Refugees dig for water in a dried up watering hole in Jamam camp, in South Sudan's Upper Nile state. Credit: Jared Ferrie/IPS

Yves Norodom, a 21-year-old refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo living in Brazil, is one of 45.2 million displaced people around the world – the largest number in 20 years.

In its annual report Global Trends 2012: Displacement, the New 21st Century Challenge, released Wednesday, the UNHCR said 28.8 million of that total were internally displaced persons (IDPs), 15.4 million were refugees outside their own countries, and nearly one million were asylum-seekers.

Some 35.8 million people were under the UNHCR mandate by late 2012 – the second highest number on record.

On average, 23,000 people were forced to flee their homes every day in 2012.

Norodom told IPS that he fled his country, the DRC, for Kenya, and from there to the United Kingdom, before finally making his way to Brazil in 2010 without documents or belongings.

“In Congo, everyone feared for their lives,” he said. “I was struggling to survive, I did the impossible to make it. My job was to save my own skin, and I was 17 years old at the time.”

His father, a member of the opposition, had to flee the DRC nearly a decade ago, and Norodom’s 15 siblings gradually found refuge in other countries, until the family ended up spread out across the globe.

“They threatened us, and six of us landed in Brazil. Others had already found refuge, some in Africa, others in France. We had to split up,” he lamented.

One of Norodom’s biggest challenges has been learning Portuguese. “I had never heard the language before. It took me six months to learn the basics, and a year to speak it a little better.”

He is currently unemployed, but he dreams of one day returning to school and attending the public university in Rio de Janeiro to study chemical engineering.

“I wouldn’t say I’m very happy, but at least I’m alive and I’m ok,” he said.

Norodom is one of 4,715 refugees of 76 nationalities in Brazil, according to figures from CONARE, the government’s national refugee agency. Of that total, 2,012 receive assistance from the UNHCR.

“They are people who belong to ethnic groups fleeing for reasons of thought or conflicts. Our challenge is to offer the refugees better conditions to adapt and integrate,” said CONARE vice-president João Guilherme Granja.

Brazil has adequate laws on refugees and offers them the same public services that are enjoyed by the country’s citizens. But this country of 198 million people receives a far smaller number of refugees than much poorer countries like Pakistan, which currently hosts over 1.6 million refugees.

At the launch of the Global Trends report ahead of World Refugee Day (Jun. 20), UNHCR representative in Brazil Andrés Ramírez said armed conflict was still the main cause of forced displacement.

He said more than half of the world’s refugees came from five countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and Syria.

On average, war and other crises drove one person from their home every 4.1 seconds, last year, Ramírez said. “The political will to prevent conflicts has been lacking at a global level,” he added. “The refugee issue is a human tragedy of enormous magnitude.”

As it has for the past three decades, Afghanistan headed the list, accounting for one of every four of the 10.5 million refugees under the UNHCR mandate, or 2.5 million. It was followed by Somalia (1.1 million), Iraq (746,700), and Syria (471,400).

The report says about four-fifths of the world’s refugees flee to neighbouring countries.

The list of countries hosting the largest refugee populations includes Pakistan, the DRC, Kenya, Iran, Syria and Kenya.

In 2012, Brazil received over 1,200 requests for asylum, and the number will be bigger this year, Ramírez said.

“We have more requests now because of the crises around the world,” the UNCHR representative said. “Brazil is a country of continental dimensions and could receive more refugees, but it is far away from the places where the humanitarian crises are occurring.”

The rise in the cost of living in Brazil’s cities and the day-to-day difficulties in making a living faced by a large part of the population also affect the quality of life of refugees, said Aline Thuller, with the Catholic NGO Caritas.

“A majority of the refugees live in favelas (shantytowns) and other poor neighbourhoods. They have the same rights to public services and face the same difficulties as Brazilians. Most of them work in the informal sector,” she told IPS.

“There is still a lot of prejudice” against refugees, Thuller said.

In the past, the refugees assisted by Caritas were mainly Angolan men, who were fleeing forced recruitment during the 27-year civil war in that former Portuguese colony in southern Africa.

But today, many pregnant women and entire families reach Rio de Janeiro as refugees.

The state of Rio de Janeiro, which receives the second-largest number of refugees after São Paulo, is in the final stages of designing a state-wide refugee policy.

Under the new policy, “working groups will be created by thematic area and will organise practical activities, to facilitate refugees’ access to basic rights,” Thuller said.

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.

Irrigation canal, Mchinji. Credit: FISD/IPS

Since food and water are so closely interlinked, there is a lingering fear based on the assumption, if there is no water, there will be no food.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) underlines the strong links between the two when it declares that agriculture accounts for over 70 percent of global water use.

Meanwhile, the share of water available for agriculture is expected to decline to 40 percent by 2050, warns an FAO report released here for the agency’s 38thsession, currently underway. 

The figures are based on statistics released by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The availability of fresh water resources shows a similar picture to that of land: sufficient resources at the global level are unevenly distributed, and an increasing number of countries, or parts of countries, are reaching critical levels of water scarcity, according to FAO.

The FAO also says many of the water-scarce countries in the Near East and North Africa, and in South Asia, further lack land resources.

Due to their vulnerability, coastal areas, the Mediterranean basin, the North East and North African countries and dry Central Asia appear as locations where investment in water management techniques should be considered a priority when promoting agricultural productivity growth.

Asked if the link between agricultural productivity and water scarcity is real, Prof. Jan Lundqvist, senior scientific advisor at Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), told IPS, “Yes and No”.

If there is no water (e.g. in deserts), food cannot be produced, he pointed out. But water is a renewable resource and the hydrological cycle, which is driven by the sun, will continue also in the future.

The amount of renewable freshwater in terms of precipitation falling over the continents is about 110,000 km3 per year, he said. But with an increasing population, the amount of water per capita is inevitably reduced.

It is increasingly difficult, costly and dangerous, according to Lundqvist, to divert more water from rivers and lakes and to pump water from groundwater reserves.

“At the same time, with economic development, the per-capita demand increases. It is, indeed, a tricky equation,” he noted.

Since everything humans eat requires water to be produced, the paradox of the “water we eat” was best illustrated by an exhibition at a SIWI conference last year, which pointed out that the production of an average hamburger – two slices of bread, beef, tomato, lettuce, onions and cheese – consumes about 2,389 litres of water, compared to 140 litres for a cup of coffee and 135 for a single egg.

An average meal of rice, beef and vegetables requires about 4,230 litres of water while a chunky, succulent beef steak, a staple among the rich in the world’s industrial countries, consumes one of the largest quantum of water: about 7,000 litres.

Vincent Casey, technical support manager at the London-based WaterAid, told IPS that irrigated agriculture accounts for the vast majority of water withdrawals in many countries.

A great deal can be done to prevent water scarcity through changes to thirsty agricultural practices.

Crop types, irrigation methods and water tariffs can be changed to reduce demand. These actions require political commitment, which can be difficult to get, he noted.

Two things are required for water security: well-managed water resources and well-managed water supply services (pumps, pipes taps, storage tanks).

Water scarcity is already a daily reality for over 760 million people right now – not because irrigation farmers are drinking all of their water, Casey said, but because of a lack of the water supply services required to make use of available water.

“If we didn’t have reservoirs, pipes and taps in the UK, we would be water scarce too”.

Management of the water supply crisis will involve demand management in areas where there is pressure on the resource, he added, and supply management where people lack any kind of access to water — not because it isn’t there but because it requires investment to develop it.

If there is a scarcity of water, Lundqvist told IPS, food production will be a victim for two main reasons.

Firstly, other sectors will require a large share of water supply. With urbanization both industry and households will be able to articulate their demands and they are in a better position to pay for additional water.

“Water is becoming scarce not because the volume of water is reduced but because demand from society is increasing,” he said.

A second reason is that precipitation pattern will be more stochastic as a result of global warming. Risk will increase for farmers, since uncertainty will increase.

This is particularly problematic, he pointed out, for rain-fed agriculture. But with an increasing frequency and amplitude of droughts and floods, and with the increasing demands from other sectors, the timing of supplies for irrigation during the agricultural seasons will be more tricky.

Higher temperature will speed up the return flow of water back to atmosphere with complications for the farmers.

Under these circumstances –and considering the fact that enough food is produced to feed the entire world population properly– it will be crucial, he said, to make sure that the food produced is beneficially used to the degree feasible and reaches the consumers, including the poor.

Between one-third and half of the food produced is lost, wasted or converted. This means a tremendous waste of resources.

“We must walk on two legs into the future, ensure that enough is produced and make sure that the produce is accessed and used in a most worthwhile manner,” he declared.

The real predicament is regional. The population continues to increase in many areas where water availability is already quite limited.

Even more challenging: the rainfall pattern is becoming more unreliable, while temperature is increasing, he noted.

There will thus be seasons and periods when a growing number of people will experience prolonged droughts (they may last over several years) while in other places, floods will have devastating consequences, he warned.

Ensuring that women, youth and other marginalised groups are employed is a challenge in combating poverty. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

In the aftermath of the global economic crisis and with three years to go until the 2015 deadline of the Millennium Development Goals, global leaders are struggling to formulate a post-2015 agenda that can address the widespread dilemmas of employment and inclusive growth.

At a meeting attended by global leaders, ambassadors and civil society to discuss the post-2015 agenda last Friday, panellists agreed that better and more job opportunities are high priorities that must be included in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Created in 2000 at the Millennium Summit, the MDGs include eradicating extreme poverty, achieving universal primary education and improving maternal health.

At the meeting, speakers critiqued a report on jobs and growth issued by the high-level panel for post-2015, co-chaired by U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, Liberian President Ellen Sirleaf and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

Civil society leaders found the report too conservative, as it failed to properly address structural issues and income inequality.

For people under the age of 35, the desire for employment opportunities is particularly high. According to data from the International Labour Organisation (ILO), unemployment increased from 170 million people in 2007 to 200 million people in 2012, 75 million of them young people.

To give experts a better understanding of global workers’ views on employment and growth, people were consulted through World We Want, an online platform.

The information they shared was “well-rounded and insightful”, Selim Jahan, director of poverty practice at UNDP, told IPS, and revealed civil society’s seemingly inherent, if surprising, understanding of the risks and issues at hand regarding jobs and growth.

“These are no economists we are talking about. These are not policymakers. But people talked about macroeconomic policies and…different measures to deal with inequality, about measures to deal with education and skill training,” he said.

Their ideas and comments reveal the myriad and complex issues people face in securing and keeping a job. One World We Want user, an executive assistant from Brazil, believed a more open dialogue about HIV/AIDS to be vital in job development.

“[There should be] government incentive for companies [and] tax deduction to hire HIV employees. We still suffer [from] prejudice. We still need to keep this disease as a secret to maintain the job,” the user, who remained anonymous to protect his or her identity, said.

For another user from India, renewable energy was an integral part of future development.

Challenges to job creation

Strong population growth presents a huge challenge for future job creation. With the world labour force growing by 40 million people a year, according to the report, 470 million new jobs will have to be created from 2016-2030 to keep up with the demand for work.

Engaging women, youth and other marginalised groups in employment is another difficulty, with a huge gender disparity in some regions. In the Middle East and North Africa, the gaps are the biggest, with male employment at around 60 percent and female employment hovering around or below the 20 percent mark.

While bringing more women into employment could require a shift in cultural norms, the low numbers of employed women in the MENA region also has to do with the way data is collected, Martha Chen, international coordinator at Women in Informal Employment: Globalising and Organising (WIEGO), told IPS.

“In the MENA region, it may also be the case that there are a lot of women doing home-based work and other forms of [paid] employment that do not get captured in the official statistics,” Chen added. “So the gap may not be as big as we think, but the problem may be that women’s work is not being fully captured.”

“It’s a mindset of those who do the interviewing and those who design the questionnaires,” she pointed out. “It’s a mindset about what…work [is], and the fact that women can be doing work in the home.”

“I think there [are] probably a lot of women in their homes doing something for the market, not just for subsistence,” Chen noted.

Youth are not the only ones who will be vying for future jobs. An aging population means that older people will also be looking for work.

“Job training, education, jobs, these are all issues important to older people. We don’t just stop living when we reach age 60,” said James Collins, U.N. representative of the International Council on Social Welfare and chair of the Committee on Aging in New York.

“As governments raise the retirement age, it’s very important that at the same time, they improve access to employment for older people who want to work,” Collins added.

Roberto Zurbano (white shirt) next to Gisela Morales, during a meeting of ARAC activists with journalists. Credit: Patricia Grogg/IPS

Jokes, songs, crude gestures and epithets that degrade people of African descent are still common in Cuba, despite the fact that the constitution prohibits discrimination based on skin colour, and in spite of more recent political measures, activists say.

According to Esther Ruiz, a member of the executive committee of the Regional Articulation of African Descendants from Latin America and the Caribbean (ARAC), these types of expressions of racism occur every day in neighbourhoods, workplaces and schools.

“These and other discriminatory expressions need to be identified and fought,” she told IPS.

Vigilance against these problems is one of the tasks that ARAC has taken on, as part of a network that Cuba joined shortly before the start this year of the International Decade for People of African Descent, proclaimed by the United Nations.

One of ARAC’s goals is to draw up strategies that will contribute to diminishing racism in the country.

“This is a task for today that was not solved yesterday, and postponing it until tomorrow could be too late. Hence the urgency that we all work together towards this goal,” Ruiz said.

Researcher and writer Daysi Rubiera said ARAC emerged during a crucial moment in Cuba. “Civil society is less fragile and people are trying to address their concerns, not just about the present, but also about the future of our country,” she told IPS.

It would be a “great leap forward” to join forces and create racial awareness – the work that has been done for years by groups like Afrocubanas, to which she belongs, and the Cofradía de la Negritud.

Another member of ARAC’s executive committee, Aries Morales, said that inequality and discrimination are universal. She said she believes Cuba is prepared to debate and deal with its contradictions head-on, with an eye toward the future. “That has always been my dream, and I have worked for it for years,” she told IPS.

The Cuban chapter of ARAC was created in September 2012, during a meeting in Havana attended by 30 community leaders and activists from the anti-racism and anti-discrimination movement in Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Puerto Rico and Venezuela.

During that meeting, Zuleica Romay, president of the Cuban Book Institute, said that ARAC was independent of any institution, but would have the support of various government agencies.

“ARAC wants to address many situations that are subjective but become obstacles as objective as a wall,” she said.

This new instrument against racial discrimination is an organisation “under construction,” and has a collective leadership, according to the network’s coordinator, Gisela Morales. “We have invited everybody to participate — intellectuals, neighbourhood activists, homemakers, and groups that are already involved in these problems. It is an inclusive and plural initiative,” she said.

She added that the idea is for people to join in from their workplace.

“If they work in the educational system, then people should try to observe how study plans are carried out; if they are in the press, they should be attentive to how the issue is addressed in the media. Neighbourhood leaders can do very important work in their communities,” she noted.

For the near future, the network’s agenda includes concrete actions, such as channelling a dialogue with institutions when concrete instances of discrimination are reported; holding training workshops; and creating alliances among different initiatives that address the race issue.

This is a social problem that “we must make more visible, because there are people who are ignorant of or refuse to recognise these problems,” Morales said.

Researchers such as Esteban Morales say that more than 60 percent of the Cuban population of 11.2 million is non-white, including blacks and mixed-race persons. That proportion is much higher than what was found by the 2002 census, according to which 10 percent of the island’s inhabitants view themselves as black, and just under 25 percent as “mulatto” or mixed-race.

Morales told IPS in 2010 that skin colour was a variable in social differences, because whites came to the island of their own free will, as colonisers, while “blacks were brought forcibly and made into slaves.” In his opinion, “those are different starting points that cannot be forgotten or ignored, and they carry weight even today.”

A sign of the progress that has been made can be seen in the current Council of State, the highest representative of the Cuban state, where 39 percent of the members are now black or mixed-race.

According to essayist Roberto Zurbano, one of the ARAC Political Committee’s four members, a number of challenges remain for carrying out the actions proposed. The biggest is understanding the process of “updating the socialist model” in which Cuba is immersed, he said.

He said the economic reforms being carried out address a number of problems related to social justice and quality of life.

And, he added, there are reforms that have to do with bringing visibility to questions that have been less widely discussed in Cuban society, and that are emerging as conflicts that are still unresolved, such as racial discrimination, Zurbano said.

“I think it is a big challenge to organise ARAC and make it a space that is capable of the integration that we still don’t have, a space capable of debate that we don’t have or that is insufficient, because all of those courses, academic spaces and publications are not enough. It needs to be addressed at all levels of society,” he commented.

An article by Zurbano on racism in Cuba was published in the New York Times on Mar. 23. He was subsequently removed from his post as editorial director of Casa de las Américas, where he continued to work as a researcher, however. His article triggered a heated debate in Cuba that showed what a touchy subject racism is at both the social and political levels.

On that occasion, ARAC issued a statement backing the “free expression of ideas by all of its activists” and opposing “obstructive or repressive institutional or personal measures or procedures against anyone” expressing their own personal opinion in public debates.

During its national conference in 2012, the ruling Communist Party of Cuba established, as one of its objectives, “confronting discriminatory prejudice and conduct based on skin colour, gender, religious belief, sexual orientation, territorial origin, or others that are contrary to the constitution and its laws, do harm to national unity, and limit the exercise of people’s rights.”

India is home to 25 percent of the World’s Hungry. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

As India’s Parliament prepares to pass a bill to provide heavily subsidised food to 810 million people, there are misgivings over its implementation through a notoriously corrupt public distribution system (PDS).

The National Food Security Bill will be debated and passed at a specially convened session of parliament, ahead of the regular monsoon session that begins mid-July.

Critics of the bill include members of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party as well as India’s communist parties in the Left Front, with the latter demanding that all of India’s 1.2 billion people be covered under a revamped ‘universal PDS’.

“We want amendments to the bill to ensure that there are no leakages through the creation of bogus categories of people such as those living below the poverty line and those living above it,”  D. Raja, national secretary of the Communist Party of India (CPI), told IPS.

According to Raja, while India certainly needs a food security law, implementing it through the existing PDS will only provide more opportunities for corrupt traders and officials to siphon out money from a dysfunctional system.

Government reports have shown that at least 50 percent of the grain channeled through the PDS – consisting essentially of a network of  50,000 fair price shops – is cornered by traders who then either sell the same grain in the open market at high profits, or export it.

Traders have even been caught selling subsidised grain right back to the government’s procurement agents in connivance with corrupt officials of the state-run Food Corporation of India.

“What is needed is a strengthening of the existing PDS which has become notorious for leakages that have been working to deny poor people access to food, defeating the purpose for which it was created,” Raja said.

That India needs to overhaul its PDS is painfully obvious from the fact that each year its granaries overflow with bumper harvests of wheat and rice, which are allowed to rot in the rain while large numbers of people go hungry.

Over the last decade, the average food grain surplus every year has been around 60 million tonnes. In 2012, the surplus stood at 82.3 million tonnes and this year, with a favourable monsoon underway, a 90 million-tonne surplus is predicted.

The government deals with the surpluses by allowing exports – about 10 million tonnes each of wheat and rice were exported last year – a practice that left-wing politicians and food security experts criticise as unconscionable when thousands of Indians go hungry.

Resolving the paradox of starvation amidst plenty has become a priority, what with India finding itself castigated by the World Food Programme of the United Nations for being home to 25 percent of the world’s hungry.

According to a 2012 report by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute, India has lagged in improving its Global Hunger Index (GHI) rating despite strong economic growth.

In India, 43.5 percent of children under five are underweight, giving it an unenviable GHI ranking of 65 among 79 countries surveyed. From 2005 to 2010, India ranked below Ethiopia, Niger, Nepal, and Bangladesh.

The new bill aims to rectify that situation by distributing some 50 million tonnes of grain to 360 million people, categorised as living below the poverty line, at about 10 percent of prices prevailing in the open market.

According to the World Bank, 32.7 percent of Indians live below the international poverty line of 1.25 dollars per day while another 68.7 percent live on less than two dollars per day.

But India’s Planning Commission places the poverty line far lower than the international level and calculates it at a pitiable 28.65 rupees (about five cents) worth of daily consumption per head in the cities and 22.42 rupees (four cents) in the rural areas.

“People at such a low level of consumption are not just poor they are in need of emergency food aid,” says Devinder Sharma, one of India’s best-known food security experts and leader of the respected Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security.

Sharma told IPS that it would be impossible to sustain the massive feeding programme envisaged in the bill for more than a few years. “It really does look as if the new policy is designed with a view to win votes in general elections due in May 2014.”

Sharma blames the phenomenon of hunger in India on colossal mismanagement and consistently poor policies. “How else can you explain the paradox of hunger existing for years alongside exports and rotting grain?”

According to Sharma, the government should be addressing hunger through a community approach that builds capacities to become self-reliant rather than depending on doles and subsidies from the government.

“There are many examples of villages building community grain banks and becoming food secure. All that the government has to do is support and foster local self-help groups and replicate this model,” Sharma said.

India should be focusing its efforts on rejuvenating agriculture through a programme aimed at restoring soil fertility, reviving groundwater levels, and stopping the destruction of rich natural resources through unsustainable farming practices.

Most importantly, farmers need to be assured a monthly income. “Since farmers generate wealth in the form of agricultural commodities they should be adequately compensated rather than driven to suicide in droves.”

Sharma believes that India’s farmers have suffered as a result of agricultural imports under World Trade Organisation rules and free trade agreements. “For example, it is senseless to flood the country with duty-free imported edible oils when Indian farmers are capable of meeting the country’s needs.”

Schoolgirls in an Amazon community. In Peru, the indigenous children of the High Andes and Amazon regions are among the most malnourished in the world. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

Since its founding in 2007 to help developing nations fight poverty, hunger, illiteracy, disease and gender discrimination, the Millennium Development Goals Achievement Fund (MDG-F) has financed about 130 joint programmes in 50 countries.

Regina Gallego of the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), the lead agency overseeing the MDGs, told IPS the Fund’s nutrition programme alone has helped draft or revise some 25 national nutrition plans, encouraged the planting of 270 school and community gardens, and improved health access for about 534,000 citizens.

“Directly or indirectly, our contribution has improved the nutritional status of more than 900,000 children and 179,000 pregnant and breast-feeding mothers,” said Gallego, UNDP’s knowledge management specialist.

The 700-million-dollar MDG-F is a collaborative effort between the government of Spain and the U.N. system involving several agencies, both in headquarters and in the field.

The funding is focused on eight themes: children, food security and nutrition; gender equality and women’s empowerment; environment and climate change; youth employment and migration; democratic economic governance; development and the private sector; conflict prevention and peace building; and culture and development.

Raul de Mora Jimenez, communications specialist at UNDP, told IPS the Fund is actively assisting several countries worldwide.

For example, it is currently working to improve conditions for indigenous people in Brazil, where four out of 10 live in extreme poverty and more than half of the children are anemic.

The Eco-stoves Initiative is part of the joint U.N. programme “Promoting Food Security and Nutrition for Indigenous Children in Brazil”, a collaboration between the Brazilian government and five U.N. agencies aimed at improving food security and the nutritional status of native populations in the areas of Dourados and Alto Rio Solimões.

The five agencies are the World Health Organisation (WHO), the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the U.N. children’s agency (UNICEF), the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and UNDP.

In Peru, the indigenous children of the High Andes and Amazon regions are among the most malnourished in the world: up to half of them suffer from chronic malnutrition and many are anemic and Vitamin A deficient.

This Joint Programme is supporting the Peruvian government’s effort to improve food security and nutrition in four of the country’s poorest regions by accelerating implementation of the national strategy titled CRECER.

In Ethiopia, nutrition has improved for children under five, Jimenez said, but the rate of progress must accelerate if the country is to achieve the MDG target of halving by 2015 the number of people who suffer from hunger.

Toward this end, the Ethiopian government has developed a National Nutrition Strategy and National Nutrition Programme, which form the framework for the MDG-F Joint Programme.

In Vietnam, the programme is focused on improving food security through increased production and consumption of quality food and targeted supplementation.
This is both a short-term strategy to address current issues of malnutrition – through breast-feeding, iron and vitamin A supplements – and a long-term strategy to provide a higher quality diet through improved food production systems, including animal (meat and milk) and aquaculture products.

Asked about funding for the reduction of extreme poverty and hunger by the 2015 deadline, Galego told IPS the general trends of the MDGs indicators show that despite the progress made, eradicating extreme hunger is still a challenge.

About 850 million people, or nearly 15 percent of the global population, are estimated to be undernourished, while one in five children under age five in the developing world is underweight.

Food security is starting to gain ground in the national agendas in a systematic and structured way, she added.

She said the MDG-F programmes have drawn some lessons about key issues to be taken into account, so that the target of reducing by 50 percent those living in extreme hunger can be reached.

A link between food security and nutrition needs to be forged to realise the Zero Hunger Challenge.

To ensure that people not only have enough food, but also sufficiently nutritious food, it is necessary to acknowledge the inextricable link between food security and nutrition security, Gallego said.

“In other words, not just the quantity of the food must be considered, but also other aspects such as its nutritious value and accessibility as well as the health status, socio-economic status and level of knowledge of the population,” she said.

The experience of the MDG-F has proved that multi-sectorial interventions, when applied in a coordinated manner, are more efficient in achieving results.

The key for success is to customise the design of the multi-sectorial interventions by selecting the most relevant sectors, taking into account the specific conditions of the targeted population, including cultural realities, political interests, and involved stakeholders, she added.

The combination package might include sectors such as health, education, agriculture, water, sanitation or energy sectors, among others, Gallego said.

The MDGs, which were formally approved by the General Assembly in September 2000 and launched a year later, expire in 2015.

But since the overwhelming majority of the 132 developing nations have not met their targets, the General Assembly will hold a high-level meeting in September this year to take stock of the successes and failures – and how best to proceed.

Meanwhile, the United Nations is negotiating a new set of goals – Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), described as a successor to MDGs – which will be part of the U.N.’s post-2015 development agenda.

Nigerian Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Akinwumi Adesina holding the FAO award recognising outstanding progress in fighting hunger and attaining MDG One. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

Thirty-eight countries were recognised for the first time on Sunday by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation for cutting in half the prevalence of people suffering from undernourishment, one of three targets under the first Millennium Development Goal.

Of those countries, 18 also achieved the tougher World Food Summit Goal of halving the absolute numbers of hungry people: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cuba, Djibouti, Georgia, Ghana, Guyana, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Nicaragua, Peru, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, Sao Tome and Principe, Thailand, Turkmenistan, Venezuela and Vietnam.

“You are the proof that when societies decide to put an end to hunger, when there is political will from governments, we can transform that will into action,” FAO Director General Jose Graziano da Silva told leaders of the awarded countries during the Rome ceremony. “Thank you for showing us that it is possible.”

Twenty other countries were recognised for cutting by half the prevalence of hunger (but not yet absolute numbers): Algeria, Angola, Bangladesh, Benin, Brazil, Cambodia, Cameroon, Chile, Dominican Republic, Fiji, Honduras, Indonesia, Jordan, Malawi, Maldives, Niger, Nigeria, Panama, Togo and Uruguay.

At the Rome World Food Summit in 1996, countries around the world committed to working towards food security for all. In 2000, the U.N. adopted the eight Millennium Development Goals, meant to guide global efforts towards offering all people a decent life.

MDG One, “eradicating extreme poverty and hunger”, is broken down into three targets: reducing by 50 percent the proportion of hungry people, achieving decent employment for all, and halving the number of people living on less than 1.25 dollars a day by 2015.

Received with broad acclaim by the FAO assembly during the award ceremony, the new Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, outlined in brief his country’s path to reducing hunger prevalence from 13.8 percent to 2.4 percent over the last decade, emphasising the core role played by former president Hugo Chavez in this battle.

“We are asking the FAO to assist us in creating a system to safeguard a permanent, stable food supply, which would permit us to confront the covert speculative attacks that Venezuela is currently enduring,” he told IPS TV.

Caribbean small island state Saint Vincent and the Grenadines is another of the countries acknowledged for meeting both goals. Since the early 1990s, it has reduced hunger rates from 20 percent to 4.9 percent, according to Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves, who spoke to IPS on the sidelines of the Jun. 15-22 FAO biannual conference in Rome.

Gonsalves explained that climate change and pressures from international markets on domestic banana production posed significant challenges to his country in the attempt to defeat hunger. And yet the 120,000-person state seems to have found a working mix of solutions.

“We have a history of root vegetables and fruit crops and an accumulated two centuries worth of knowledge resident in the folk which should be mobilised and is being mobilised,” Gonsalves said.

“Secondly, important is the organisation of farmers to engage in cooperative work with the state. Finally, we are implementing targeted solutions such as feeding programmes for school children and the elderly and in general developing a strong safety net.

“We are addressing the production side but also the consumer side through targeted interventions,” the prime minister said.

Georgia, another country recognised in Rome, reduced the prevalence of malnourishment from 60 percent to 25 percent over the past decade, according to FAO figures.

“This was possible because of a number of different measures that we took to generally improve the economy and combat corruption and mismanagement, which allowed us to have double-digit growth for the past years,” Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili told IPS in Rome.

“Growth was combined with implementing poverty reduction programmes helping families to reach subsistence levels.”

Current estimates put the number of people suffering from hunger today at 870 million.

According to the U.N.’s The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2012 report, significant progress has been made on combating hunger since 1990, yet in some areas around the world this was either slowed down or even reversed by the global economic crisis.

The U.N. says that meeting the MDG goal of halving hunger prevalence by 2015 is within reach but only if measures are taken to make up for the negative impact of the crisis.

Villagers in the Simbu Province of Papua New Guinea, where over 200 people have been killed in sorcery-related violence. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

Following worldwide outrage over a spate of brutal sorcery-related murders in Papua New Guinea, the government has rolled out a new hard-line approach to spiralling crime in this southwest Pacific island state.

Repeal of the much-criticised 1971 Sorcery Act means that sorcery-related killings will now qualify as murders and will be punishable by the reinstated death penalty.

But for many who reside in the mountainous highlands in the country’s interior, where there is scarce infrastructure and government services, safety from sorcery-related violence will remain a distant reality unless promises on paper translate into action at the local level.

Monica Paulus, a human rights defender in the highlands province of Simbu, supports the government’s move to repeal the Act. She knows what it is like to be accused of ‘sanguma’, the indigenous term for sorcery or black magic, and now works to support those who are targets of vigilante style purges.

In the Kundiawa district of about 58,000 people, Paulus is aware of five major incidents of sorcery-related violence in the last five months.

But she told IPS legislative reform alone “won’t make a big difference”, explaining that cultural pressure on communities to remain silent about such crimes would likely continue, while the impunity of perpetrators would have to be challenged by police capable of rapid response.

She added that justice was dependent on victims and witnesses being given adequate protection, and the reduction of widespread gender inequality.

Particularly in rural areas, where more than 80 percent of the nation’s population of seven million reside, spiritual beliefs are still used to explain events in the physical world.  Death, especially of young people, is attributed to evil forces. Those accused of sorcery – particularly the elderly, women and widows – are often unable to defend themselves from the young disenfranchised, males making the allegations.

In 2009, a rise in reported ‘sanguma’ violence, with an estimated 200 related killings in the Simbu Province alone, prompted the government to launch a Constitutional and Law Reform Commission to investigate the pre-Independence Sorcery Act, whose aim to punish so-called black magic practitioners had raised questions about the difficulty of proving “witchcraft” in a court of law.

The subsequent recommendation that the Act be repealed was accepted by parliament two weeks ago.  Simultaneously, the government reinstated the death penalty applicable to crimes of murder, rape and violent robbery.

Dr. Arnold Kukari at the National Research Institute based in the capital, Port Moresby, commented that the Act’s abolition signified the government’s “first step to address sorcery-related violence”, but said it was “not enough.”

“A major problem has been poor law enforcement by the police,” he continued.

The horrific immolation of 20-year-old Kepari Leniata in front of onlookers in the highlands town of Mt. Hagen in February, after she was falsely associated with the death of a young boy, unleashed wide public condemnation. Arrests were made and two individuals subsequently charged.

The following month six women and one man were reportedly tortured following allegations of witchcraft in the Southern Highlands Province, while in April two accused women were kidnapped and one publicly beheaded in Lopele village in southern Bougainville.

The police force has long been plagued by a lack of resources, with common reports of victims being asked to pay for fuel for police vehicles and “fees” for investigations and arrests, while corruption is rampant.

However, according to a local media public awareness campaign this month, the government is planning to boost police numbers and training to support its new crime fighting measures.

Bringing perpetrators to justice will be dependent on improving community trust in law enforcement and proper protection of witnesses, who are often accused of sorcery if they provide testimonies.

Reluctance to report incidents is also due to many Papua New Guineans’ fear of sorcerers and a widespread belief that removing them is necessary to protect the wellbeing of the whole community.

Gender inequality has contributed to the problem, with Amnesty International claiming that women are six times more likely to be accused of witchcraft.

Jack Urame, director of the Melanesian Institute in the Eastern Highlands Province, said that “a deeply embedded belief that men are more important in society” makes it difficult for women to defend themselves or even retaliate.

“Sanguma is a dangerous name in our country,” Josephine, a woman who has suffered the stigma of sorcery for more than ten years, told IPS.  “It affects you for the rest of your life and affects your children as well.”

Kukari added that sorcery-related violence was driving women to “live in fear and isolate themselves from active involvement in all spheres of development.”

Challenging harmful beliefs through education and increased law enforcement is essential, but there is an equally pressing need to address widening socio-economic disparity in a nation unlikely to achieve any of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), experts say.

A 2010 Oxfam report highlighted a Health Services finding that sorcery-related violence is increasingly associated with “high expectations that have turned into frustration and anxiety as many people have found themselves excluded from the benefits of development.”

It identifies a trend of sorcery allegations being used to veil premeditated assaults motivated by revenge in disputes, envy of another’s success or desire to possess their land and wealth.

Hardship in the highlands is exemplified by a lack of economic opportunities and basic services. In Simbu, where male and female literacy is 48 percent and 34 percent respectively, there are a total of just seven medical offices and 31 health centres serving a population of 260,000.

There are no quick fixes to this complex collision of ancient ways with the harsh realities of low human development. Legislative reform and better law enforcement are a start, but nothing short of an integrated multi-sector approach embracing cultural, social and economic change is going to reduce the tragic fallout.

“All Papua New Guineans must take ownership of the problem,” Kukari emphasised. “Everyone, including the government, parents and churches have important roles to play.”

But Josephine pointed out that addressing the issue effectively necessitates directly affected grassroots communities overcoming their fear of speaking out.

“People have to acknowledge and talk about the problem before they can find a solution,” she said.  “At the moment, people don’t even know how to defend themselves.”