges were made on the basis of the “Plan for the Sustainable Recovery of Mali, 2013-2014″, presented by the Malian government, which says that an amount of 4.343 billion Euros is needed to fully implement the plan.

Aid agencies and non-governmental organisations were careful in welcoming the influx of aid, however. “These pledges need to be seen as a down payment and not a one-off cheque,” Marietou Diaby, Malian country director for the NGO Oxfam, said in a press release following the meeting.

“Donors must now support a new development contract between the people of Mali and their government which tackles poverty, corruption and inequality – issues that lie at the heart of the crisis,” Diaby noted, adding that crises such as Afghanistan and Somalia show that winning a military conflict is never enough to achieve sustainable peace and security.

EU officials in the field have also expressed concern about the enormous amount of money about to flow into a country that is not yet ready for it. According to one official, who requested anonymity, “The country does not have the absorption capacity yet. Other issues have to be dealt with first.”

“Donors want to move quickly, get the country back on its feet and show results as quickly as possible,” Tidhar Wald, EU conflict and humanitarian policy advisor at Oxfam Brussels, explained.

“But if we inject this amount of money, without proper guarantees in terms of sources management and transparency, into a country that is poorly governed, services are not functioning and some parts of society are benefiting more than others, the situation will hardly get any better,” Wald cautioned.

Just ahead of yesterday’s high-level meeting, Oxfam published a report stressing the need for smart development aid. “The Brussels meeting was intended to bring Mali back to normal,” Wald told IPS, “but even before the rebellion in the north started, Mali was in a crisis.”

“Its society has been eroding for decades because of previous ethnic conflicts, corruption, lack of transparency and other governance issues,” he described. “There needs to be a new contract between the Malian government and its people. The reconstruction plan needs to be inclusive; all Malians should benefit from it.”

“We have to make sure that the government is made accountable to its people, that people can influence decision making, that civil society is part of the decision-making process,” Wald concluded.

According to Oxfam’s report, donors should commit to providing aid at least for the next 15 years, the amount of time needed to successfully undertake necessary government reforms and tackle the root causes of poverty. This time frame, however, stands in stark contrast with the two years mentioned in the Malian government’s reconstruction plan.

Other experts also point to the fact the conflict in Mali is not over yet and human rights violations persist. On Tuesday, Amnesty International accused government forces of carrying out extrajudicial executions in the north. Islamic militants have been reported recruiting child soldiers and killing civilians and wounding government soldiers.

U.N. officials, meanwhile, have expressed grave concern about retaliatory attacks against Tuared and Arab communities in the north after government troops retook towns held by Islamic rebels. As a result, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch urge donors to pressure the Malian government to end to human rights abuses in the country.

“Pending issues include economics, education, violence and sexual and reproductive health,” María Oviedo, the Argentine training manager for the Latin American and Caribbean Committee for the Defence of Women’s Rights (CLADEM), told IPS. “Enforcement of the laws is the weakest link. Governments lack a comprehensive policy to address these issues.”

Oviedo, together with dozens of women’s rights defenders from Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa, attended the May 7-10 seminar “Incidencia en red: el desafío que los estados cumplan con los derechos humanos de las mujeres” (Networking: Challenging States to Respect Women’s Human Rights).

CLADEM, founded in 1987, launched a campaign in 2011 with the slogan “For a state that fulfils its duties towards women’s human rights. The time has arrived!” Financed by the European Union and the Dutch organisation Oxfam Novib, the campaign will conclude in 2015.

In Latin America, indicators on primary school education, employment and incomes have improved over the past decade, but there are still significant gaps between the status of women and men in this region with a highly patriarchal culture.

There are some 163 million economically active men and 113 million women in the region. By 2020 these figures are forecast to rise to 188 million and 141 million respectively, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

There is an upward trend for women’s employment, and ECLAC estimates that by 2020, 56 percent of women will be working outside the home, compared to 52 percent in 2010.

“Inequality and injustice underlie day-to-day violence,” Gabriela Delgado, of the human rights programme at the state National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), told IPS. “The bottleneck for women’s struggles is the justice system. This means that structural changes are needed.”

Among the states’ pending debts in this area are legislative reforms to establish formal equality under the law, and the enforcement of policies to achieve the goals of access to economic resources, violence-free lives, sexual and reproductive rights and non-sexist education to combat discrimination.

Activists have identified laws that tolerate marital rape and other kinds of rape, endorse different minimum ages at which men and women can marry, or grant greater rights to men on marriage, in countries like Argentina, Bolivia, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua and Panama.

Between 17 and 53 percent of women in the region are victims of violence, and this scenario is exacerbated because 92 percent of reported crimes go unpunished.

And abortion largely remains illegal in Latin America.

In the view of Rosa Cobo, an academic at Spain’s public University of A Coruña, a mixture of age-old forms of violence are reemerging, together with new phenomena linked to the illegal economy and organised crime.

“We are living in a world characterised by geopolitical, economic, political and patriarchal disorder, which produces excessive violence that always affects the most disadvantaged and the weakest sectors,” Cobo told IPS.

She cited as examples the femicides (gender-based murders of women) in Guatemala and Ciudad Juárez, on the border between Mexico and the United States; gender violence in armed conflicts; the trafficking of women for sexual exploitation; and the sale of women into marriage in Asia.

The activists called for guarantees from states for equality between men and women and girls and boys, through the elimination of discriminatory rules and practices, and the promotion of equality and shared responsibilities for domestic chores, in order to eradicate poverty and usher in a life free from violence for women and girls.

They also called for sexual and reproductive autonomy for women, access to reproductive health resources and services, and secular, intercultural, non-sexist and anti-discriminatory education.

“There is a worrying debt to women that is going to take years to overcome,” Oviedo said.

CLADEM, which is based in Lima, launched a campaign in 2009 for non-sexist and anti-discriminatory education to promote education based on respect, equality and cooperation between the sexes.

“Isn’t it likely that there is a relationship between this extreme violence against women and the progress made in winning women’s rights in recent years?” Cobo asked.

This kind of violence “shows a compulsion to control, in response to the social reality that criticises the status of women. Violence has been displaced from known spaces to the unknown, so that men are now killing women whom they do not know,” she said.

Participants in CBA-7 taking part in a brainstorming session. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

Adaptation and mitigation. Identified by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and by scientists as the two major responses to address the problem, these were also the twin preoccupations of a climate change conference held recently in Dhaka.

Some 200 environmentalists, scientists, policymakers, academics, government and non-government officials as well as international development partners converged on the capital city of Bangladesh to discuss ways community-based adaptation (CBA) could be made more holistic, incorporating sectors such as food, water, education, health, energy, livelihood opportunities, poverty reduction and social mobilisation.

A joint initiative of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies (BCAS) – a research, policy and implementation organisation in Dhaka – and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), a UK-based think-tank which works in partnership with fellow organisations in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the Dhaka plenary was the seventh edition of the CBA conference or CBA-7.

“As time goes by, climate change impacts will only get more severe,” Atiq Rahman, executive director of BCAS and co-chair of the Climate Action Network South Asia, told IPS. “If the industrialised nations do not take their roles seriously, then it could lead to catastrophic consequences.”

Speaker after speaker underlined the urgency of addressing the needs of communities vulnerable to climate change. There was not a moment to be lost, they emphasised: the time to act was now.

“It is a race against time,” said Tracy Kajumba, a capacity-building and advocacy coordinator for the Africa Climate Change Resilience Alliance (ACCRA) in Uganda.

“The earlier we get into action, the better it will be. Otherwise, the cost of adaptation will only become higher, leading to population displacement, conflict and increased poverty, and hence huge global tensions,” she commented to IPS.

World leaders also needed to invest more, both in terms of commitment and funds, the experts agreed.

“The world leaders had promised to limit the global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius by the end of this century,” Rahman said. “Unfortunately, that has already been
superseded.”

“Honestly speaking,” Susan Nanduddu of the Development Network of Indigenous Voluntary Associations in Uganda remarked to IPS, “the rich nations do not have the will to respond to the damages made by climate change.”

Neither the will, nor the money, it seems. Simon Anderson, head of the IIED climate change group, told IPS, “Many countries affected by climate change have not yet received the proportion or scale of global climate funds to respond to the needs of adaptation strategies. This is a global failure.”

“There is a huge investment gap,” Rahman agreed, “and until that is met, there will be serious political tensions which will lead to conflicts.”

Global efforts – and funds – needed to be channelled mainly in two directions, the experts felt: adaptation strategies to reduce the vulnerability of communities, and the scaling up of mitigation efforts to combat the ever-growing threat of global warming.

“I am afraid the world leaders are not doing enough to focus on the need for adaptation strategies,” Saskia Daggett, ACCRA international coordinator, told IPS. “The funds are the biggest challenge here, and there are huge gaps.”

Kajumba too urged world leaders to make sure adaptation and mitigation interventions were uppermost in all their funding and programme priorities.

But until the funds started coming in, there was something else that could be done, Nanduddu proposed. “Every year you have negotiations for funds to address climate change but the trickledown result is insignificant. So communities have to wake up and do something on their own.”

This means scaling up CBA activities to involve more and more affected communities, in order to build capacity and reduce climate change-induced risks, she said.

“We are not making the most of our opportunities,” Nanduddu stated. “This platform is a real chance to recognise voices and make everything fairer and accessible to those who suffer the most.”

Such scaling up would involve the restructuring and modification of successful adaptation programmes, for them to be implemented in similar environments. These could be areas of saline water intrusion, extreme drought, severe cyclones, water-logging and devastating floods or riverbank erosion.

However, developing the design, demonstration and implementation of all CBA programmes in an organised way would require massive coordination and mobilisation. Hence, the need for a multi-pronged strategy.

For one, it could involve local government agencies entering into more serious interactions with communities and taking lessons from their adaptation initiatives.

The knowledge generated could then be integrated and intensified with CBA initiatives. In turn, these could be used as approaches to reducing climate change risks and enhancing resilience, the speakers noted.

Similarly, they observed, central and local government agencies could integrate this horizontally in all their agencies.

“Adaptation plans have to be long term,” said Nanduddu, “and integrating the adaptation strategies into national development plans is the main challenge here.”

“What we are trying to do here,” Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development, told IPS, “is to narrow the gaps between the top-down approach of national governments and the bottom-up approach of communities and civil society.”

Highlighting another aspect, Tianna Scozzaro of the Washington-based research and advocacy group Population Action International said, “We are looking at what the impact of migration and urbanisation due to climate change means to urban communities and hence, in a broader sense, looking at population growth and women’s empowerment.

“We want to mobilise resources to meet the unmet needs of women’s reproductive health and how they can adapt to change in such extreme weather,” she told IPS.

LGBT activists, human rights observers and police officers wait outside a courtroom in Uganda's constitutional court. Four activists had brought a case against Minister of State for Ethics and Integrity Simon Lokodo. Credit: Will Boase/IPS

Ishita Chaudhry spent the past 36 hours listening to U.N. delegates discuss population growth and development. She noticed that on “controversial” topics, such as sexual and reproductive rights, young people’s voices often get lost.

“For us as young people, it’s really not as controversial as it is for governments,” said Chaudhry, a member of the High-Level Task Force for the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), at a press briefing Thursday.

“We know that we need to be empowered to claim our human rights… And we understand that access to sexual, reproductive health and birth services, and comprehensive sexuality education is a key aspect of that empowerment,” she explained.

Joaquim Alberto Chissano, a former president of Mozambique and co-chair of the task force, added, “Fulfilling sexual and (reproductive) health and rights is not only a human right… it also offers solutions to many of today’s global problems.”

Chissano – often credited for ending civil war and strengthening democracy in Mozambique – cited the links between sexual and reproductive health and national progress.

He explained that by promoting sexual and reproductive health, the international community can “fully unleash human potential, energies and talents… to nurture the human capital that countries need to reduce poverty and inequality”.

If sexual and reproductive rights are not addressed, “those who will feel the pinch more are the coming generations”, he warned.

The task force’s work – entitled “Policy Recommendations for the ICPD Beyond 2014: Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights for All” – reaffirms values established almost twenty years ago in Cairo, where 179 governments gathered to adopt a Programme of Action that placed the human rights of women at the centre of international development goals.

The task force calls on the governments to address Cairo’s “unfinished agenda” by: ensuring sexual and reproductive rights through law; working towards universal access to sexual and reproductive health services; providing sexuality education for all young people; and eliminating violence against women and girls.

It argues that governments should expand access to safe abortion and to services for victims of gender-based violence, and that the international community should adopt a definition of “comprehensive sexuality education”.

The task force’s work will inform U.N. negotiations for a new development framework, to replace the expiring Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) post-2015.

According to the task force, the sexual and reproductive health of young women and girls are particularly compromised. It cites that one in three girls in developing countries are married without their consent; 2,400 young people are infected with HIV every day; and up to 50 percent of all sexual assaults are committed against girls under the age of 16.

Asked if sexual and reproductive rights are often barred by social or cultural norms, Chaudhry – founder of The YP Foundation, a non-profit organisation in India – said, “I come from a country that has a broad representation, both in terms of religion (and) culture. It has a lot of sensitivities.”

She emphasised the importance of providing information and sexuality education to approach such sensitivities. “You’re not telling the young person that they should or shouldn’t do something, you’re giving them access to evidence-based information, which means that they are in the best place to decide (for themselves).”

She said, “Because there’s such a broad lack of understanding… the fear and stigma and discrimination around issues of sex and sexuality therefore remains very high.”

Chaudhry argued that some of the most effective cases in achieving sexual and reproductive rights are when governments invest at community levels in reducing levels of related stigma.

She explained, “One of the biggest misconceptions of sexuality education is that if you provide sexuality education to an adolescent, you’re going to decrease the age of first sex.”

She added, “Once you start breaking the stigma and the silence around issues of sex and sexuality, you find that even parents and religious leaders themselves have questions… They (just) haven’t had anybody else to ask.”

Tarja Halonen, former president of Finland and co-chair of the task force, posed a question of her own: would you want to perpetuate socially rooted injustices, “or would you like to be the founding father or mother with a new way of (doing things)”?

She explained that while it is important to respect traditional values, it is also important to abide by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She emphasised the need to work with experts from schools, health centres and religious communities.

Halonen noted that social stigmas on sexuality are prevalent even in Finland – ranked the second happiest country by the U.N.’s World Happiness Report. These stigmas discourage victims of sexual abuse from seeking the help they need, while providing impunity for perpetrators.

Halonen told IPS, however, that there has been some progress. She shared her experience fighting for sexual and reproductive rights, which started over four decades ago when she was a young lawyer.

“In the late 1960s, when I spoke on behalf of young Finnish students… I said that (students) need more information for these issues,” said Halonen.

“I remembered how they answered me in Parliament. They said, ‘(Students) are in the university in order to study, not to have sex’.”

Despite social stigmas and Parliament’s neglect, Halonen was able organise sexual and reproductive health services and information for the university’s health care centres.

Her national progress for sexual and reproductive rights continued from there.

“We changed the legislation in 1970s concerning minorities (and) homosexuals. Then we changed the abortion law, little by little. Now when we look at statistics, we see afterwards that it has worked well. We have less abortions, we have better birth rates, we have fewer HIVs,” she said.

“So what are we afraid of?” she added.

“The NPT has its own process and business as usual,” said Rebecca Johnson, co-chair for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a Geneva-based global coalition of pressure groups working on disarmament and a ban on nuclear weapons.

The Geneva preparatory committee meeting will focus on a range of issues for the next two weeks to prepare the agenda for the 2015 Review Conference which will take place in Geneva.

More importantly, it is taking place against the backdrop of rising nuclear tensions in the Korean peninsula and Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme.  Also, several countries held an international conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear weapons in Oslo last month.

“My hope is that a large number of countries talk (at the Geneva meeting) about the importance of bringing the nuclear issue back to human level and understanding the humanitarian consequences because of nuclear weapons,” Johnson told IPS.

She expects that a large number of parties to the NPT will sign up to the South African statement on the human dimension of nuclear weapons which will be delivered at the meeting.

“We want a sustained dialogue on the humanitarian impact so that it changes the balance of power in the NPT,” Johnson argued.

The NPT came into force in 1970 with the avowed goal of stopping countries from building a nuclear bomb. So far, 189 countries have ratified the treaty while India, Israel, and Pakistan refused to become parties to it. All three countries possess a nuclear arsenal, with total estimates varying from 50 to 200 nuclear weapons.

The official nuclear weapon states – the United States, Russia, Britain, France, and China who are known as P5 – are required to implement measures under the treaty to “cessation” of the nuclear arms race, and complete nuclear “disarmament”.

The five nuclear weapon states held a meeting last week during which they discussed promoting dialogue and mutual confidence on nuclear issues. The P5 members exchanged views on various issues concerning “non-proliferation”, “the peaceful uses of nuclear energy”, and “disarmament” – known as the three pillars of the NPT.  The five nations, who are the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, reaffirmed their commitment to the goal of nuclear disarmament.

However, progress on nuclear disarmament is almost limited or negligible over the last 45 years.  “There is not much progress on nuclear disarmament and we need a new dynamic to break the paralysis, otherwise there will be new cold war,” said Martin Hinrichs, an ICAN activist. Representatives of ICAN from some 16 countries held a brainstorming session on how to go about their advocacy campaign during the NPT meeting this week.

“They (the P5) have got a vested interest and they constructed their industry, defence industries, and military to deploy, to possess, and to modernise nuclear weapons,” said Johnson.

The P5 members, says Johnson, “have a vested interest in keeping the status quo and stopping new countries entering the nuclear club.” Besides, they enjoy numerous privileges because of their status and it would be a mistake to think that they would implement substantive measures towards complete nuclear disarmament, she said.

So, the “game” for the elimination of nuclear weapons will not start from the P5 side who wield powerful nuclear weapons, Johnson said.

“What has to change is that the non-nuclear states have to start things to bring about nuclear disarmament,” the ICAN co-chair argued. “They (the non-nuclear weapon states) have the power and tools to change by becoming aware that nuclear weapons are a humanitarian problem even if they are set in the international legal and political rules.”

Therefore, it is important not to give exalted status to the nuclear arms states every time on the hope that they would carry out disarmament. “The non-nuclear weapon states are not supplicants, and they have to engage in politics and change international relations by joining forces with civil society,” Johnson asserted.

The international ban movement intends to delegitimise nuclear weapons for everybody so that countries are dissuaded from spending billions of dollars on nuclear weapons.

Children in a slum in Dhaka, Bangladesh, earn 44 cents a day cutting used condensed milk cans. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

“Recall the face of the poorest and weakest man you have seen, and ask yourself if this step you contemplate is going to be any use to him.”

Gandhi’s challenge from 1948 should be uppermost in our thoughts this week at the Washington summit led by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, when we examine why progress to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) has stalled.

Gandhi’s challenge is this: who will speak up for the most marginalised – the out-of-school child, the child slave, the trafficked boy, the girl bride, the street child? Who will speak up for the most vulnerable and the hardest to reach? These are the forgotten millions that the MDGs were to do most to help. And yet the most revealing conclusion of our decade-long anti-poverty crusade is that despite great, and in some cases, outstanding progress, we have done least for those most in need.

This week in Washington, in the presence of Ban Ki-moon and Jim Yong Kim, we are discovering that unless we target resources on the most vulnerable, they will continue to miss out. While the MDG process has made huge strides for universal education, it has been best at plucking the “low hanging fruit” – with some of the most marginalised left high and dry. So there are still 15 million children working full-time when they should be at school, and ten million school-aged girls who get married every year, unlikely to return to education.

For these reasons, but also because of shortages of teachers and classrooms – and often sheer discrimination against girls – a total of 500 million girls growing up today will never complete their schooling.

Unfortunately our failure is no accident: universal goals, which do not explicitly target resources on the most vulnerable, mean that those who are already the most marginalised will continue to go without. Indeed, as we formulate a new set of post-2015 anti-poverty targets, we have to recognise that future MDGs will also fall short on delivery if they do not ensure more resources go to those in need.

Adam Wagstaff of the World Bank concludes from his studies on health as well as on education that: “It’s not actually true that progress at the population level will automatically entail faster progress among the poor. If inequalities in education and health outcomes across the income distribution matter, and if we want to see ‘prosperity’ in its broadest sense shared, it looks like we really do need an explicit goal that captures inequality.”

Our failure to reach those most in need is not just ethically indefensible for anyone who believes in equal opportunities. It is self-evidently bad for the MDGs: we can’t accelerate progress unless we get serious about reaching the poor.

So a new focus on the marginalised is central to new plans put by Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and others to the Washington summit this week. Nigeria is considering extending a World Bank pilot offering conditional cash transfers to girls in northern states who represent the largest group in the country’s ten million out-of-school population.

Ethiopia – which has seen one of the most rapid expansions of education enrolment anywhere in the world – is also now targeting the out-of-school girls in hard to reach rural areas who have so far not benefitted from the country’s progress. The DRC wishes to abolish school fees, which currently deter two million pupils from going to school.

Bangladesh wants to go further. It has also decided more resources are needed for the children of the flood zones and hill areas and the victims of child labour and child marriage – but it is also making an equity goal explicit in order to reach the most marginalised. It has committed to closing the gap in attendance rates between the richest and poorest income groups and to closing the learning gap between the best and poorest performing areas. Bangladesh faces a huge uphill fight to deliver on its new policy of increasing public spending on schools. It simply does not have the money for educational investment – either domestically or from the international community – to fund its new direction.

So while the public justification for all our efforts is to help the poorest, the frailest, the neediest and most vulnerable, we are coming to realise that our focus on universal goals must be matched by extra resources for the most marginalised. Indeed, when the next set of post-2015 MDGs includes more ambitious universal targets for learning outputs and secondary education, we must do more to prevent the most disadvantaged being left further behind. Put simply – as we start to raise the ceiling, we must not forget to finish putting in place the floor.

As Pauline Rose of the UNESCO Global Monitoring Report has concluded: “Unless we have a goal that tracks progress for the poorest and richest…on education access and learning, gaps are likely to remain when we reach the next deadline for goals.”

So one of the lessons to learn from more than ten years of experience in trying to meet the MDGs is that, without corrective remedies, unequal outcomes in one generation conspire with unequal access to resources in the next to make a mockery of genuine equality of opportunity. Here we rely on and are influenced by the original thinking of Indian economist Amartya Sen, who argues that “equivalent freedom” for people who come to the table with unequal advantages requires more resources to turn the right to equal treatment into real opportunity.

Fortunately there is already a growing consensus that without this focus on inequality we cannot meet our ambitions on behalf of the poor. In education we need what Kevin Watkins of the Overseas Development Institute calls “stepping stone” targets for reducing inequalities, with timelines for 2020 and 2025 on the way to our universal goals in 2030. Further commitments are required to reduce the gap in school attendance and completion rates between poorest and wealthiest and between best and worst performing areas.

What makes me convinced that we could gain support for these measures? It is that these forgotten millions that the MDGs were to do most to help are prepared to be silent no more.

Poor rural girls now know that they do not have the freedom to choose to go to school – and that the 2015 goal of schooling for all will not be worth the paper it is written on without a commitment to greater equity. Child labourers know that they have been left behind – and that their human right to education is not being delivered by their governments or the international agencies responsible.

I am struck by the energy, creativity and determination I see in these new civil rights movements, led by Malala Yousafzai. Children are providing leadership lessons from which we can learn.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Switzerland is anything but a country rich in raw materials but it is, nevertheless, a major hub for international commodity trade, hosting some of the world’s biggest commodities companies such as Glencore (which specialises in power generation, steel production, oil and food processing); Xstrata (copper, zinc, aluminium, nickel and coal-fired electricity), Vitol (which ships oil products like gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and metals, as well as ethanol and chemicals) and Mercuria (dealing in oil and energy products).

Swiss-based companies are estimated to have a share of 15 to 25 percent of the global commodities trade.

Data provided by the industry reveals that 60 percent of the global metals and coffee trade is done in Switzerland. In sugar, the Swiss sector has a market share of 50 percent and in crude oil and grains it makes up 35 percent of global trade.

Against this backdrop, Swiss critics are preparing for a chance to voice their grievances with these massive commodities giants at the second annual Financial Times Global Commodities Summit to be held in the city of Lausanne, about 60 kilometres northeast of Geneva, on Apr. 15.

But protestors say the summit “is a symbol of exploitation and speculation”.

“While the companies’ profits increase, the local population in mining countries suffers from environmental damage, expulsion, tax avoidance and anti-trade union measures,” Yvonne Zimmermann of MultiWatch, a broad coalition of NGOs, trade unions and anti-globalisation organisations, tells IPS.

An alliance of two-dozen organisations is calling for a demonstration to coincide with the arrival of businessmen in Lausanne on Apr. 15. Speaking on behalf of the protest organisers, Alwin Egger tells IPS the march, which is expected to draw hundreds, will move towards the Hotel Beau-Rivage Palace, where the summit takes place.

A member of the anti-globalisation Association for the Taxation of financial Transactions and Aid to Citizens (ATTAC), Egger says, “In our opinion, it’s the people who should have control over extraction and trade of raw materials, not profit-oriented companies.”

Over the last decade, the commodities business has grown exponentially in Switzerland. In 2011, its net receipts from trade added up to 20 billion Swiss francs (or 21 billion dollars), contributing 3.5 percent to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). While some corporations are only involved in either commodity trade or extraction, most of them offer services throughout the entire supply chain.

For more than a century, commodity companies have flocked to Switzerland to avail themselves of the country’s low tax rates and the privileged corporate taxation system. Holding companies, for example, are exempt from corporate income tax on cantonal and communal levels as long as they own shares in foreign companies only. Besides, Switzerland offers strong banks, political stability and a high standard of living.

That the country wasn’t a member of the United Nations until 2002 was another factor behind its popularity, as it allowed Switzerland-based companies to avoid U.N. embargoes and sanctions.

The commodities business is known for its discreetness. But as of late, that peace has been disturbed by NGOs such as the Berne Declaration (BD), which published a groundbreaking book in 2011 to shed light on some of the dubious practices the sector constantly engages in.

Accusations range from human rights abuses, ecological destruction, exploitation, to corruption and tax avoidance in developing countries. In 2012, for instance, NGOs accused Glencore of buying copper from intermediaries in the Democratic Republic of Congo that was extracted partly using child labour and under precarious conditions.

Entitled “Commodities – Switzerland’s Most Dangerous Business”, the book found that “trade in oil, gas, coal, metals and agricultural products – particularly via deals made in Geneva and Zug – has grown by an incredible 1,500 percent since 1998…The result: Seven of the twelve corporations with the highest turnover in Switzerland trade in…or mine commodities.”

“As more information becomes available, attentiveness to the issue grows” — and so does criticism, observes Zimmermann, adding that a media spotlight on these practices has dealt a harsh blow to the industry’s public image.

But Economics Minister Johann Schneider-Amman opposes specific, national regulations for the commodities sector. “We don’t want to treat our companies any stricter than other, competing locations do,” he said at a press conference, echoing the standard argument issued every time the corporate tax system is in the line of fire: that Switzerland cannot afford to have companies relocate elsewhere.

For critical experts like Classen, this excuse is not valid since “there are no unregulated alternative business locations” anywhere else in the world.

The Swiss Federal Council has proposed a consultation draft for a transparency regulation similar to the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act in the United States, section 1504 of which obliges companies to disclose their payments to governments for access to oil, gas and minerals. It is still unclear, though, whether payments of commodity trading companies will be included in the Swiss draft regulation.

Fearing new regulations, the Swiss commodities sector has ramped up its lobbying efforts. Associations representing the industry have popped up in the main commodity trading hubs of Geneva, Zug and Lugano.

Glencore recently invited Swiss parliamentarians to hear an explanation of its “engagement for sustainable business, for the health and safety of its employees and for the environment”. Media and NGOs were denied access to the closed-door meeting.

“The sector is concerned that it has become the subject of attentiveness and debates,” says MultiWatch’s Zimmermann, who protested against the recent lobby event.

“As a reaction to criticism, these companies have started to publish sustainability reports”, she said, which whitewash their practices and portray themselves as charities.