An Israeli patrol on the border with Syria. Credit: Pierre Klochendler/IPS.

It all happened within ten days – Syria’s civil war fought metres away from Israeli orchards abutting the ceasefire line; Austrian peacekeepers hastily evacuating the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) that separates Israel from Syria; fears of a total collapse of the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF). All while the cherry-picking season is at its peak.

Staff Sergeant Heinz Brandl of the 378-strong Austrian UNDOF battalion deplored last week’s evacuation. “Our government decided that it became too dangerous here. Most of us are unhappy to leave. Unfortunately we must follow the rules of our politicians. There’s no way back.”

The Austrian pullout came in the wake of the short-lived capture on Jun. 6 of the Syrian town Quneitra by rebel Free Syrian Army forces. Four hours later, Syrian army forces loyal to President Bashar el-Assad dislodged the rebels. The 911-member UN force was caught in the crosshairs of the fighting. Two peacekeepers were wounded.

“Austria go home, return to the Anschluss!” railed an Israeli as he witnessed the sudden pullout from the Ein Zivan lookout, comparing the admission of powerlessness by the peacekeepers to the capitulation of Austria to Nazi Germany’s annexationist demand in 1938.

At the Quneitra border crossing where the UNDOF headquarters are located, the loyalist Syrian flag flies again on the masthead opposite the Israeli flag.

From kibbutz Ein Zivan’s lookout, smouldering fields attest to the battle, the fiercest in the area since the start of the civil war.

Who controls which part of the Golan Heights is now easily identifiable. The charred fields are in Syria. The lush trees are on the Israeli side. This is the height of the cherry season.

Ein Zivan’s community chairman Ronen Gilboa witnessed the fighting. “At 5am, we heard gunshots and explosions while we were picking cherries. Within minutes, the army asked us to leave the orchards.”

Gilboa points out that during the clash, Syrian tanks outflanked the rebels from the area adjacent to the ceasefire line, preferring to fire towards their own territory lest Israel retaliates. “The whole area is a north-south passageway for the rebel.”

Israel nonetheless lodged a customary complaint to the UN because it said five Syrian tanks and four Armoured Personal Carriers had entered the DMZ.

Over the past year, Syria’s civil war has leaked across the ceasefire line. Errant mortar shells occasionally land on the Israeli side. Israel then returns fire towards the source of fire.

Croatia withdrew its force after a UN convoy was held hostage in March by Syrian rebels.

Damascus is a mere 60 kilometres from the Israeli side of the ceasefire line, and 243 kilometres from the Israeli Prime Minister’s office, where Benjamin Netanyahu sounded the alarm.

“The disintegration of the UN force in the Golan makes trenchant the fact that Israel cannot lean on international forces for its security,” Netanyahu told his cabinet.

UNDOF chief Herve Ladsous told a closed emergency session of the United Nations Security Council that the latest incident brought Israel and Syria on the brink of the most direct military confrontation on the Golan Heights front in 40 years.

The 1974 Separation of Forces Agreement between Israel and Syria formally ended the 1973 war. UNDOF has since been operating in the buffer zone, supervising the ceasefire.

“We cannot entrust our security to UNDOF; yet, we cannot entrust our security to Syria’s commitment to the 1974 ceasefire agreement without UNDOF,” Gilboa reasons. “We appreciate that UNDOF is part and parcel of the agreement.”

Rhetoric aside, Netanyahu shares this opinion.

Every six months, the Security Council must extend UNDOF’s mandate for a further six months. The current mandate expires by the end of the month.

In a recent report to the Security Council, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recommended the renewal of the UNDOF mission for six more months, until Dec. 31, calling it “essential”.

This is a view shared by both Netanyahu and Assad. Ban announced that Israel and Syria have given their approval to the proposed extension.

Fiji is expected to somehow fill the UNDOF vacuum by sending 170 military and medical personnel to the Golan at the end of June.

Just kilometres away from the UN border crossing around which the recent clash took place, an Israeli reserve artillery battalion prepares for what a soldier calls “a long-planned military exercise.”

In a compound not far from what now looks more like a frontline than a ceasefire line, Israeli tanks trundle by, discharging plumes of exhaust fumes and dust. There’s no need for a smokescreen to hide from the Syrian line of sight, says Gilboa, himself a former armoured regiment commander.

Armoured warfare is often practised on this swath of territory. During the 1973 war, Israel and Syria fought one of the largest tanks battles since World War II on the Golan as Syria tried to recapture the territory conquered by Israel in 1967, to no avail.

“As long as Assad is in control, we’re not that concerned,” says Gilboa. “The civil war doesn’t affect our daily lives. We train our people to be alert, that’s it.”

Syria’s civil war may have reached the fence. Yet, on the Israeli side 50 metres away from the border, visitors have fun insouciantly reaping the fruit of their own labour. Self cherry-picking is a major touristic attraction in this area. Just last weekend, 6,000 tourists flocked to Ein Zivan’s orchards.

Naftali Ashkenazi, a resident of Holon in central Israel, is unfazed by the rising tension: “I’ve been through much worse during the 1973 war.”

“It’s all a little surreal when you hear bangs and booms just across the border,” says kibbutz member Neta Bahat. “But our main concern is to prevent the birds from eating the cherries from the trees. Our livelihood depends on it. I hope nothing will change here. And, may calm prevail.”

By the end of the month, the kibbutz will have produced 100 tons of cherries. That’s half of last year’s harvest. The winter was too hot, the farmers say.

Anna Mungara (seated, short hair), a midwife in training, who attends the midwifery school at Masvingo Provincial Hospital, Zimbabwe treats a newborn baby in the neonatal ward. Courtesy: Jordi Matas/UNICEF

A newborn baby lets out a feeble cry as midwife Anna Mungara tends to a small wound on its head, at the provincial hospital in Masvingo, a town in southeast Zimbabwe.

With utmost care, Mungara cleans the cut, wraps the baby in two sets of warm blankets and makes cooing sounds to soothe him. When the infant calms down, she gently places him into an incubator.

Mungara, a trainee at the hospital’s midwifery school in Masvingo Province, is part of a new intake of nurses receiving additional skills to bring down skyrocketing maternal and infant mortality rates in this southern African nation.

Every day, eight women and 100 children die from pregnancy- and delivery-related complications in Zimbabwe, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Most of them die of easily preventable causes and illnesses.

Zimbabwe’s health sector, once among the best in sub-Saharan Africa, collapsed during the nation’s 2008 economic crisis, when hyperinflation of 231 million percent caused public hospitals to temporarily close down as they ran out of medicines, while skilled health workers left the country in droves to pursue better opportunities elsewhere.

The health system has been struggling to recover ever since, causing maternal mortality to shoot up to 790 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2012, from 390 deaths in 1990. Mortality of children under five increased from 78 deaths per 1,000 live births to 94 deaths per 1,000 in the same timeframe.

A 435-million-dollar Health Transition Fund (HTF), sponsored by several European Union members and managed by UNICEF, hopes to reverse these figures by 2015. The money goes towards a retention and training scheme for health workers. It also goes to the supply of essential drugs and vaccines, the training of community health workers, and the planning and financing of health policy.

UNICEF Zimbabwe’s chief of young child survival and development, Aboubacar Kampo, tells IPS that one of the fund’s goals is to have at least one midwife per 5,000 people and three doctors in each of Zimbabwe’s 62 districts. Another aim is to achieve a more equitable distribution of health professionals between urban and rural areas.

“When we started to roll out the fund, Zimbabwe had 76 doctors countrywide. Most of them were working in Harare and Bulawayo (the two main cities). Today, the number of doctors has increased to 116, with most of the new recruits working in rural areas,” says Kampo.

At Masvingo Provincial Hospital, senior tutor Catherine Sithole and her team train 60 new midwives per year. The midwifery school is one of several in the country, aimed at undoing the dramatic brain drain that the national health system suffered over the past years.

In 2001, about 80 percent of midwife posts were vacant, according to the Zimbabwean Ministry of Health and Child Welfare. Especially rural areas were drained of skilled staff.

A key component of the HTF is the payment of bonuses to health workers to encourage them to stay in the country and, most importantly, take up usually less sought-after positions in rural areas, which experience the most drastic shortfalls in service delivery.

Mungara knows from experience how tough it is to provide even the most basic health care in Zimbabwe’s rural areas. Before she joined the midwifery school, the 36-year-old was employed at a clinic in Zaka, a remote village 80 km south of Masvingo town.

“We have no resources to assist women during deliveries. It is difficult to get referrals for pregnant women with issues like hypertension, or even to get transport to the nearest hospital,” she tells IPS.

Since the HTF formed in 2011, the gap has been closing, but only slowly. Sithole tells IPS: “Having more trained midwives is really making a difference to the health of mothers and small children. The training enables them to make better decisions with regard to their patients.”

But external funding alone will not be enough to resolve Zimbabwe’s health crisis in the long run. The government will have to substantially increase its spending on health to help rebuild the health system and ensure sustainability beyond 2015. The current health budget of 380 million dollars will not be enough to achieve this, experts say.

“The government is only spending 26 dollars per person on health, less than half of what they should allocate,” says Kampo. “At the moment, the health system is 70 percent donor-funded.”

Given Zimbabwe’s dire economic situation – the cash-strapped country is 10.7 billion dollars in external debt – the health budget is unlikely to receive a substantial increase any time soon.

“We don’t have much money in the country and can’t get credit. Although long-term prospects of recovery are good, given the richness of natural resources, recovery hasn’t even started yet,” independent economist John Robertson, from Robertson Economic Information Services in Harare, tells IPS.

Health department officials admit that more needs to be done to give the national health system a sustainable boost. Dr. Robert Mudyiradima, the provincial medical director of Masvingo Province, tells IPS: “There is not enough budget support. Whatever finances come through the HTF have to fill a very big hole.

“There are still weaknesses in the general drug supply. Service delivery is not what it is supposed to be. Until the Zimbabwean government’s budget support for health services is adequate, the demand for services will be overwhelmed by the need,” Mudyiradima says.

A walk through the Chivi District Hospital, which services a population of 174,000 in Chivi, a small town in Masvingo province, illustrates Mudyiradima’s point. Most days there is no running water here, the hospital kitchen is out of order, washing machines and the incinerator are not operational, and power outages are frequent.

“We are often running out of basics, like surgical gloves,” district medical officer Dr. Emmanuel Chagondah tells IPS.

When Chagondah started working here 11 months ago, the facility had been without a doctor for more than four years. Due to the HTF retention scheme, two other doctors recently joined him, while numerous vacant nursing positions have been filled.

“The quality of services has improved a lot due to an increase in personnel, but drug supply and technical equipment remain big challenges,” the young doctor says.

He has set his hopes on the government keeping its promises to increase the national health budget.

“Donor funding is great, but we need our own financing as well to make programmes sustainable.”

Peace talks between the United States and the Taliban are due to begin later this week in Qatar. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

Nearly 12 years after the United States ousted the Taliban from power, the White House announced Tuesday that the United States will begin formal talks with the militant Islamist group in Qatar later this week as part of Afghanistan’s national reconciliation process.

The announcement, which coincided with ceremonies marking the formal transfer of primary security responsibility from U.S.-led NATO forces to their Afghan counterparts, preceded a statement issued shortly afterwards by the Taliban itself in which it implicitly disassociated itself from Al-Qaeda.

The Taliban “would not allow anyone to threaten the security of other countries from the soil of Afghanistan”, Muhammad Naim, a Taliban spokesman, said in a televised broadcast from Doha. In addition, he pledged that the group seeks “a political and peaceful solution” to the conflict.

“These are two statements which we’ve long called for and together, they fulfil the requirements for the Taliban to open…a political office in Doha for the purposes of negotiation with the Afghan government,” said a senior official in a background teleconference for reporters.

“These statements represent an important first step towards reconciliation, a process that, after 30 years of armed conflict in Afghanistan, will certainly promise to be complex, long and messy, but nonetheless, this is an important first step,” said the official, who spoke on condition of not being identified.

He also called on the Taliban and the U.S.-backed government of President Hamid Karzai to begin direct negotiations “soon”.

Speaking at the G8 Summit in Northern Ireland, President Barack Obama also described the opening of the Taliban office an “important first step towards reconciliation” but stressed that “there will be a lot of bumps in the road”.

He also said Washington remained “fully committed to our military efforts to defeat Al-Qaeda and to support the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF)”.

Critics of the U.S. military effort hailed Tuesday’s announcement as signalling a major change in policy in advance of the deadline at the end of 2014 for the withdrawal of virtually all foreign troops from Afghanistan.

Most experts in Washington believe that at most 10,000 U.S. troops – plus about 4,000 more from other NATO countries – are likely to remain beyond that date as trainers for Afghan forces and as counter-terrorist units focused on preventing the return of Al-Qaeda forces.

“The U.S. and Karzai know they have to cut a deal with the Taliban and that the Taliban cannot be defeated militarily,” said William Goodfellow, director of the Centre for International Policy (CIP) here.

“The problem for the last 11 years is that it’s the (U.S.) military that’s been running the show, and to the military, negotiations equals defeat. We’re now shifting away from a policy of wanting to defeat the Taliban militarily to one of finding a political solution,” he said.

Tuesday’s developments – both the transfer of security responsibility to Afghan forces and the announcement of U.S.-Taliban talks – come amidst indications of eagerness by both the White House and Congress to wind down Washington’s commitment to Afghanistan as quickly as possible.

Just last week, a majority of the Republican-led House voted for the first time to approve a bipartisan amendment to the defence authorisation bill in favour of accelerating Washington’s troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The amendment, which was adopted by a 305-121 margin, also deleted a provision of the bill that had supported a continued U.S. military presence after 2014, replacing it with a call for the administration to seek explicit Congressional approval for retaining any U.S. troops there after that date.

About 66,000 U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan – down from a high of around 100,000 two years ago following two “surges” sent by Obama as part of an ambitious counter-insurgency (COIN) strategy overseen by General David Petraeus.

The administration is currently engaged in a major internal debate over the pace of withdrawal for the remaining troops before the 2014 deadline and how many troops Washington will retain in Afghanistan after that date.

The latter question presumes that Karzai – or whoever succeeds him after the 2014 presidential election – wants them and provides the necessary guarantees, including the thorny issue of immunity from criminal prosecution, to keep them there.

The Pentagon and its supporters want to keep as many troops there for as long as possible, including next year’s “fighting season”, which lasts from late spring into the fall. They believe that that U.S. forces can still deal major blows to the Taliban – thus weakening its position in any negotiations – and are still badly needed to back up the ANSF.

Though 352,000 strong and more battle-tested than two years ago, the ANSF suffers serious weaknesses in a range of areas, including air support and an annual attrition rate of about 30 percent. The United States and its allies have said they will continue spending more than 4 billion dollars annually to help maintain, supply and expand the ANSF after 2014.

Obama, who had described the Afghanistan conflict as a “war of necessity” during his 2008 presidential campaign, initially deferred to Petraeus but reportedly became increasingly disenchanted with COIN’s effectiveness.

As early as two years ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the administration’s support for direct negotiations with the Taliban.

But despite a series of informal meetings with Taliban representatives hosted by various European countries and Qatar, the State Department proved unable to wrest control of policy from the Pentagon and its supporters in Congress.

Other key actors, including Karzai himself, the Pakistani military, which is believed to exert considerable influence if not outright control over key Taliban leaders, and more hard-line factions within the Taliban, also opposed talks at various times.

U.S. officials who briefed the press said they believed that the Taliban Political Commission in Doha is fully authorised by all factions of the movement and its leader, Mullah Omar, to conduct negotiations.

The officials also stressed that talks between the United States and the Taliban would likely be limited in scope and that negotiations between the Taliban and the Karzai government, as represented initially by the High Peace Council, were far more important. They said they expected the Council to send representatives to meet with the Taliban several days after the U.S.-Taliban talks.

“I think that given the level of distrust among Afghans, it’s going to be a slow process to get that…intra-Afghan dialogue moving,” said one. “The United States will encourage and help facilitate that, but the talks are largely going to be paced by the success or failure in that dialogue, and so I wouldn’t be looking for early results.”

“There is no guarantee that this will happen quickly, if at all,” added another.

In addition, Washington, they said, would only sign a final accord if the Taliban met three conditions: “First, that they break ties with Al-Qaeda; that they end the violence; and that they accept Afghanistan’s constitution, including its protections for women and minorities.”

While the Taliban’s statement about not permitting Afghan territory to be used to threaten the security of other nations moved partway toward meeting the first condition, they said, the Taliban would have to be more explicit to fully satisfy it.

Although the United States did unveil important new pledges Tuesday to crack down on anonymous “shell” corporations, used by money launderers and tax evaders, critics point out that Washington has not outlined how it will implement these commitments. They also warn that the commitments will not put corporate ownership information into the public domain, a criticism also levelled at the G8 declaration overall.

The G8 met Monday and Tuesday at a summit in Northern Ireland, during which tax evasion and corporate transparency were given top billing. While Cameron had hoped other countries would back his call for the creation of public registries, none did so.

Even as the G8 countries decided on a more incremental approach to financial transparency than some had hoped, however, they did arrive at a host of important agreements, including for countries to begin sharing tax information.

“The G8′s declaration is absolutely historic,” Eric LeCompte, executive director of Jubilee USA Network, a religious antipoverty group, said Tuesday. “We would like to see even greater moves for corporate transparency, but the foundation the G8 built will take us into a more accountable corporate world then we’ve seen before.”

Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, the Washington-based multilateral lender, similarly issued congratulations, noting, “International tax avoidance and evasion have emerged as major risks to government revenue and as threats to the credibility of tax systems in the eyes of citizens – in both advanced and developing countries.”

Others are offering more tempered reactions, however, particularly over the failure of the G8 to explicitly call for the creation of public registries detailing the “beneficial” (or final) ownership of all companies, including shell corporations.

While the United States has now said it will be creating these registries on its own, these will apparently be available only to law enforcement and tax authorities. Critics urge these databases to be made open to the public from the beginning.

“It is important that the United States has committed to creating registries of beneficial information, because this does go beyond the G8 declaration,” Stefanie Ostfeld, a senior policy advisor with Global Witness, an advocacy group and member of the Financial Transparency Coalition, told IPS.

“But it’s not putting that information in the public domain, as the United Kingdom is saying it will do. Without such a commitment, these moves will not live up to their potential impact.”

Shell companies

“We’re very pleased to see the G8 as a whole recognise that anonymous shell companies around the world are a massive problem,” Heather Lowe, legal counsel and director of government affairs at Global Financial Integrity (GFI), a Washington watchdog group, told IPS.

“But then it comes down to the individual national action plans to achieve meaningful progress. In this, the United States is particularly significant in part because of the very high number of companies created here in the first place.”

In recent years, the United States has increasingly spoken out on international tax evasion and money laundering, with a domestic political debate progressing on related reforms to the tax code. At the same time, the United States is widely thought to shelter a huge number of these shell corporations, used to launder corrupt earnings or hide income of foreign citizens.

“It’s very hard to tell how many of these shell companies are incorporated here, as the U.S. doesn’t require information on the ultimate beneficial controller of each company,” Lowe said.

“However, we do know that the potential for a large number of anonymous corporations existing under U.S. law is very high. We also know that those who want to create such a company know this is a good place to do it.”

U.S. shell companies are estimated to have facilitated some 18 billion dollars in illicit transactions in 2005 alone, according to the Treasury Department. Advocates say this legal laxity is directly affecting developing economies, allowing corrupt officials or cronies in resource-rich countries to siphon billions of dollars out of their countries.

According to a recent report by GFI, such abuse could be resulting in losses for developing countries as high as a trillion dollars a year – 10 times the amount those countries receive annually in foreign aid.

For this reason, activists had increased pressure substantially in recent months on President Obama, calling on him to back Cameron’s plan to create a public registry on corporate ownership.

Yet the final pledge fell short of this goal. In a fact sheet released Tuesday, the White House said simply that “The Treasury Department, along with other federal agencies, will continue to advocate for comprehensive legislation on beneficial ownership.”

Recommitment

Simply pushing for such legislation is in line with a commitment the Obama administration made nearly two years ago. According to Lowe, little progress has been made since then.

“While this is a step forward, it’s certainly not a change in U.S. government policy,” she said.

“This [G8 announcement] is really just a recommitment to the issue. That’s fine, but what we really wanted to see was a plan for how the government would advocate for new legislation, which we haven’t been able to obtain.”

In the past, U.S. legislation to require the collection of “beneficial ownership” information has been difficult to advance. One proposal has been introduced (and rejected) in the Senate at least three times over the past decade, at one point being co-sponsored by then-Senator Obama.

On Tuesday, Senator Carl Levin, a primary sponsor of a bill that would require such disclosure, lauded the new G8 commitments: “I said before the summit that the G8 nations were poised to strike a hammer blow against offshore corporate tax avoidance. The G8 commitments made today, if carried out, can bring that hammer down.”

Levin’s legislation, as well as a similar bill in the House of Representatives, is expected to be reintroduced in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, it is currently unclear whether regulatory or executive action on this issue could allow the administration to work around Congress, but advocates suggest they see some opportunities for doing so.

Critics of a potential free trade agreement between the United States and European Union worry that such an agreement could lead to increased exportation of liquified natural gas from the U.S. Credit: Bigstock

Controversy is building following the announcement that negotiations will soon begin on a free trade agreement between the United States and European Union, with critics warning that any such agreement could negatively affect a host of regulatory concerns.

On Monday, during the Group of Eight (G8) summit held in Northern Ireland, the United States, European Commission and European Council jointly announced that negotiations will begin on Jul. 8 in Washington for what British Prime Minister David Cameron called “the biggest bilateral trade deal in history”.

Proponents characterise the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP), also known as the Trans-Atlantic Free Agreement (TAFTA), as a way to improve the struggling economies of the United States and European Union.

“The whole point,” Cameron stated on Monday, “is to fire up our economies and drive growth and prosperity around the world – to do things that make a real difference to people’s lives. And there is no more powerful way to achieve that than by boosting trade.”

He asserted that the deal could “add as much as a 100 billion pounds to the EU economy, 80 billion pounds to the U.S. economy, and as much as 85 billion pounds to the rest of the world”.

Nevertheless, there is significant opposition to the proposed deal.

“The claims that this deal will somehow be an economic cure-all and generate significant growth are simply not supported by any reliable evidence,” Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen‘s Global Trade Watch, a public interest watchdog group based in Washington, said Tuesday.

“But we do know that the talks are based on the demands of U.S. and EU corporations that have been pushing for decades to eliminate the best consumer, environmental and financial standards on either side of the Atlantic.”

Tariffs between the U.S. and E.U. are already low, and critics note that that what the deal really seeks to accomplish is the removal of “non tariff barriers” (also referred to as “trade irritants”).

“Non-tariff barriers is a commonly-used euphemism which refers to the array of financial, environmental, health and other policies which the public has put in place to safeguard its own interests,” Ben Beachy, a research director for Public Citizen, told IPS.

Under T-TIP, standards such as those mentioned by Beachy would be “converged”, so that regulations from state to state would be more closely aligned. Supporters of the deal say this uniformity would facilitate trade, but Beachy contended that the greater effect would be to lower regulation levels to a point that “democratic electorates would never stand for.”

“The resulting effect of ‘convergence’”, he said, “will be to limit the ability of democratic policymakers to establish their own preferred levels of regulation.”

Chilling effect

Environment groups are likewise worried that such harmonisation will allow for an increase in certain energy technologies, particularly the sudden prevalence in the United States of natural gas hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”.

Countries of the European Union currently restrict fracking within their own borders due to environmental concerns. But some analysts suggest these countries would be less averse to consuming imported gas fracked in the United States.

“There are concerns that the U.S. would become a major exporter of liquefied natural gas to the E.U.,” Ilana Solomon, of the Sierra Club, an environmental protection group, told IPS.

The United States recently approved private licenses for companies seeking to liquefy gas, indicating that in the future it will export liquefied natural gas, something it does not currently do.

Under free trade agreements in the past, Solomon noted, important regulatory reviews normally undertaken when considering the advantages of exportation have often been replaced by automatic approvals.

There are also health concerns related to the agreement. Some worry that food safety standards in the United States, for example, could be compromised if European exporters –  currently subject to lower standards – could deliver their, say, milk to U.S. stores.

Regardless of where U.S. standards stood, the less-well-regulated (and possibly less expensive) European milk would be available to U.S. consumers.

Another controversial aspect of the agreement would allow European privately owned corporations to challenge U.S. domestic laws that may negatively affect their profits or even expected profits.

In what are known as “investor-state” tribunals, foreign corporations would be eligible to receive compensation from taxpayers if the corporations could demonstrate that they lost money because of laws that inhibit trade.

Being subject to these tribunals could lead to what Public Citizen’s Beachy refers to as a “chilling effect”, meaning policymakers would be less likely to pass regulations because of perceived vulnerability.

Chipping away regulation

Beachy also noted the deal could carry “very real economic costs” if it undermines financial regulations and increases the risk of economic crisis.

According to a European Commission study, regulations that may be subject to “convergence” include financial safeguards such as those included in policies enacted by the United States following the economic crisis that began in 2008.

Last year, the Association of German Banks indicated what it hoped would emerge from any transatlantic deal regarding the aligning of U.S. and European standards.

“We would not like to see U.S. regulators applying standards to our banks that are extraterritorial, duplicative or discriminating … we have a number of such concerns regarding the ongoing implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act,” said the Association, referring to the most significant U.S. regulatory legislation passed in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

According to Beachy, it is doubtful that the free trade agreement could succeed in removing all its targeted “irritants”.

The European Commission study confirmed that this would be “unlikely”, noting that to do so in some cases would require “constitutional changes” and that “political sensitivities” might stand in the way.

Still, opponents worry that by specifically targeting these barriers, the broad agreement could succeed in chipping away at a significant number of them.

“The corporations that favour the agreement know they won’t get everything they want,” Beachy said. “But they think they can get a lot.”

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.

Argentine economist Raúl Benítez highlights continuing inequality in Latin America. Credit: FAO/Giulio Napolitano

Judging by the accolades and diplomas handed out to 11 Latin American and Caribbean countries by FAO, it would be easy to conclude that the region has taken a giant leap towards eradicating hunger.

This is the benign face of the fight against hunger in Latin America, together with the strong economic growth experienced by many countries in the region.

But a closer look at the food and agriculture scenario reveals another side: lingering inequality, marked by the increasing influence of agribusiness, in which a few giant corporations wield enormous control and power.

Argentine economist Raúl Benítez, head of the FAO office for Latin America and the Caribbean, said that “although our continent has made great strides against hunger, it is still the most unequal region in the world.”

“Of the nearly 900 million hungry people in the world, 50 million are in Latin America or the Caribbean,” Benítez told IPS at the 38th FAO Conference meeting in Rome Jun. 15-22.

Hunger has even reared its head once again in countries like Argentina, whose population was among the best-fed on the planet for a considerable part of the 20th century.

“Today in Argentina there are many children suffering from malnutrition caused by the soy boom,” complained Silvia Ribeiro, Latin America director of the Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC), referring to Argentina’s top export.

“For more than 20 years, with the support of every administration, Argentina has allowed massive expansion of soy cultivation, displacing cattle as well as other crops, and even transforming the local diet,” said Ribeiro, whose organisation monitors the impact of emerging technologies and corporations on biodiversity, agriculture and human rights.

Today, “the poor in Argentina don’t drink cow’s milk but soy milk, and they don’t eat beef but soy substitutes, a monotonous diet that causes malnutrition,” she said.

According to Ribeiro, who is also at the Rome conference, FAO’s praise for Latin America’s achievements against hunger “is based on a biased and misleading analysis.”

“It’s as if FAO only saw GDP, which does reflect greater agricultural production, but closed its eyes to the fact that this production is socially excluding and ecologically unsustainable, and only benefits big multinational corporations that produce for export,” she said.

But Benítez said “FAO can only call attention to these phenomena and propose corrective measures; states are sovereign, and they may or may not adopt policies in line with our proposals.”

Ribeiro also highlighted the increasing use of genetically modified crops. “The most serious case is that of Mexican maize, because the government has approved (experimental plots) of transgenic maize seeds by companies like Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer,” the activist said.

Maize is an essential staple in the diet of the people of Mesoamerica, the region encompassing southern Mexico and Central America. Moreover, Mexico “is the birthplace” of maize, Ribeiro noted. In this country, “maize is more than food, it is an essential pillar of national identity and tradition,” she added.

Countries in similar positions, such as China in the case of soy, and parts of southeast Asia in the case of rice, prohibit the cultivation of transgenic varieties to safeguard their biological heritage, said Ribeiro. “Mexico should follow their lead with maize,” she argued.

Recent research has found that transgenic maize may be harmful to health. “A group of French scientists has shown that transgenic maize causes cancer in rats,” said Ribeiro.

“Another study, for the European Food Safety Authority, discovered that most of the transgenic varieties approved for commercial use in the United States (54 out of 86) contain virus genetic material that was not observed when they were approved, and may have harmful effects in plants, animals and people,” she said.

“At FAO we are aware that land grabbing and large agribusiness concerns can cause social exclusion and be environmentally unsustainable,” said Benítez. “Governments must weigh the short-term benefits against the long-term costs, which may be much higher, and make decisions accordingly.”

Zapotec indigenous people from Unión Hidalgo protesting in Mexico City against a wind farm project in their town. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

“We can’t sow our fields, which they have rented for next to nothing. What good do we get out of it?” Guadalupe Ramírez complained about wind farms operating in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.

Ramírez said, “the governments play favourites with big business; our land produces more than what the companies are offering … They said they would come to help us, but that’s a lie,” this 62-year-old Zapotec Indian told IPS when she and other campesinos came to Mexico City from the municipality of Unión Hidalgo, 560 kilometres to the south, to protest the situation.

The Piedra Larga I wind farm, which has been operating in the town since October 2012, comprises 145 wind turbines producing 90 MW of power. It is the property of Desarrollos Eólicos Mexicanos (DEMEX), a subsidiary of the Spanish company Renovalia Energy and the private U.S. investment firm First Reserve.

In 2007 DEMEX approached local people and began to sign rental contracts with members of the “ejido” or communal land, treating them as if they were independent smallholders and not communal rights holders, and setting an average monthly rental of 20 dollars a hectare. The campesinos of Unión Hidalgo farm between three and four hectares each.

But in other municipalities wind energy companies are paying up to 80 dollars a hectare. Moreover, land tenure in Unión Hidalgo is collective, and all decisions pertaining to ejido land have to be made by the entire assembly of the ejido members, so the contracts signed are not actually valid – a fact that at first was not noticed by those who rented out their land.

Ejido members farming communal land in the municipality accuse DEMEX of tricking them by not explaining the clauses of contracts that were written in Spanish rather than Zapotec, of not calling the obligatory assembly of the ejido members, of polluting their land and of denying them freedom of movement on their land.

In 2014 the company will begin operating the Piedra Larga II wind farm, occupying 300 hectares in Unión Hidalgo, which has a population of 13,970, mainly native Zapotec people. A Resistance Committee against the Wind Farm Project has been created, several of whose members came to the capital to protest on Wednesday Jun. 12.

Their protest shows the increasing discontent of Mexican communities with wind energy projects because of their economic, environmental and social consequences. The future of the sector is turning cloudy, just when Global Wind Day was celebrated on Saturday Jun. 15.

The energy ministry estimated on Wednesday Jun. 12 that wind energy generates 1,304 MW in Mexico, followed by geothermal power with 812 MW, biomass and biogas with 581 MW and mini-hydropower projects with 450 MW. Without including large hydroelectric power stations, renewable energy sources contribute five percent of the total national energy supply, and the proportion is increasing.

The strong winds in the isthmus of Tehuantepec, the narrowest part of Mexico which includes parts of the southern states of Oaxaca, Tabasco, Veracruz and Chiapas, have made it an epicentre for several wind farm projects. Land ownership in this area is primarily collective and communities are governed by traditional custom.

To date wind energy exploitation occupies 11,000 hectares nationwide, with investments since 2007 totalling five billion dollars, according to the Mexican Wind Energy Association (AMDEE).

The energy reform of 2008 allows individuals and businesses to generate their own electricity from renewable sources, supply it to the national grid and be rewarded with preferential feed-in tariffs.

As a result, many companies are buying cheap wind energy to become self-sufficient in energy and reduce their electricity bills. However, critics of this strategy argue that the communities where wind parks are installed have the least to gain.

“There is a pattern of human rights violations in the communities. Wind energy companies advertise themselves well, offering money and jobs, but the jobs are temporary. The companies’ actions are not transparent, nor do they meet established standards,” Alejandra Ancheita, the head of Proyecto de Derechos Económicos, Sociales y Culturales (ProDESC – Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Project), told IPS.

Following the wind energy boom in Oaxaca, activists fear the negative aspects of the model will be repeated in wind farm projects in other states.

“They have brought no benefits. The energy companies violate collective property rights, agrarian laws and the traditional laws of indigenous peoples,” Bettina Cruz, the founder of the Assembly of Indigenous Peoples of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Defence of Land and Territory (APIIDTT), told IPS.

DEMEX has denied the allegations against it, saying that the contracts are valid and that it has the necessary authorisations for construction and operation of the wind park.

“Conditions in the communities have not improved,” said Benjamin Cokelet, head of the Project on Organising, Development, Education and Research (PODER), an NGO for corporate accountability. In his view, the companies may be in violation of international conventions.

In the towns of San Dionisio del Mar, Álvaro Obregón and San Vicente, close to Unión Hidalgo, local people have blocked similar wind energy projects through direct protests and legal appeals.

For instance, in San Dionisio, the Spanish company Mareña Renovables is planning a 392 MW wind park with 75 million dollars of financing from the Inter-American Development Bank. But the project is at a standstill due to legal action.

On Tuesday Jun. 11 the Unión Hidalgo Resistance Committee presented a lawsuit to the agrarian court, which deals with land rights, seeking to invalidate the contracts that have been signed and suspend the working of the wind farm and its expansion, with immediate effect.

In April, they presented a complaint to PROFEPA, Mexico’s federal agency for environmental protection, against pollution caused by the wind park.

“It’s not right for the government to negotiate with the companies over our land. We have been badly off ever since they arrived. They say it’s clean energy, but that’s not true: lubricating oil from the turbines is contaminating the soil and the groundwater, the blades are killing birds, and the turbines are noisy,” Esteban López, a 55-year-old Zapotec Indian who grows maize and sorghum, told IPS.

The three private banks financing the project are signatories to the Equator Principles, a set of voluntary guidelines for assessing social and environmental risk in credits, adhered to by more than 70 international financial institutions since 2003.

Cokelet said PODER is considering lodging a grievance under the Equator Principles over irregularities in Unión Hidalgo.

“We are not smallholders, we are community farmers with collective tenure, and the company ignored that. They didn’t explain what they were going to do on our land. The contracts are unfair and one-sided,” Ramírez said.

By 2020, Mexico expects to generate some 12,000 MW from wind power.

The Prime Minister’s chief of office Jana Nagyova, a regular in the tabloids and allegedly his lover, has been arrested and stands accused of illegal spying and bribing of MPs.

Two military intelligence officers and two former members of parliament face similar charges. Necas himself denies any wrongdoing.

The government, composed of a coalition of right-wing liberal and conservative parties, is resisting opposition calls for a fresh election, hoping to weather the storm with a mere government reshuffle.

Necas, who is intent on leaving politics following last week’s events, tendered his resignation to the President on Monday. He will remain in his post until a new prime minister is appointed.

“This is a good sign of some judicial independence in governance structures,” Petr Lebeda, director of the independent think-tank Glopolis told IPS.

“It could be encouraging for judicial systems in other countries. A message has been sent that there is no such thing as impunity for politicians and high public officials, that anybody who does something illegal can be sued for his crimes.”

Indeed, news of the corruption scandal and the subsequent resignation have sent shockwaves across Central and Eastern Europe, with the media following developments closely.

In the face of weak institutions, the region’s media and particularly investigative journalists have played a crucial role in uncovering corruption scandals and in pushing authorities to act, as is frequently recognised by international anti-corruption organisations such as Transparency International (TI).

Slovakia is witnessing the re-emergence of a public debate on the lack of independence of prosecuting and judicial bodies as well as on politicians’ lack of will to tackle corruption systematically.

In a statement published last year, Transparency International singled out the Czech Republic and Slovakia as home to particularly weak prosecuting bodies, describing them as “vulnerable to direct political influence because of their strictly hierarchical and non-transparent organisational structures.”

In one comment published by leading Slovak daily Sme, commentator Roman Pataj accused the government of “occupying key posts in the Slovak judiciary” and termed its policies in this field as “non-transparent” and “disastrous”.

There were similar reactions in Hungary, where also politicians could be heard: Gergely Karacsony, leader of the opposition party Dialogue for Hungary, reacted by making fresh calls for an investigation into a recent tobacco retail tender which controversially benefited government supporters and their relatives.

Karacsony lashed out at the country’s state prosecutor, calling on him to follow the Czech example while criticising his inactivity: “He lacks the expertise and the courage to step up,” he said, accusing him of protecting government “mafias”.

The Czech scandal has reverberated because it is inserted in a region that faces very similar challenges. The most frequently corruption-related malaise in the region involves unlawful party financing, manipulation of state institutions by political and economic interest groups, murky ties between the business and political classes, and weak prosecuting bodies.

There is also a clear East/West divide: TI’s corruption perception index shows Central and Eastern Europe lagging behind all of Western Europe with the exception of Italy. Among post-communist countries, only Estonia fares well in the index.

Hence the fall of the Czech leader caught many by surprise, not because of the high-level corruption, but due to the fact that authorities acted: “Justice only worked at the lowest levels, once it reached the top levels it would never lead to the courts,” Lebeda said.

While prosecutions of high level officials are not unseen in the region, they are usually reserved for opposition politicians, and convictions are rare.

What makes the Czech Republic different from the rest of the region is the fresh “emancipation of the office of public prosecutor and consequently anti-corruption police,” Ondrej Cisar, a political scientist at the Czech Academy of Sciences told IPS.

“Making a sort of sweeping analogy, one can say that we are going through a prosecutors’ revolution, similar to the judges’ revolution in Italy in the beginning of the 1990s,” Cisar added.

Ironically, Necas himself may be responsible for his own fate, as he ended an old habit – not just in the Czech Republic but in all of post-communist Europe and beyond – of placing political appointees to judicial posts.

Following years of media criticism of various governments over the prevalence of an alleged ‘justice mafia’ that protected high-profile politicians from prosecution, Necas named Pavel Zeman as chief prosecutor in 2010.

Zeman, perceived as an independent, played a key role in strengthening the independence of various prosecution and judicial bodies as well as in starting a wave of prosecutions that reached its climax last week.

This process was one that the “government probably did not actively support, but also did not block,” Lebeda told IPS. The weakness of the coalition government may thus have been a blessing in disguise, preventing any particular political force from asserting its authority over the judiciary.

Both have good reasons: Colombia has witnessed the longest lasting violence in any contemporary country: from 1949, with some interruptions, then on again from 1964 with the notorious guerilla group, the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).

Johan Galtung, rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University. Credit: IPS

The U.S., with its conviction that evil is lurking around every corner, domestic and global, believes it better have the arms to handle those bad guys.

Both countries have among the highest rates of structural violence, and the most unequal distributions of economic wealth, in the world.

There is a difference, though: one country submits its problem to third party mediation, of all places in Havana, facilitated by Cuba and Norway; the other submits its problem to nobody, nor does anyone seem to offer their services.

Colombia admits openly to the world that it does not have sufficient capacity for self-regulation; from the U.S. no such admission has been forthcoming.

Recently there was news from Havana: a breakthrough in the peace negotiations about a rather basic economic issue: land, and land reform – a redistribution of land, and of better land, to small impoverished peasants.

There are four other problems on the agenda: political participation (the problem being real democracy), ceasefire, drugs, and the rights of the victims and the bereaved in a country where four million have been displaced and thousands kidnapped and killed.

Reasons to celebrate? Wait. The class differences in a country ruled by the triumvirate of landowners, the military and clerics (like three brothers in many families – the Iberian heritage) force upon us a sad prediction: there will be one more military coup in the chain of coups, supported by the Church.

Let us not pray. Let us hope for disarmament of the FARC and the other guerrillas (particularly the reactionary paramilitary) and control of the army, lest we end up with Nepal: disarmament to the left, not centre-right.

To produce food, not only land, but also water, seeds, manure and some technology are needed. Water and seeds may become privatised – by Monsanto – so where does the credit to buy these inputs come from? And at what price?

What’s needed is collective, cooperative farming on communal land with direct democracy for decisions, not corruptible multi-party national elections. And can farming compete with drug commissions when drugs change hands until finally traveling via submarines to the U.S.? Or on the long road to the Mexican border?

Small farms cannot compete; cooperatives would do better. Well, let’s hope.

Expand the zones of peace, have them intersect, and aim at all of huge Colombia.

The U.S.: On May 23, President Barack Obama concluded that he should pull back the drones, and close the Guantanamo prison. Does he have the guts to do so, by executive orders, using vetoes?

There will be no military coup in the U.S. There are permanent, structural links between the Pentagon, Congress, the military industry and the media (owned by the former, and for whom news of peace is bad news) designed to keep the war industry going.

That industry has one major purpose: to stamp out any initiative to eliminate the special status of the dollar as the world’s “reserve currency” – like by Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, by Iran, now by BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) – so that the U.S. can pay by printing money, and even get the naive to buy U.S. bonds, meaning lending the U.S. petro-dollars or China dollars.

Alas, the U.S.’ efforts are self-defeating. The more wars against terror for U.S. security, the more insecurity and terrorism; the more wars to save the dollar, the closer the collapse of the currency of that bankrupt country: by inflation, by stock exchange crashes, by serving debts rather than people.

May still last a couple of years, but the synergy of these three factors will catch up with the economy. In the meantime Monsanto is at work, like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the National Riffle Association (NRA) and other lobbies threatening anyone whose voting is not to their liking that they will not be reelected.

The finance industry is at work forcing the administration to withdraw one step behind the other from the tiny measures introduced after the Grand Repression to control the finance industry.

The U.S. Supreme Court did its part of the job granting money to politicians under “freedom of expression.”

And Obama did his job, offering to cut Social Security entitlements in return for some compromise with Republicans, the average retirement package in the U.S. now being only 40 percent of a salary as opposed to 70 percent in developed countries.

Montesquieu’s plan of separating legislative, executive and judiciary power so that they check each other does not work. In the U.S. today all three powers are on the same course set by the finance industry, to which the dollar status is key.

Politicians are bought and cowed and the president once again betrays those who elected him. Democracy does not work. The U.S. blessing – the Occupy Movement – was itself occupied: by armies of FBI agents.

All of this and worse was Colombia’s fate; the answer was FARC, armed revolt. Will there be a similar armed revolt in the U.S., given that the guns are well distributed?

For Anglo-American global direct violence, yes. As the suspected Boston bombers said, an attack on one Muslim is an attack on all Muslims, an eye for an eye – except when it comes to domestic structural violence.

Let us hope for the revival of Montesquieu and democracy or, if not, submission to outside mediation.