H&M, a major European apparel chain, signed the agreement Monday, and Benetton, which was under fire from activists after their clothing was found in the ruins of the Rana Plaza factory which collapsed in late April, signed on Tuesday.

The ruins of the eight-story Rana Plaza factory. Credit: Rijans/CC BY-SA 2.0

The nearly month-long search for victims in the wake of the Rana Plaza collapse ended Monday, after the death toll had reached 1,127.

“H&M’s decision to sign the accord is crucial,” Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), an independent labour rights watchdog group based in Washington, said in a press release.

“They are the single largest producer of apparel in Bangladesh, ahead even of Walmart. This accord now has tremendous momentum.”

Other European companies that signed the accord, known as the Bangladesh Building and Fire Safety Agreement, included Inditex, C&A, Primark and Tesco. By Tuesday evening, the only U.S. company to agree to the accord was PVH, the parent company of Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, which signed last year.

According to the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF), an advocacy organisation, the new agreement covers all major areas needed to ensure its effectiveness: “independent safety inspections with public reports, mandatory factory building renovations, the obligation by brands and retailers to underwrite the cost of repairs, and a vital role for workers and their unions”.

The pact also calls for participating companies to pay up to 500,000 dollars a year toward building maintenance and safety in Bangladeshi factories, to bring them up to a specified standard. According to Liana Foxvog, ILRF communications director, the associated costs would translate into about ten cents per garment.

The agreement between several major European companies has also been significant in that it now focuses a spotlight on the relative inaction of their U.S. counterparts – and narrows and intensifies the pressure from labour groups on U.S. companies to sign the pact.

“The fact of European brands signing on is very important for the Bangladesh garment industry,” Foxvog told IPS. “It’s time for U.S. companies to sign on as well.”

Labour groups are particularly focused on Walmart and Gap, two of the largest and most influential companies that source from factories in Bangladesh. Foxvog said that “If Gap changes its mind, we expect that more U.S. companies will sign on.”

Gap, which was close to signing the agreement last year before starting its own non-binding, voluntary agreement with factories in Bangladesh in October 2012, said Monday that the company was concerned about possible “legal liability” issues that could arise.

The company said Tuesday that it was “six sentences away” from signing the accord and would accept if those proposed sentences, which lessen its liability concerns, were accepted.

But critics say such arguments have little substance behind them.

“They’re nonsense,” WRC’s Nova told IPS. “Ask Gap wherein the legal liability lies; ask them to point to the language in the agreement that creates legal liability for them – they can’t do it. What Gap wants is an agreement that can’t be enforced. The stuff about legal liabilities is a ruse.”

Foxvog expressed similar sentiments.

“Gap is saying it doesn’t want to be held accountable for the working conditions (in the factories) and other commitments of the safety agreement,” she said.

Company-led change

Still, labour rights groups are growing increasingly optimistic, as companies seem to be facing increasing pressure to conform to multi-stakeholder agreements, and the Bangladeshi government has shown signs of committing to stronger labour standards.

On Monday, Bangladesh’s cabinet lifted restrictions on forming unions, reversing a 2006 law that required employees to obtain permission from an employer before organising.

And the previous day, the government set up a new minimum wage board that will include factory owners and workers, and government officials, and will recommend pay raises. However, the decision to implement these new standards will still need to be approved by the cabinet.

But for broader change, advocates argue that the active participation of multinational companies is key to bringing about permanent change in the Bangladeshi garment industry. Proponents are now hoping that the announcement by the 10 European companies – with more, perhaps, to come – could now create a transatlantic ripple effect.

“This is a really tremendous advance to have … global brands and retailers make a binding commitment to worker safety,” Judy Gearhart, executive director of the ILRF, said in a statement. “Now we need major U.S. brands and retailers such as Walmart, Gap, and JC Penney to join in the same agreement.”

Walmart has said its own safety plan meets or exceeds the building and fire safety code’s standards, but added that it would continue to discuss the plan.

Howard Riefs, spokesman for Sears, also a large producer in Bangladesh, said late Tuesday that while the company is still in discussions over the plan, it is not yet ready to sign on. JCPenney and The Children’s Place are also reportedly still evaluating the plan.

Last week, the ILRF and United Students against Sweatshops, an advocacy group, launched a new website, designed to ramp up pressure on Gap to sign the Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety Agreement.

“I find it hard to believe that Gap is irresponsible enough to continue on this course of action (of avoidance) any longer,” Nova told IPS.

Italian Foreign Affairs Minister Emma Bonino. Credit: Victor Sokolowicz/IPS

With every passing day, the founding fathers’ dream of peace and freedom seems to be turning into a nightmare for many.

The EU is increasingly being associated with austerity policies that lead to recession, unemployment and social despair. More worryingly, there are signs that the current crisis is not limited to the EU’s economic sphere but also impacts its most fundamental values.

Everywhere in Europe we see rising intolerance; growing support for xenophobic and populist parties; discrimination and a weakening of the rule of law; and entire populations of undocumented migrants, virtually without rights, punished for their status rather than their individual behaviour.

Our inclusive and open community is threatened by destructive actions pursued by nationalistic and demagogic groups. But they are not the only ones inflicting damage on the Union.

In some countries, including Italy, we see too many violations of the rule of law and of international and European treaties, an unreliable justice system, inhumane and degrading conditions in prisons, serious infringements of human rights and grave cases of lack of accountability. How can we preach respect for universal values abroad if we are among the countries most condemned by the European Court of human rights?

It is in our vital interest to react to all these alarming trends.

To defend the European construction, we need to rediscover its mission. Its founding fathers had to discard a whole world of prejudice and fear. They knew from their tragic experience that building fortresses and walls under the guise of ensuring peace and security was an illusion.

They chose integration, and rejected barriers. And they understood that all freedoms are closely linked: one cannot want free trade yet hinder the free movement of people.

Nationalist and demagogic groups are spreading fear and prejudice across Europe by exploiting the current malaise and social despair of all those without a job, and without faith in their future. As European Central Bank President Mario Draghi stressed: “It is of particular importance at this juncture to address the current high long-term and youth unemployment.” This is a fundamental mission of the new Italian government. The data flow is still depressing, urging us to adopt new measures in coordination with our partners and in full respect of our fiscal commitments.

However, I believe that the choice is not simply between fiscal tightening and reckless spending, nor can fear of and disaffection with Europe be tackled with economic measures or financial engineering alone. No solution is credible without a political dimension and without encompassing the whole European architecture.

We need a new score: a federal solution.

I have spent a lot of time, passion and energy supporting the creation of a federal Europe; not for ideological reasons but simply because I do not know any other system capable of allowing 500 million people – belonging to different nations, cultures, religions and speaking a multitude of languages – to live together in freedom and diversity in the 21st century.

Federalism does not mean that the central European government should become a Leviathan, as described by the frightening words of the Europhobes.

A couple of years ago, I proposed a “light federation”, an institutional model that would absorb no more than five percent of European gross domestic product (GDP) in order to finance specific government functions such as foreign and security policy, scientific research, trans-European networks and safety of commercial transactions, among others.

For instance, how can European governments provide adequate security, with fewer financial resources? Only a shared European defence system, with common, integrated armed forces, would enable us to get out of the corner into which tight budgetary constraints are confining us. European governments are reluctant to take decisive steps towards this goal. The consequences of that reluctance are fragmented initiatives, wasted resources and a growing irrelevance of European influence on the world stage.

The same applies to scientific research, a field where national programmes are often too small to be productive and compete successfully with the huge projects of the other global powers.

The 2014 European parliamentary elections will be a significant test. If we want to prevent the risk of an over-representation of populist parties, we need to put federal Europe at the centre stage of the electoral campaign. The pro-Europe political families should present their own candidate for the presidency of the European Commission and submit political agendas for the future of the EU, stressing that a federal solution would save significant financial resources. So, the federalist perspective could assume concrete meaning for all citizens, avoiding the risk of being perceived as an abstract juridical matter.

In 2014, exactly a century after the murder of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo that led to the destruction of Europe, we will have another opportunity to give a new impetus to the federal project, under the Italian presidency of the EU. And after 2014, a review of the treaties could give European citizens a stronger sense of ownership of our common institutions and ensure an easier coexistence between countries in the eurozone and the other member states.

If Europe does not solve its problems of recession and populism, we could lose all that we have achieved since the 1950s, with no estimate of how long it will take to regain the same level of democracy, prosperity and stability as before. But if we adopt a new vision, engage our citizens and unite our governments, we could start a new phase of boosting growth and fostering democratic legitimacy and global influence.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Shaheen Begum receives skills training at the PPC paraplegic centre in Hayatabad in northern Pakistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

Gul Shada thought it was the end of the road for her when she and her husband met with a road accident last year in the Nowshera district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, one of the four provinces of Pakistan. Not only did the mishap leave Shada widowed at the relatively young age of 37, she also sustained an injury to her back that immobilised her.

It was then that she came to the country’s sole paraplegic centre (PPC) at Hayatabad, to the southwest of Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. And it was here that she was taught that you don’t need to be on your feet to be able to stand on your own.

Along with helping her regain her physical strength, the centre also gave Shada training in sewing and embroidery. Today, she is able to earn a living of her own, enough to provide her three children with a decent education.

“I had thought I would be bedridden forever and my children would have to beg on the streets,” Shada told IPS. “But I am a shining example of how the PPC is helping its patients. I was referred for physiotherapy here after being operated on for spinal injury at the Hayatabad Medical Complex. My hopes were raised further when I was taught sewing and embroidery here and I became somewhat of an expert.”

Established by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in 1983 for those wounded in the 1979-1989 Soviet war in Afghanistan, the centre was left in the hands of the Pakistan Red Crescent (PRC) after the ICRC withdrew in 1995.

The PRC managed the centre till the reins were handed over to the current management in 2005. The provincial government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa – which borders Afghanistan to the northwest – then made it an autonomous body governed by a board, through a 2009 Act.

The PPC, which has a staff of 110, remains the only centre of its kind in Pakistan which provides free treatment and rehabilitation to patients who have received injuries to their spine. Some 1,200 women and 800 men have benefited since 2005 under its training centre, bringing hopes to lives that have foreseen only despair.

One among them is Shaheen Begum from Khyber Agency, one of the eight tribal areas that make up the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, to the west of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The 25-year-old fell from a wall in February last year, damaging her spine. After treatment at the local hospital, she was shifted to the PPC for physiotherapy.

“Not only did the physiotherapists give me tips on different exercises during my two-month stay here, they also helped me acquire computer skills. Now, I work as a composer from home,” Begum told IPS.

She may be confined to a wheelchair now, but that hasn’t dented Begum’s confidence.

On a follow-up visit to the PPC she told IPS that “I have only one son. I feel proud to be able to operate a computer and earn enough so that I can afford a proper education for him. Otherwise, I would have been roaming the streets of Peshawar with a begging bowl.”

She said she couldn’t thank god enough for giving her the opportunity to be able to work and earn her own living despite her misfortune.

The PPC’s chief executive officer, Syed Muhammad Ilyas, takes pride in the progress of his patients. He urges them to regain their physical strength and rather than be a burden on others, learn to help not just themselves but also their families.

“These are healthy young men and women who have become prisoners in their own bodies and have lost control over their bodily functions. One can well imagine the level of frustration and anxiety they go through,” he said.

The trap becomes worse if they are the sole breadwinners of the family, he added. This is, in fact, the case with 80 per cent of the patients who come to the PPC, while more than 90 per cent of them fall below the poverty line.

Many of the spinal cord injuries are sustained during road accidents, said Ilyas. But he added that falls from rooftops, trees or electricity poles, as well as firearm injuries, were also common. Patients at the centre are as young as 26 years old, he said, and they tend to arrive at the centre with little or no hope.

Few things are more expensive than treating and rehabilitating patients with spinal injuries. The cost of rehabilitating a patient in Europe or the United States can go up to millions of dollars. “We achieve the same with a fraction of that amount by getting patients to a stage where they can move about on a wheelchair and by imparting them different skills,” Ilyas said.

Sultana Gul, 51, says she came to the centre for physiotherapy 10 years ago, where she learned skills as a seamstress. Her house in Charsadda district now serves as a training centre for local women, helping many earn respectability and an income.

“In the past decade, I have taught these skills to at least 200 women in my neighbourhood,” Gul told IPS. “Around 10 women, who were earlier reduced to begging in the market square, are now earning their own living because we brought them here and taught them how to knit and sew. We train them for a month after which they teach the same skills to other women around them, everyone making a decent sum of money in the bargain.”

“It takes only a month to train a patient,” said Gul Pari, a trainer at Sultana Gul’s centre. They are initially hesitant to go through training, but agree once you convince them of how it can change their lives, she said. The centre trains about 80 women every year, she said, and there six trainers like her.

And that gives a whole new meaning to women’s empowerment.

Eighteen-year-old Shapla, a garment worker who survived the Apr. 24 factory collapse, lies on a hospital bed in Dhaka. Credit: Nari Uddung Kendra (the Centre for Women’s Initiative)

Last month, 18-year-old Shapla was just another one of thousands of garment workers employed in a factory in Savar, a suburb of Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka.

Today she is a handicapped survivor of one of the worst industrial accidents in history: the collapse on Apr. 24 of the massive Rana Plaza, a building housing five factories, that buried scores of workers under a wave of cement and glass.

The death toll reached 996 on Friday, though officials and families are still counting the bodies and searching for others beneath the rubble.

“I am desperate about the future,” Shapla said, echoing the sentiments of hundreds of female apparel workers like her who lost their limbs on that fateful day.

The young mother is now recovering in a hospital in Dhaka after her hand was amputated. Having survived the collapse, Shapla is considered one of “the lucky ones”, but she is loath to see the bright side, as her handicap will almost certainly prevent her from finding work.

Experts say that women, who make up 80 percent of the workforce in this country’s booming garments industry, have borne the brunt of this tragedy. According to initial reports, over 80 percent of those who lost lives and sustained injuries in the collapse were women.

“They are now socially and economically heavily disadvantaged,” said Mashud Khatun Shefali, founder and head of Nari Uddung Kendra (the Centre for Women’s Initiatives).

A leading advocate for female garment workers’ rights, Shefali says her organisation, which has lobbied for better conditions such as safe housing for workers, is now focusing on helping female survivors overcome the trauma of the accident.

Some of the workers are “so badly affected that they say they never want to work in factories again,” Shefali told IPS. “They need long-term physical and mental rehabilitation…and they need to be accepted as disabled persons by their families and society.”

A woman named Nazma Begum, whose legs have been amputated as a result of her injuries, told a local television station this week that she “worried incessantly” about how she would handle her disability, until her husband assured her of his continued support and love.

The dark side of manufacturing

Over the last decade, Bangladesh – a country of 150 million of which 49 percent live below the poverty line – has become a crucial player in the international apparel trade by providing a vast supply of cheap labour.

Bangladesh’s garment industry is now the third largest in the world after China and Vietnam, bringing in 20 billion dollars or roughly 80 percent of the country’s annual foreign exchange.

Major apparel companies based in the West and wealthy Asian countries like Japan and South Korea began shifting their production centres to Bangladesh when old manufacturing hubs like Thailand began to raise wages.

Mass-produced and bargain clothes that include such labels as Gap, Primark, HMV, Walmart, Sears and American Apparel are all manufactured here and then sold in the importing countries.

The biggest to the smallest of these factories are staffed by mostly young women hailing from rural areas, who come to the cities in the hopes of acquiring skills they have no access to in Bangladesh’s agricultural regions.

When they arrive in the city, they often live together in close quarters, sharing bathrooms and food.

Uneducated and illiterate, these women have few means by which to earn a steady income; their vulnerability makes them easy prey for manufacturers who claim that, in order to remain “competitive” on the world market, they must hire the cheapest possible workforce.

According to Shefali, young women often start off as interns, meaning they do not receive a wage but instead labour for a stipend that can be as low as a dollar per month.

Within a year, they move on to operating more sophisticated machinery and drawing a regular salary, she added.

Most women sew, wash and pack garments for roughly 30 to 40 dollars a month, working a daily average of 10 hours, seven days a week. In contrast, men tend to be hired for high-level positions, such as quality control and management.

The garment sector has been hailed as one of the country’s biggest employers, bringing a steady wage to thousands of women. But a string of tragedies has recently highlighted the hazardous nature of this work.

Last November, over 100 garment workers perished in a fire in the Tazreen Fashion Factory on the outskirts of Dhaka. Survivors of that tragedy claim they tried to escape, but were locked in by the factory managers.

Similarly, on Apr. 24, employees were threatened with dismissal if they failed to come to work, despite warnings that the eight-storey building, which only had a permit to house five floors, was unsafe. A week before the incident large cracks had begun to appear on the ceilings, prompting engineers to issue warnings that a collapse might be inevitable.

Negligence of workplace safety is just one of many labour violations women workers face. Sometimes they are forced to work 14-hour shifts in order to turn around a quick profit for the factory owners.

Still, activists point out that in a Muslim country with high poverty rates, the garment industry provided a rare opportunity for women to leave their homes and raise their status from housewives to breadwinners.

This increased economic independence enabled them to exercise more autonomy in their own lives, to choose their own husbands and enter into marriages on more equal terms.

But the Savar tragedy has dealt a hefty blow to this hard-earned status.

Sharmin Huq, a retired professor at the Dhaka University who specialises on the handicapped sector, fears that social discrimination will make life harder for women than ever before.

Those who survived the tragedy will likely lose their jobs, as their injuries will prevent them from performing at the level demanded by factory owners.

Huq told IPS that generous donations pouring in from countries like the United States and Germany to help the survivors must be channeled directly towards “the large number of (affected) female workers, to help them re-start their lives.”

This includes support for everything from acquiring artificial limbs to accessing regular counseling to deal with the trauma of the tragedy.

Over two decades after they were forced to flee their homes in northern Sri Lanka, tens of thousands of Muslim IDPs still feel reluctant to return. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

The camp should not have been difficult to find. We were told to drive straight on the road that leads north away from the town of Puttalam, 140 kilometres from Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo, and we would come upon the settlement of internally displaced people.

What IPS found were not the typical temporary shelters of the war displaced – no tarpaulins stamped with the telltale insignia of donor agencies, no busy aid workers; only a cluster of small villages comprised of white-painted houses on the outskirts of Puttalam’s narrow traffic-clogged, sewer-lined streets.

But on close inspection it became clear that these were, indeed, the homes of the roughly 75,000 Muslims and their descendants who were forced to flee the northern provinces at the height of this country’s civil war in 1990.

IPS spoke with Ahamed Lebbe, a casual labourer in his fifties originally from the village of Pallai in the northern Jaffna Peninsula, who said his life changed forever on Oct. 29, 1990, when the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) – the rebel group that was then fighting the Sri Lankan government for a separate state for the island’s minority Tamil population – ordered all Muslims to evacuate the province within 24 hours.

The message that he would have to leave with nothing more than 300 rupees (about two dollars) in cash came to Lebbe by word of mouth, though there is some evidence the Tigers made a public announcement in Jaffna Town earlier that day.

The public rationale behind the order was that Muslims, along with their fledgling national political party, the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress, represented a threat to the Tigers’ ideal of ethnic hegemony in the North, which formed the basis of their demand for an independent Tamil state.

The command was taken dead seriously and on the night of Oct. 29 the exodus began, with one Muslim family after another leaving behind homes, valuables and businesses, carrying with them only the meagre monies allowed by the LTTE, fear, and memories.

“There were only four Muslim families in the village where we lived,” Lebbe told IPS. “But it was our home – I still speak in the Tamil dialect used in Jaffna.”

Twenty-three years later, Lebbe has still not regained a sense of belonging, even though he has lived half of his life in an exclusively Muslim village in Puttalam.

“There is always this sense that we don’t belong here, that we are not at home,” he said.

The number of IDPs living in these semi-permanent “camps” has now swelled to nearly 250,000, according to some researchers. The majority never left the northwestern coastal belt, where they arrived over two decades ago.

Locals’ initial welcome of the refugees quickly turned to resentment when it became clear that these visitors would not be leaving anytime soon, and would ultimately start clamouring for scarce government resources like jobs, schools and healthcare.

Employers here wasted no time identifying the displaced as a source of cheap labour, quickly hiring them to work in sectors like construction, fishing, and agriculture, and as causal labourers.

Today, the demand for government services in Puttalam is under enourmous stress. With a total population of 700,000 the province is one of the poorest in Sri Lanka. Ten to 11 percent of its residents live below the poverty line, compared to a national poverty rate of about eight percent.

Local authorities are also seriously concerned about the lack of safe water here, exacerbated of late by a long drought.

Mirak Raheem, former researcher with the Centre for Policy Alternatives, a national advocacy body, told IPS the infrastructure in Puttalam is in urgent need of an upgrade. He also stressed the importance of implementing development projects like road construction, which can create jobs for the displaced.

Few incentives to return home

Ever since the government wiped out the LTTE in May 2009, over 400,000 Tamils who were displaced during the 30 years of fighting have been resettled, but nothing of the sort has taken place for the Muslims.

The situation raises the question of whether or not the IDP settlements in Puttalam – built with generous support from international agencies like the World Bank, which funded the construction of over 4,400 housing units – will ever be empty of their current residents.

Mohamed Abdul, a rights advocate who works closely with the community, believes displaced Muslims will not return to the north unless they are presented with a solid plan of action for rebuilding their homes, or offered loans for start-up businesses.

So far, he told IPS, much has been promised but little delivered.

In mid-2010, IDPs wishing to return to their old neighbourhoods were instructed to register with the Sri Lankan authorities. Almost all of the 250,000 Muslims in Puttalam did so, but few ended up making the return journey. It later transpired that most registered only in order to receive the promised six months worth of government rations.

According to Farzana Haniffa an academic at the Colombo University, displaced Muslims were never given priority, even among international organisations, because theirs was not considered an “emergency” humanitarian situation.

“There was never (the threat) that they would starve,” Hanifa, editor of a report on Northern Muslims, told IPS. As a result, only a fraction of the millions of dollars of development aid that have flooded this country since the 1980s has found its way to Puttalam.

For people like Lebbe, the decision on whether or not to return to the north is a simple one.

The formerly war-torn province has little to offer: unemployment rates in the northern Vanni region are feared to be as high as 20 or 30 percent, according to Muttukrishna Sarvananthan, who heads the Jaffna-based Point Pedro Institute of Development, indicating that anyone who wishes to start life there faces, at best, an uncertain future.

“At least here we know for sure what to expect,” Lebbe said.

Farmers on the Weather Coast of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. Credit: Kastom Gaden Association (KGA)

Life is difficult enough for communities on the remote southern Weather Coast of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.  Sustaining a livelihood from the land is a daily struggle on the steep coastal mountain slopes that plunge to the sea, made worse by the absence of adequate roads, transport and government services. And now, climate change is taking its toll on the already precarious food situation here.

“From mid-March to June it is always raining and whatever crops we grow will not go to harvest,” Alice, a member of a farming family on the Weather Coast, told IPS, referring to the period locals here call “time hungry”.

During these months, most meals consist of rice and one or two other items procured from the shops in the city of Honiara, the capital of this nation comprising more than 900 islands located northeast of Australia and east of Papua New Guinea.

Stretching for 160 kilometres, this island, the largest in the Solomon Islands archipelago, has a widely dispersed population. Located on the northern coast and home to 64,600 people, Honiara is separated by high mountains from isolated villages on the southern coast, where the total population is more than 19,000.

The climate here is hot and humid all year round and people are vulnerable to cyclones, gale force winds and flooding during the wet season, as well as earthquakes and landslides due to the country’s proximity to the highly seismic Pacific Rim of Fire.

Scientists are now predicting the weather extremes that batter this rugged coast will only get worse as the nation faces the full force of climate change.

The sea level near the Solomon Islands has been rising by eight millimetres per year compared to the global average of 2.8 to 3.6 mm, according to the Pacific Climate Change Science Programme.  During the first half of this century, average annual and extreme rainfall is predicted to increase, along with the intensity of cyclones.

Climate change is the greatest challenge to sustainable development in this South Pacific nation, imperilling the food security of 85 percent of the population who depend on subsistence agriculture. In terms of development, the Solomon Islands is ranked 142 out of 187 countries by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and has the second lowest average per capita income in the Pacific region, while 23 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.

Residents of Weather Coast villages like Duidui, Reavu and Avuavu use the steep slopes above the coastline to cultivate crops, growing everything from taro, yams and sweet potatoes to cassava and bananas. This region receives heavy rainfall of 5,000 to 8,000 mm a year during two wet seasons, the first from January to April, the second from May to September.

Boku Joke, a climate change advisor working with the non-profit Kastom Gaden Association (KGA), told IPS that resulting floods and intense saturation of the soil has made life difficult for farmers and threatened food production.

Heavy rain also erodes soil nutrients and provides fertile ground for plant pests and diseases like chuaka, which affects taro, to thrive.

“Rain and floods and lack of crop bulking (mass cultivation and storage of different crop varieties) by local farmers have also resulted in a loss of crop diversity,” Joke said, explaining that since farmers plant just one crop, they are often left with nothing if extreme weather ruins the harvest.

Varieties of taro and yam were also lost when food gardens were abandoned and pests and diseases proliferated during the “Tensions” (1998 to 2003), a civil conflict in the Solomon Islands that left hundreds dead and 35,000 displaced when grievances among the indigenous Gwales of the main island, Guadalcanal, led them to fight the influx of numbers of migrants from Malaita, a heavily populated island to the east.

The presence of armed members of the Guadalcanal Liberation Front (GLF) on the Weather Coast forced villagers to flee into the bush for up to two years.

The government now recognises the need to focus investment on developing and supporting agricultural livelihoods to ensure a secure future for people in the region.

“Food and agricultural production has been and will continue to be the most important source of economic development and income generation as well as food security for these communities, given their geographical remoteness,” Hezekiah Valimana, chief field officer at the ministry of agriculture’s Guadalcanal office, told IPS.  Agriculture accounts for 38 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) and 75 percent of the labour force.

Agriculture will also be critical to enduring peace and stability in this part of the country as a history of poor access to development, basic services and income opportunities in rural and remote areas contributed to the grievances that triggered the conflict more than a decade ago.

“An increase in food and cash crop production will help to improve the livelihoods of families and provide cash incomes,” Valimana said.  Most residents here are subsistence farmers and the average cash income of households in the region can be as little as 13 dollars per month.

Valimana advocates bringing different communities together to “achieve shared goals,” stressing that collaboration on agricultural projects is “key to maintaining peace.”

In recognition of the environmental challenges ahead, the government launched its first National Climate Change Policy last year to improve the coordination of adaptation efforts by various government ministries and national institutions.

The KGA, which works alongside the ministry of agriculture, as well as the ministry of health and the ministry of environment and conservation, has made rural communities a priority, and is working to deliver new technologies to improve farm management and productivity, as well as planting materials to 25 percent of rural households in the Solomon Islands.

On the Weather Coast, KGA is collaborating with local farmer support groups to increase crop diversity, introduce climate resistant crops and promote contour farming, which involves tilling land along lines of consistent elevation on hill slopes to reduce the speed of rainwater run-off and prevent soil erosion.

“We need new or more climate resistant crops,” Alice confirmed.  “But we also need more education and training about how to cultivate bush foods such as breadfruit and nuts and preserve them for eating and selling.  At the moment, most people don’t see these as useful or commercial foods.”

The programme, known as the diversity visa lottery, has in recent years been sharply tilted towards African immigration. Since 2008, immigrants from African countries have made up nearly half of the 55,000 randomly awarded U.S. work visas annually awarded.

Yet under a landmark bipartisan proposal to overhaul the U.S. immigration system, released in mid-April and currently being debated in the U.S. Senate, the so-called DV lottery would be eliminated (see Section 2303 of the draft bill). Instead, it would be replaced with “merit-based” visas aimed at opening U.S doors to higher-skilled workers, particularly in the science, technology and engineering fields.

If passed, the provisions on the DV lottery would take effect in October 2014.

“We are concerned that the Senate’s plan to eliminate the DV lottery will stem the future flow of immigration from African countries and negatively impact the future make-up of America,” the Cameroon American Council (CAC), a Washington-based advocacy group, said Monday in a statement.

“The DV lottery is built upon foundational, democratic and egalitarian principles that strengthen America. These principles advance equal opportunity, attracts entrepreneurs and visionaries who contribute immensely to the American small business sector, and improves the quality of our social, economic, political and cultural life.”

The DV programme was created in 1990 with the aim of rectifying a bias within U.S. immigration laws against certain countries. The lottery is open to citizens of countries where immigration to the United States totalled less than 50,000 over the preceding half-decade, and it closes again once those levels hit a certain level.

As such, while high-immigration countries such as Mexico, the Philippines or China have never been allowed to enter the DV lottery, the programme has allowed in a broad spectrum of immigrants from smaller or lesser-represented countries. The representation from Africa has been particularly significant.

Since 2010, for instance, just three percent of Asians became U.S. permanent residents through the DV lottery, while more than 20 percent of Africans did so. The lottery thus became the third most important avenue to U.S. residency for Africans, behind asylum claims and family reunification.

Indeed, family reunification made up nearly half of U.S. residency routes for Africans in the past three years, yet this route too is not included in the current Senate bill. Instead, the current bill focuses on bringing in higher-skilled workers.

“Lawmakers say the new proposal won’t put various communities at a disadvantage, because new visas will be made for them – but they’ve left Africans out,” Yves Bouele, an advocate with the Cameroon American Council, told IPS.

“They say everybody is going to be well served with these new provisions, and that might be true, but that definitely doesn’t look to be the case for Africans. If the DV lottery is eliminated, we need to ensure that new provisions will continue to serve these African communities, which are really underserved.”

Conservative target

“The DV lottery has had the effect of lifting families out of poverty; provided opportunities to the affected families; and provided a talent pool for the U.S. economy,” the CAC suggests. “It has been a very successful foreign policy, civil rights achievement and national security tool.”

Such claims notwithstanding, Republican members of Congress have been aiming at dismantling the diversity visa programme for years. Indeed, Bouele says that the DV lottery has become a make-or-break issue for the Senate’s proposal.

“Basically, the DV lottery had to go in order to make sure the Republicans supported the bill,” he notes.

“And now people worry that if we insist on the lottery the Republicans will back out. Why exactly they want to take this out so bad, I’m not sure. We have a lot of data to prove how good the African immigrant population has been for the United States.”

Most recently, the Republican-held House of Representatives passed a bill in November that would have increased the number of high-skilled immigrant visas while eliminating the DV lottery – exactly as the new Senate proposal would do.

At the time, President Barack Obama threatened to veto the bill, calling it a “narrowly tailored proposal”. While the president has not discussed the DV lottery since the Senate unveiled the new proposal, other Congressional democrats have expressed their concerns.

“I am truly disappointed that the bipartisan proposal eliminates the Diversity Visa Program that provides for the future flow of diverse immigrant groups from underrepresented countries to have a real chance of obtaining the American Dream,” Yvette Clarke, a member of both the House of Representatives and the Congressional Black Caucus, said in a statement.

“Although assurances have been made that the new ‘Merit Based Point System’ would account for diversity, my concern is that it isn’t robust or sustainable enough to adequately protect the future flow of racially and socioeconomically diverse immigrant populations.”

Diversity compromise

Still, the new immigration reform proposal is a massive piece of legislation, and if it were to pass it would be the largest such overhaul since the mid-1980s. Further, while the bill is coming under increased fire from conservatives, it has received notably strong bipartisan support from both lawmakers and the U.S. public.

Given the polarised and politicised nature of immigration policy in the United States, the Senate’s bill has been widely referred to as strong though compromise legislation. In this context, many appear willing to offer concessions in order to get the legislation through to become law.

“This isn’t one of our favourite elements of the new proposal, as we think there’s real value in the diversity visa system – it has brought in people who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to access the U.S.,” Crystal Williams, the executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told IPS.

“But taken holistically, the number of things that the bill does that are of great benefit has to be weighed against the sacrifice of the DV lottery. Right now, we’re willing to accept that trade-off, although reluctantly.”

Further, Williams notes that some of the context around the discussion of diversity in the United States has evolved over the past two decades.

“One of the reasons that this is a politically viable bill is because diversity has become a driving factor right now,” she says. “Today, there is a recognition that any party that wants to stay politically viable has to understand that diversity.”

The immigration flow to Argentina from the Caribbean island nation is much smaller than the influx of Paraguayans, Bolivians, Peruvians and Uruguayans, who make up 80 percent of the foreign nationals who have come to this South American country since 2004.

But Dominicans stand out because of specific problems when it comes to insertion in the labour market.

Clarisa Rondó of the Association of Dominicans Living in Argentina tells IPS that the women come in search of better employment opportunities, but often fall into prostitution networks due to the difficulty in finding other work.

“Argentina is a country that takes us in, it makes us feel we are taking a step ahead,” she says. “It’s a big, generous country that offers possibilities.”

Rondó was 21 when she came here on her own in 1994. She has since married, had children, got divorced, and earned a teaching certificate in the arts.

“More women than men have always come, because men find it harder to break into the labour market,” she says. She clarifies that it is also difficult for women, but “they get involved in prostitution. Many of them are illiterate, they don’t find any other work, and they don’t have any alternative.”

The presence of Dominican women in Argentina becomes visible when the police raid places where prostitution is practiced, in Buenos Aires or in provinces like Córdoba, Misiones, La Pampa, Tierra del Fuego, Rio Negro or San Luis.

Although there are no official statistics, Rondó estimates that there are some 40,000 Dominicans living in this South American country of 40 million people. Most of them – some 15,000 – live in the capital.

Sociologist Lucía Nuñez Lodwick at the National University of San Martín explains to IPS that Dominicans, who traditionally migrated to the United States or Spain, began to come to Argentina in the mid-1990s.

Argentina’s rigid peg of the peso to the dollar in the 1990s drove the influx of immigrants from the rest of the region, who earned here in pesos and exchanged them for the same amount in dollars, to send back home as remittances, she points out.

That was one of the main reasons that Dominicans began to arrive, along with the common language – Spanish – and the demand in Argentina for people willing to do low-paid, low-skilled work – as domestics, nannies, caregivers for the elderly, hairdressers or restaurant workers, she explains.

According to a study carried out by the Ecumenical Services for the Support and Orientation of Migrants and Refugees (CAREF) and commissioned by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), thousands of Dominicans came to Argentina in the 1990s.

The study, “Migración, Prostitución y Trata de Mujeres Dominicanas en Argentina” (Migration, Prostitution and Trafficking of Dominican Women in Argentina) states that 12,000 to 15,000 immigrants from the Dominican Republic reached Argentina between 1995 and 2002.

In recent years, although the exchange rate is no longer a lure, Dominicans have continued to come. “We have been arriving for years, and some have managed to gain a good position in society,” Rondó says.

The activist explains that in some cases, the women take out a mortgage on their homes to travel, in the hope of finding a job in domestic service. But when they arrive, they find it hard to get a job, start racking up a debt with those who financed part of their journey, and end up falling into the hands of trafficking or prostitution rings, she says.

Nuñez concurs: “They come to Argentina with promises of jobs that don’t turn out to be what they had expected – work that would give them a better standard of living than they had in their country.”

Once here, they find it difficult to get any other kind of work, says the sociologist, who wrote the paper “Construyendo mapas: Cuerpos femeninos, espacio y jerarquización racial en la práctica de la prostitución en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires” on prostitution and racism in Buenos Aires.

Nuñez says that when they leave their countries in search of work abroad, women are aware that prostitution is one of the possibilities, from things they have heard about, but “many think it won’t happen to them.”

The sociologist studied the link between street prostitution and female migration in the Argentine capital, focusing on women from the Dominican Republic, who are highly visible as they are black in a country where there are so few people of African descent they only began to be counted in the 2010 census.

In her study, Nuñez says black women in Argentina are often seen as highly sexual, much more so than white or indigenous women, and this makes them more vulnerable.

One Dominican woman working as a sex worker in Buenos Aires, who was interviewed by Nuñez for her study, said “maybe they like (Dominican women) because we have big breasts.”

Another Dominican immigrant working as a street prostitute told the sociologist that “My mom didn’t want me to come here. She told me what women did when they came here, and I didn’t believe her.”

To combat this phenomenon, the Argentine authorities announced in August 2012 that people from the Dominican Republic would need visas to enter the country. And for those who already live here, the authorities simplified the legalisation process and streamlined the paperwork for gaining temporary residency for three years.

But Rondó believes that requiring visas is not a solution. The same view is shared in CAREF, where IPS spoke with Gabriela Liguori, and in the Dominican Republic Embassy in Buenos Aires. They all agree that the new visa requirement won’t solve the problem.

“This just makes things worse,” says the activist. “Because it will be difficult, but they’ll find other ways to get here on land, illegally, and then the women will be less protected and more exposed to trafficking.”

But the sources who spoke to IPS do believe it is a good idea to cut the red tape needed to regularise the situation of those who came in as tourists and are now living here without the proper documents, because temporary residency status would make it easier for them to find a job.

The programme has assistance from the Dominican consulate, Argentina’s foreign ministry, and the justice ministry’s office to rescue and support victims of trafficking.

Undocumented immigrants from the Dominican Republic were given from January to July to apply for temporary residency permits. By March, 631 permits had been granted, according to the web site of the national migrations office.

“My idea is that people who come should be able to regularise their situation, study or work, because even if some do come for prostitution, they could at least have other alternatives. But without documents, they’re forced to become sex workers,” Rondó says.

Roberto Savio, founder and president emeritus of the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and publisher of Other News. Credit: IPS

Unemployment in the euro area is expected to climb to 12.2 percent this year, up from 11.4 percent last year. In Spain, unemployment will rise to 27 percent, up from the 25 percent of last year; in Portugal it will rise from 15.9 to 18.9 percent; and after three brutal years of suffering, in Greece it will climb by 2.7 percent to 27 percent.

The trend will be devastating for young people: in Spain alone, it is estimated that 52 percent of young people will be without a job. We are creating a generation that will probably never get back on track.

The same trend is also unfolding in the rich countries of northern Europe. The German economy is expected to grow this year by a mere 0.4 percent, and from Austria to the Netherlands, the picture is one of decline.

This crisis is sapping the foundations and the identity of Europe. Since the end of the Second World War, Europeans have come to expect a social safety net that would cushion the less fortunate until they were able to spring back to work and dignity. Compared with the American dream, in which anybody could achieve the highest economic and social status through individual effort, without meddling by the state, the European dream was very different.

Now, however, most economists agree that this dream has become very distant because there is no way that the economy can lift that many people any longer. In Europe, austerity is eliminating the social safety net.

But while the United States and Japan have taken the road of economic stimulus, injecting massive quantities of money into their systems every month, and already with some visible results, Europe has taken the opposite direction. The European policy is to cut public spending and raise taxes simultaneously as the recipe for eliminating deficits. And, despite clearly available facts and the declarations of some accepting the need for growth, this policy is not changing.

Besides losing its gloss, the EU is fostering a growing resentment. On the same day the European Commission report was released, the strongly anti-Europe United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) registered a major success by taking 25 percent of the votes cast in local elections in the United Kingdom. Similar parties are sprouting everywhere, from Belgium to the Netherlands, from Austria to Finland. And, for the first time, a similar party in Germany is now running on a platform to leave the Euro.

The lack of effective leaders who are up to the task is allowing the cracks in Europe’s foundations to grow. In Spain, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy enjoys a comfortable majority in parliament but is vilified every day by demonstrators throughout the country. In France, President François Hollande also enjoys a solid majority but he now has the approval of only 25 percent of the electorate. Portugal has an almost identical situation, Greece has a very strong anti-austerity and anti Europe party and Italy has a new government with an uncertain future.

Few realise that Italy is a special case of malfunctioning and lack of synchronism with Europe. The end of the Cold War led to the death of the modern Italian political parties, which were created and fuelled by the Cold War: the Communist Party and the Christian Democratic Party.

But in the creation of a new political system, an unparalleled event took place: Silvio Berlusconi, the richest man in Italy, with a powerful media empire, decided to enter politics to escape personal economic and judicial problems. He became a deft politician and ever since Italy has been split between pro-Berlusconians and anti-Berlusconians.

This latter camp has brought together the entire centre-left and left, and is unlike other European left-wing parties such as the Labour Party in England, the Social Democrats in Germany and the Socialist Party in France. Those parties predate the end of the Cold War, and were not built to counteract a one-person party like Berlusconi’s People of Freedom Party. Out of this anomaly has emerged a new Italian political “party”, the Five Star Movement, again led very personally by a comedian-turned-politician, Beppe Grillo, which is also totally asynchronous with Europe. Until Berlusconi retires, Italy will remain split over him, and all elections will be inconclusive and bring no real political agenda to the centre of debate.

If the old generation of German pro-European leaders, like Helmut Kohl and Helmut Schmidt, were still there, it would probably try to educate the Germans on the values of Europe for Germany. Germans are deeply convinced that they should not put their wallets at the disposal of southern Europeans who work less, try to avoid paying taxes, have spent beyond their means and, instead of swallowing the bitter medicine, expect Germans taxpayers to bail them out.

But a study last year by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy found that, in 2011 alone, Germany was able to save the equivalent of 11.1 billion dollars. This was because it could borrow money at much cheaper rates than southern Europe. And last month, a study by Germany’s Bertelsmann Foundation claimed that to leave the euro would cost Germany the equivalent of some 1.6 trillion dollars over 13 years.

The whole of Europe is waiting to see what will happen in the September elections in Germany. The Social Democrats are less pro-austerity than Chancellor Angela Merkel, but in all probability she is going to win. Will she then change her stand against everybody, including even the International Monetary Fund, which is decrying the excesses of austerity? Nobody knows, but many hope.

Meanwhile, the world is not stopping to give Europe time to solve its internal weaknesses. Just read the report of the U.S. National Intelligence Council on global trends. Among others, the U.S., European and Japanese share of global income is projected to fall from 56 percent to 26 percent in 2030. Any further European decline would hasten those projections. So, time is not on Europe’s side.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) farmworkers at a rally in Lakeland, Florida on Apr. 18, 2010. The Working Group voiced particular concerns regarding low-wage agricultural workers. Credit: Andrew Stelzer/IPS

A United Nations expert group is warning that too many gaps remain in implementing new safeguards among businesses based in the United States, both in terms of their domestic and international operations, to ensure the protection of human rights of workers and communities affected by those operations.

Two members of the U.N. Working Group on Business and Human Rights wrapped up a 10-day fact-finding mission to the United States this week, at the end of which they released initial observations. Ultimately, these will be expanded upon and finalised for presentation to the U.N. Human Rights Council in June 2014.

“With a few exceptions, most companies still struggle to understand the implications of the corporate responsibility to respect human rights,” Puvan Selvanathan, the current head of the Working Group and one of the two members on the U.S. trip, said at the end of the mission “Those that do have policies in place, in turn, face the challenge of turning such policies into effective practices.”

Selvanathan and his colleague, Michael Addo, focused on gauging U.S. adherence to and regulatory changes following the 2011 adoption of the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. These principles offer the first international standards aimed at ameliorating the negative rights impacts of global business.

Although the United States is a signatory to the Guiding Principles, Washington has not yet come up with a national plan for their implantation, a gap highlighted by the Working Group and long emphasised by civil society.

“We were pleased that the Working Group engaged with civil society organisations, including human rights, environmental, labour and indigenous groups,” Amol Mehra, director of the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable (ICAR), a Washington-based coalition, told IPS.

“We believe that the U.S. government has much farther to go in fulfilling its duty to protect human rights under the Guiding Principles … and we also note the Working Group’s call to the U.S. government to develop a National Action Plan for implementation of the Guiding Principles.”

Both Mehra and the Working Group also noted the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision known as Kiobel vs. Royal Dutch Shell. That case, decided just weeks ago, will now “significantly limit access to judicial remedy for victims of corporate-related human rights abuse,” Mehra said.

The Working Group, meanwhile, noted that further analysis was still necessary to understand the “full implications” of the judgement.

Due diligence

In late April, ICAR and a group of civil society groups sent a brief to the U.S. State Department outlining a series of recommendations to bring the country closer in line with the Guiding Principles and to strengthen related indicators.

The brief’s three central recommendations, in addition to developing a national implementation plan, include strengthening remedies for human rights violations. It also calls on regulators to mandate that U.S. corporations incorporate human rights into their “due diligence”, the legally mandated inquiries that companies must take ahead of a business sale or agreement.

Currently, such a step regarding human rights impact is not required.

“Our overall concern is that quite a bit more needs to be done on this issue in the United States, and we’re looking for regulatory mechanisms that can hold businesses to account on human rights,” Corinna Gilfillan, head of the U.S. office of Global Witness, a watchdog group, told IPS.

“In particular, we’re asking that the U.S. government mandates human rights due diligence, looks into how laws can be structured around this issue. And, of course, we’re also asking that U.S. government institutions themselves act in accordance with human rights norms.”

The early notes from the Working Group do offer positive reports on local-level engagement in line with the Guiding Principles, as well as on important strengthening of U.S. policy and regulation, including bolstering disclosure standards. Movement towards broad implementation, however, appears to be taking place only slowly.

“The U.S. government has committed to the Guiding Principles, and established a number of key initiatives in this regard,” the Working Group’s Michael Addo stated Wednesday, when he and Selvanathan unveiled their early observations here in Washington.

“[But] it is now facing the challenge of putting them into practice, across all departments, ensuring that this is done in a coherent and effective way, and in a way that makes a real difference to people on the ground.”

Selvanathan and Addo pointed to “significant gaps” in oversight, regulation and enforcement in the context of U.S. attempts to conform to the Guiding Principles. Yet they said the responsibility goes beyond government officials.

“There is negligible awareness of the Guiding Principles generally among U.S. stakeholders,” they note in an eight-page concluding statement seen by IPS, “and, it seems, little appreciation of human rights being material to the conduct of business in the U.S.”

Chronic disregard

Speaking with reporters and civil society on Wednesday, the Working Group voiced particular concerns regarding low-wage agricultural workers, lack of free and prior informed consent for Native American communities engaging with big business, and harmful practices by the domestic extractives industry.

Indeed, Selvanathan and Addo reserved some of their strongest language for these issues. For instance, they reported having heard “allegations of labour practices in low-wage industries with migrant workers, particularly within the services sector, that would be illegal under both U.S. laws and international standards.”

Such violations reportedly include violations of minimum wage requirements, wage theft and “chronic disregard for minimum health and safety measures”.

The two also singled out the extractives industry, travelling to the state of West Virginia, in the Appalachian Mountains, to talk to communities living near strip mines and so-called “mountaintop removal” mining operations.

There, they were told of “significant adverse human rights impacts, most notably related to the enjoyment of the rights to health and water”, and also heard allegations of intimidation and harassment by those opposed to surface mining.

“I am hopeful that our visit from the United Nations is a sign that they’re starting to take notice of the human rights atrocities being committed in Appalachia today,” Junior Walk, a campaigner with Coal River Mountain Watch, a local advocacy group, said in a statement.

“It’s a sad thought that our politicians are so crooked that we have to ask the United Nations for help, but no one else will listen.”