Kurds of all ages have been quick to take up skiing in the pristine mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

When 37-year-old Igor Urizar first happened upon the isolated mountain village of Penjwin, 300 kilometres northeast of Baghdad, he had a vision of this border-town — nestled in the pristine, snow-capped mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan — transformed into a haven for skiers.

Today, after four years of hard work, Urizar is the proud founder of the first ever ski school in Iraq, and can hardly contain his satisfaction.

This past winter, until the early months of 2013, over 100 visitors flocked to this long forgotten region that has witnessed scores of conflicts — from the Gulf War in 1990-1991 to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 – and discovered something other than war: the pleasure of donning a pair of skis and gliding through the powdery snow.

But most visitors are happily oblivious to the challenges of establishing this recreational site in one of the world’s most volatile geopolitical regions.

“My first attempt was in 2009 in Baskale – a Kurdish village in Turkey about 1,000 kilometres east of Ankara,” Urizar said. “Snow conditions were perfect but the Turkish police so suspicious of a Westerner in a Kurdish village on the border with Iran that I was forced to leave the place a week after I arrived.”

Back in his hometown of Durango, 400 kilometres north of Madrid, Urizar contacted the Tigris Association, a non-profit organisation comprised of Basques and Kurds supporting development projects in Kurdish areas, which suggested that he try again in 2010 – only this time in Iraqi Kurdistan, where the local Kurdish population has enjoyed a high degree of autonomy since 1991.

Urizar discovered Penjwin on a hunt for the best possible skiing spots in the region. Luckily, he said, he had brought a few pairs of skis with him so was able to present his project to the local authorities, who finally gave him the green light later that year.

The initiative would not have been possible without the help of Falah Salah, a Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) official and member of the Tigris Association.

“Our long-term goal is to import the successful “white week” model into Kurdistan,” Salah told IPS, referring to the annual 14-week period when over 5,000 schoolchildren from northern Spain’s Navarra region converge for skiing trips in the Pyrenees mountain range that forms the natural border between France and Spain.

Over the last 30 years this programme has become such an integral part of the economy of Spain’s Roncal Valley that many fear it will not be able to sustain itself without the ski industry. Innkeepers in the region told IPS that they earn 70 percent of their annual income during the winter months.

Salah believes the economically depressed Iraqi border region, where cattle rearing and farming have traditionally been the primary means of subsistence, could benefit greatly by promoting a similar scheme.

Skiers demand equipment rentals, they eat kebap (thinly-sliced grilled lamb served over pita bread) at local restaurants, and eventually spend the weekend in a village that has hitherto only served as a transit spot for refugees fleeing from either side of the Iran-Iraq border.

It was not difficult to cultivate a love of snow and winter sports among the local population here. Having grown up in the rocky mountains that are covered for several months out of the year in a thick white blanket, Kurds of almost all ages have been quick to participate in this playful activity, which Urizar labels “sustainable skiing”.

No ski lifts or other metallic eyesores ruin the beautiful landscape here. Instead, a simple municipal building, located close to a ski site, houses the equipment. Just outside, an unobtrusive track guides cross-country skiers through the shrubbery.

Dlosh Fatah, a physical education teacher at a school in the neighbouring Rania district, 328 kilometres northeast of Baghdad, won a pair of skis in Penjwin in 2012 and said the experience was so satisfying that she came back as an instructor a year later with a group who had received training in the Pyrenees during the first week of April.

Though her technique could do with some improvement, “for the time being, it’s more important to convey what I have learned to our children here” the 25-year-old told IPS, proudly producing a diploma issued by the Ski School of the Roncal Valley.

Chia Hassan is another future Kurdish ski instructor to whom Urizar will likely pass the baton in the winter of 2014.

“During our visit to the Pyrenees we have seen the development cross country skiing brought to a mountainous region similar to ours,” Hassan told IPS. “Like us, (locals) were living on wood and cattle until they discovered that snow could also be economically profitable,” the enthusiastic 31-year-old Kurd from Rania told IPS.

Penjwin’s ski centre also got a boost this year when local TV channels and newspapers picked up the story. The news has now piqued curiosity on the other side of the border, including an invitation from the Iranian Kurdish town of Sardasht, 430 kilometres west of Tehran, to share details of the project.

“We will definitely visit our friends in Sardasht but we must also struggle to take the project to other valleys in Iraqi Kurdistan,” said Urizar. He believes the best skiing spot is in the Qandil Mountains, an imposing watchtower peering down from a height of 3,000 metres, located at the exact spot where the borders of Turkey, Iraq and Iran meet.

“If negotiations between Ankara and the Kurds of Turkey stay on track we might be able be able to ski there one day,” Salah said hopefully.

For the time being, the mountain range remains a stronghold of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a guerrilla group engaged in an armed struggle for rights and recognition. The recent ceasefire between the guerrillas and the Turkish government has sparked optimism over a negotiated solution to a conflict that has dragged on for over three decades.

Locals can hardly wait for the moment when the sound of gliding skis replaces the soundtrack of bullets and shells in a location that Salah describes as “a paradise yet to be discovered”.

Children at the MST’s Frei Henri des Roziers Camp in Pará, Brazil. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

Toiling beneath a blazing sun in the humid heat of the Amazon, Waldemar dos Santos, 60, tends the community garden he shares with other landless peasant farmers in the Brazilian state of Pará, as they wait for agrarian reform to provide them with the opportunity for a better life.

“My dream is a small plot of land. Our goal is to bring an end to hunger in this country, which is falling off the precipice of need,” he told Tierramérica*. As a child, Santos fled the drought-stricken northeast Brazilian state of Bahia and migrated to the northern state of Pará, in Brazil’s Amazon region.

His family is one of the 280 families living in the Frei Henri des Roziers Camp, established by the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) in Aug. 8, 2010. The camp is named after a Dominican friar and lawyer from the Catholic Pastoral Land Commission who continues to fight in defence of human rights in the region at the age of 82.

The landless peasants are occupying a 400-hectare estate known as Fazendinha, located off federal highway BR-155 roughly 100 kilometres from the city of Marabá. They say that the purported owners of the estate, formerly a cattle ranch, created it by invading and illegally deforesting public land, and that at the time of the occupation, it had been left idle and unproductive.

This is the justification for almost all of the land occupations by social movements demanding agrarian reform in Brazil.

In the southeast of Pará, where the struggle over land is most violent, over 500 settlements of small farmers have been legalised by the National Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (INCRA). But there are still more than 100 camps of families living in tents and straw huts waiting for the federal government to grant them legal ownership of the land.

It takes an average of five years to get the government to confiscate a property and allocate the land to agrarian reform.

To reach the Frei Henri camp, you need to drive along a long stretch of the dusty BR-155, full of potholes and trucks loaded with minerals that block the road day and night.

The region was once rich in cashew trees, which were razed to make way for cattle pastures. Right in the heart of the Amazon, the towering green canopies and exuberant vegetation of the rainforest were replaced with the flat monotony of grassland years ago.

The occupation of Fazendinha has led to bitter conflicts with local ranch owners, who have joined forces and hired private armed guards to intimidate the landless farmers and destroy their crops.

“We plant crops to grow healthy food. The ranch owners don’t produce anything and claim that their lands are productive. We face constant threats. Justice in Pará is very slow. We wait and despair,” said Dos Santos.

“Here, land is power,” declared Maria Raimunda César, 39, a member of the MST coordinating committee in Pará. “The conflict is never-ending. In Pará, people are gunned down like animals. A side of beef for export is worth more than a human life. There is tremendous injustice, and growing oppression and violence.”

According to César, agrarian reform is ignored in national policies. Both the current government of Dilma Rousseff and that of her predecessor Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011) “removed the issue from the agenda.”

Changes in land use tend to follow a similar perverse pattern, said César. First the rainforest is opened up to make way for mining and logging for charcoal production. This is followed by the invasion of public lands by private landholders, who destroy the forest and plant grasses for cattle grazing.

On average, there is one head of cattle per hectare, she noted.

Also along highway BR-155, but close to Marabá, there is another camp of landless peasant farmers, the Helenira Resende Camp, which was set up on Mar. 1, 2010 and is now home to 150 families. In addition to intimidation by armed men, these farmers also face airborne threats: toxic agricultural products sprayed over their homes and fields.

Raúl Montenegro, an Argentine activist who participated in an international mission in solidarity with the landless peasants of Pará, told Tierramérica that “the combined use of bullets and poisons is tantamount to chemical warfare against these communities.”

“The large landholders claim that they are spraying these chemicals on their own lands, but this is a way of evading responsibility,” said Montenegro, the president of the Foundation for the Defence of the Environment, based in Córdoba, Argentina, and a recipient in 2004 of the Right Livelihood Award, known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize”.

“We were not only able to confirm that groups of armed men laid siege to an entire community and subjected them to a nightly hail of gunfire and loud bombs at the Frei Henri des Roziers Camp. We also witnessed how companies like Santa Barbara conduct aerial spraying of pesticides,” he denounced.

“This poison reaches children, adolescents and adults, with total impunity, with no government control, and no epidemiological or environmental testing,” he added.

“Our motto is to occupy and resist, but they are an extremely powerful group. The men at the ranch are heavily armed and they shoot,” said Aldemir Monteiro de Souza, 28, a resident of the Helenira Resende Camp, which occupies 50 hectares within the Cedro ranch, an estate covering a total area of almost 15,000 hectares.

The “powerful group” he is referring to are the owners of the cattle company Agropecuária Santa Barbara. One of the company’s biggest shareholders is banker Daniel Dantas, who was arrested in 2008 for financial crimes and money laundering.

According to the MST and the Pastoral Land Commission, in the last 10 years alone, the Santa Barbara Group has bought up 800,000 hectares of land in six municipalities in Pará.

“The group appropriates public lands, uses slave labour, and commits environmental crimes,” said Charles Trocate, an MST coordinator in Pará.

The landless peasants are waiting for INCRA technicians to inspect the Cedro ranch to determine if it is productive and legal. If irregularities are detected, the process for its expropriation will begin, and the land will subsequently be allocated in parcels to the farmers.

A hearing with the INCRA agrarian oversight committee has been scheduled for May 22 at the Justice Forum in Marabá. This will be the first step, after years of occupation and the establishment of the landless farmers’ camp.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Hundreds of young Egyptian Christian girls have mysteriously disappeared. Credit: Cam McGrath/IPS.

When a young Christian girl goes missing in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria, her family will call on a certain Muslim sheikh in the nearby town of El-Ameriya.

The local Salafi leader, whose ultra-conservative views condone the marriage of girls as young as nine, has a history of abducting Coptic Christian girls and forcing them to convert to Islam and marry Muslim men, claim rights activists.

And so the sheikh and his associates are the natural starting point for any investigation into missing underage Christian girls. And, according to activists, that is usually where they find them.

“Whenever a young girl disappears in the area the trail leads to this sheikh,” says Mamdouh Nakhla, chairman of the Al Kalema Organisation for Human Rights.

In a recent case, a 13-year-old Coptic Christian girl from a village near Alexandria was allegedly kidnapped and held for over a week as her abductors tried to force her to renounce her religion.

According to her testimony, she was drugged unconscious while in a taxi on her way home from school. She woke up in a secluded house with two Salafi sheikhs and an elderly woman. Her abductors forced her to wear niqab, a full veil covering the body and face, and beat her when she refused to convert to Islam.

Girgis claims she was released nine days later when the sheikhs became nervous after her family organised large demonstrations for her return. The Salafis turned her over to police, who feared the girl’s testimony would spark sectarian clashes, and so tried to convince her to claim she had wilfully gone to a sheikh seeking to convert to Islam.

“The only thing unusual (about this case) was that the girl was returned,” says Nakhla. “In one case I investigated a kidnapped girl was allowed to call her parents, but in all others the girl was never heard from again.”

Christian rights watchdogs say abductions and forced conversions of young Egyptian Coptic girls have been going on for decades right under the noses of local authorities. But the frequency of the kidnappings has increased alarmingly since the uprising in 2011 that toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak and brought an Islamist-led government to power.

More than 500 Christian girls have been abducted in the last two years, according to the Association of Victims of Abduction and Forced Disappearance (AVAFD), which documents the disappearances. A growing number of cases involve girls between the ages of 13 and 17.

AVAFD head Abram Louis claims the abducted girls are taken to ‘safe’ houses, where they are manipulated or blackmailed into converting to Islam and forced to marry Muslim men, often to serve as second wives.

“If we inform the police where the kidnapped girl is being kept, they inform the Salafis, who then move her away to another home and then we lose all trace of her,” Louis said in a recent interview.

“Egypt has laws in place to protect girls under 18, but Salafis do not accept them,” says Amal Abdel Hadi, head of the New Woman Foundation. “To them, a girl is only a minor until she has her first period.”

However, Salafi leaders have categorically denied any role in abducting Christian girls or forceful proselytising. They claim that so far as they know, the girls converted to Islam of their own free will, in some cases after falling in love with a Muslim man.

Ishaak Ibrahim, a religious rights researcher at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), says inter-faith love affairs and conversions are dangerously provocative issues in Egypt. Rumours of such have led to outbreaks of sectarian violence.

He says many of the alleged abductions involve young Christian girls who appear to have converted to Islam to escape bad relations with their families, or after having engaged in pre-marital relations (taboo in conservative Egyptian culture) with Muslim men.

“The girls appear to have chosen to change their religion,” Ibrahim told IPS. “But because the family is ashamed, and because the police don’t investigate to find their daughter, the family chooses the easiest solution, which is to say the girl was kidnapped by Muslim extremists.”

Such cases only present a problem when the girl is a minor, he says, as Egypt’s Child Law criminalises the marriage of any girl under 18, even if by her own free will.

But Nakhla, who is representing the families of 20 missing Coptic girls, says there are clear signs that young girls have been coerced into converting and marrying.

Referring to one recent case, he asks if it makes sense that a 15-year-old Christian girl would suddenly choose to convert to Islam and serve as a second wife, without any legal rights, to a firebrand Salafi sheikh over 40 years her senior. The girl has never spoken or written to her parents since her disappearance – unusual behaviour in a country where family ties run deep.

“In Egypt it is a crime to marry a minor, and you can’t legally change your religion until you’re 18… yet the government refuses to investigate these cases and arrest those responsible,” complains Nakhla.

While Ibrahim argues that all Egyptians should have the right to change their religion at any time, he says authorities also have a responsibility to ensure that women – particularly minors – are protected from coercion and exploitation.

“The family should be allowed to meet their daughter and get her to explain what she wants in the presence of the public prosecutor,” he says.

Salafi leaders have rejected any state intervention, and have warned against attempts by parents and human rights organisations to return the girls to their families.

Two Tuareg girls are playing at Goudebo Refugee Camp in Burkina Faso. In the refugee camps, many Malian children have already missed crucial weeks and months of schooling. Credit: Marc-André Boisvert/IPS

Malian widow Mariama Sow, 30, and her three children are trying to find some semblance of normalcy in their lives in Dakar, Senegal, since they left the historic city of Timbuktu in northern Mali last June to escape the Islamist occupation.

Sow and her children are now living in relative safety with her eldest sister in this West African nation, as she helps her sibling run her two tangana (informal township restaurants).

“The (Islamist) occupation was not good at all, it affected many lives and will continue to haunt many of us for years to come,” Sow tells IPS, refusing to explain further, except to say it was “hell”.

“Though I’ll never forget what happened, I decided to get over it and focus on the future of my three children who are now eating well thanks to my elder sister’s support,” she says emotionally, adding that the imposition of Sharia Law in northern Mali affected not only women, but everybody in the occupied territories.

As she speaks, a group of men who work at a nearby construction site each wait their turn to be served with a plate of tchep (fried rice and fish).

But Sow is still concerned about the future of her eldest child. Her eight-year-old son has not attended school since armed Islamist groups allied with Al-Qaeda occupied northern Mali back in April 2012. Her daughters, aged four and two, are yet to attend school.

“My son’s first year at school was disrupted by the occupation. It’s now a dilemma because he has not been attending school since, and next year he will be nine. And I’m not sure when real peace will return to Mali so that he can go back to school again,” she says.

While a French-led international intervention in January – requested by Mali’s interim president Dioncounda Traore – eventually pushed the Islamist fighters out of the north, real peace in the West African nation seems a long way off. Defeated Jihadists have now resorted to suicide bombings and other guerrilla attacks.

A report, “Mali in the Aftermath of the French Military Operation”, released in late February by the South African-based Institute for Security Studies, called for the north to be quickly stabilised and secured now that it has been liberated.

“In order to consolidate the military gains achieved and given France’s expressed desire to scale down its presence or, at least, to ‘multilateralise’ its commitment, the idea now is to deploy a United Nations operation that will take over from AFISMA (African-led International Mission in Mali),” the report, authored by Lori Anne Théroux-Bénoni, states.

The war in northern Mali has driven thousands of men, women and children away from their homes. To date, there are 167,370 Malian refugees scattered in five countries in West Africa, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) says.

Mauritania has the highest number, 68,385 refugees, followed by 50,000 refugees in Niger, and 48,939 in Burkina Faso. There are 26 and 20 refugees in Guinea and Togo, respectively.

Awo Dede Cromwell, reporting officer for the situation in Mali at the UNHCR’s regional office for West Africa, tells IPS that there are 31 Malian asylum seekers in Senegal whose status has yet to be examined by the National Commission of Eligibility at the Interior Ministry. “They are seven females and 24 males. There are three children among the 31 asylum seekers,” Cromwell explains.

Sow, however, is one of a number of refugees in Senegal who have not registered with the UNHCR, as she was lucky to be taken in by a relative. Many Malians are not so lucky, as they have been forced to live in refugee camps in Niger, Mauritania and Burkina Faso.

But the situation her son faces with his schooling is the same as that of other Malian refugee children.

“In the refugee camps, many Malian children have already missed crucial weeks and months of schooling. If they don’t get access to education quickly, they may even miss the entire school year and be at risk of dropping out of school when returning to Mali,” Laurent Duvillier, regional communication specialist at U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) West and Central Africa, explains to IPS.

“The future of these Malian schoolchildren shouldn’t be jeopardised because they are refugees. How can Mali rebuild after the conflict if thousands of its children are deprived from access to education?” he asks.

Duvillier says children who fled violence in Mali have been through a lot of suffering and that getting access to education also means getting back to a “normal life” – playing with other children, learning and smiling.

He says parents who are refugees have little time to look after their children. “If children are left alone, they can easily be at risk of all kinds of abuse and violence. It’s a great relief for parents if they know there is a safe place where their children can learn and play without being in danger.”

Duvillier says that together with the UNHCR, UNICEF is working to train volunteer teachers, distribute school supplies to refugee and displaced children from Mali, and set up tents where teaching can take place in Niger, Mauritania, Burkina Faso and Mali.

“But unfortunately, many Malian refugee children still have no access to education. We need more children in temporary learning spaces, we need more trained and equipped teachers, we need to make sure that what refugee children learn in the camps can be of great use once they go back to Mali.

“More resources are needed as requirements for education needs remain largely underfunded to date,” he concludes.

Residents queue at checkpoint in downtown Baghdad. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

Driving into the city of Kirkuk, one is greeted by the view of a huge sea of grey concrete houses from which laundry has been hung out to dry in the wind and be blackened by smoke rising from the surrounding oil wells.

Only the turquoise flags fluttering from lampposts and balconies break the monochromatic view, reminding visitors that Turkmen form the majority here.

Indeed, this entire city, which lies 230 kilometres northwest of Baghdad on top of one of the world’s largest oil reserves, is disputed by Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen. Its legal status is yet to be defined by a referendum that has been postponed since 2007 due to the lack of a population census.

Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Kirkuk has been languishing in a sort of legal “limbo” amid constant suicide attacks and targeted killings.

Today, according to the Kurdish MP Khalid Shawni, Kirkuk “is on the threshold of a new war.”

Receiving IPS at his residence in the neighbourhood of Tarik Baghdad, Shawni tells IPS, “Kirkuk is a black well in which Iraq finds its reflection. There is no political agreement, no dialogue and no confidence between the different communities.”

Paradoxically, the prospect of a civil conflict is one of the few points almost every Iraqi agrees on today, as the country marks ten years since the start of a war that has claimed the lives of over 100,000 Iraqis according to the Iraq Body Count database.

“After the invasion in 2003 we all expected an improvement in our living conditions but the sad truth is that today we are all knocked out by the system,” Arshad al Salihi, head of the Turkmen Front – the main coalition of this Iraqi minority – and the only Turkmen MP in Baghdad’s parliament, tells IPS.

“We believe that civil war is imminent and we’re all scared. If war finally breaks out we’ll be trapped in ‘no man’s land’ – it has always been like this for us,” explains the senior politician.

Protestors call for government removal

Just one day after U.S. troops officially left Iraqi soil in December 2011, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki – who also heads the ministries of interior and justice – triggered a political crisis when he ordered the arrest of Iraq’s Sunni Vice President Tariq Hashemi over allegations of promoting terrorism.

The Shia prime minister has constantly denied that such moves are politically motivated. But Sunnis say they are being increasingly marginalised from political power-sharing.

“Today Sunnis only form a majority in the prisons,” Mohammad Qasim Abid, governor of the Western Anbar region, told IPS in an interview conducted in March 2012.

Anti-government protests gained momentum in mid-December, when several bodyguards of Finance Minister Rafie al-Issawi, the highest-profile Sunni Arab in the cabinet, were arrested.

For the last three months, thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets of Nineveh, Anbar and Salahadin, in the west and northwest of Baghdad. It comes as no surprise to anyone that the biggest demonstrations since the outbreak of the “Iraqi Spring” – in February 2011 – are taking place in the predominantly Sunni regions of the country.

Ganem Alabed, coordinator of the demonstrations in Mosul, some 350 kilometres northwest of Baghdad, told IPS that tens of thousands of people have been gathering in Ahrar square in downtown Mosul every Friday since last December.

“We could be many more were it not for the security cordon around the area,” the activist claimed.

“People are asking for basic infrastructure to provide water and electricity, but are also crying out against abuses such as arbitrary arrests, including of children, or rapes inside the prisons,” Alabed told IPS in Mosul.

“Basically we are asking for a complete removal of the government in Baghdad.”

The local activist also blamed the police for the Mar. 8 killing of a protestor named Mahmoud Saleh, as well as for the gunshot injuries of 10 others.

On Mar. 9, Human Rights Watch interviewed witnesses to the Mosul shootings who claimed soldiers also searched and harassed demonstrators as they approached the protest site and tried to prevent ambulances from carrying away the wounded.

On Jan. 25, Iraqi soldiers reportedly opened fire on demonstrators in Fallujah, located 60 kilometres west of Baghdad, killing nine people.

In claiming that “foreign agents are behind the demonstrations”, Maliki echoes Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s attempts to discredit the legitimacy and grievances of those opposed to the ruling regime.

His remedy — to “isolate the virus” – involves repeatedly closing the borders with Syria and Jordan, which lie along Iraqi Sunni regions, and blocking protests as well as the press. In fact, this correspondent was the first foreign reporter to enter Mosul since the protests erupted three months ago, according to local activists.

Accordingly, images of the demonstrations pop up the same way as those in neighbouring Syria: footage is recorded using mobile phones and uploaded via Youtube.

The sense of déjà vu is even stronger when masked members of the self-proclaimed “Free Iraqi Army” – in clear imitation of the Free Syrian Army – start to give interviews to local and international media.

“We are not Baathists”

The demonstrations in Kirkuk may be much smaller given the city’s mixed population, but that did not prevent the local coordinator of the protest committee, Bunyan al Ubaidi, from being gunned down outside his home on Mar. 9.

“He is our first martyr in this new stage,” laments Ahmed al Ubaidi, a member of the same tribe as the deceased coordinator of the Arab Joint Coalition, comprised of 24 Arab organisations including political parties and NGO’s, which is set to participate in the 2013 provincial council elections.

“First we suffered the invasion of the (U.S.) and then that of Iran. We are not Baathists but we do not want to live under a regime governed by politicians loyal to Tehran,” stresses this former senior official in Saddam Hussein’s army.

Ubaidi firmly denies that the ongoing revolts are being spurred by the war in neighbouring Syria, insisting that the protestors simply seek “rights and democracy for all Iraqis”.

However, the veteran activist does not hesitate when it comes to denouncing the recent deployment in the region of the new Tigris Command Centre, a strong military unit exclusively composed of Shi’ite Arabs.

“Maliki has set up that unit under the pretext of ensuring security in Kirkuk but his only purpose is to protect the regime in case the crisis deepens,” explains Ubaidi, who used an old Iraqi expression to sum up the political climate in the country: “The protesters have planted a palm tree and now they are hoping to collect the dates.”

Artisanal miner panning for gold in Choluteca, Honduras. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

The Honduran government’s announcement of its plans to join the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) has raised expectations as well as doubts, particularly due to the speed with which it aims to complete a process that has taken several years in other countries of the region.

The EITI is a coalition of governments, companies, civil society groups, investors and international organisations that promotes better governance in countries rich in natural resources, through the publication and verification of tax payments made by the companies and of government revenues from oil, gas and minerals.

Honduras is not yet an official EITI candidate country, as Guatemala and Trinidad and Tobago have been since 2011, much less a fully fledged EITI compliant country, a status attained by Peru in 2012 after a process that began in 2004.

These are the only nations in Latin America and the Caribbean that currently form part of this initiative which now encompasses 35 countries, half of them in Africa.

Honduras does not even appear on the EITI website among the countries that intend to implement the initiative. Nonetheless, its government has announced that it plans to complete the initial stage of adhesion to the EITI in a year and a half.

“Nobody could be opposed to transparency, but we have been rather taken aback by how these plans for adhesion have come about, without any consultation with the sectors involved, such as the communities where mining activities are carried out,” activist Pedro Landa of the National Coalition of Environmental Networks of Honduras commented to Tierramérica.

Landa said that his organisation will announce a public position in the coming weeks, “because transparency and accountability are essential, and we feel that up until now, the EITI process has not been sufficiently transparent.”

When the Honduran Congress passed a new mining law in January, a generic article referring to the EITI was included at the last minute. “This came as a surprise, because no one knew the country was even trying to join the initiative,” said Landa.

The Coalition, which includes more than 40 community-based environmental groups, played a prominent role in the debate over the new law, whose draft text was submitted for consultations with different stakeholder sectors for over a year.

When it enters into force, the new law will bring an end to a six-year moratorium on the issuing of mining permits, in place since the Supreme Court of Justice declared 11 articles of the previous law to be unconstitutional.

According to congressional deputy Donaldo Reyes Avelar of the ruling National Party, the novelty of the newly passed legislation lies in the fact that communities will directly participate in deciding whether or not mining projects will be given the green light. It also raises the royalties paid by mining companies from one to two percent, he told Tierramérica.

But the Coalition withdrew from the final stage of consultations because the draft text “is not clear on community participation in decisions regarding the authorisation of mining activities, and the mechanisms for transparency and accountability are not defined,” stressed Landa.

In fact, some 400 protestors took part in a 10-day march this month from the northern community of La Barca to the Congress building in Tegucigalpa to demonstrate their opposition to the new legislation.

Francisca Valle, from the western department of Santa Bárbara, was one of the participants in the “Dignity and Sovereignty Step by Step” march. She called for “greater transparency in terms of the scope of the law, where we were not taken into account.”

Her fellow marchers included representatives of indigenous, women’s and religious organisations.

“During these days of walking, staying overnight in community centres, we have received incredible support from the people. The government consulted on the law with its own ‘activists’ in the municipalities it controls, but the grassroots communities, the people, are angry, because they were not taken into account,” Jesuit priest Ismael Moreno told Tierramérica.

The protestors called for a 90-day period for changes to be incorporated into the draft legislation, based on wide social participation, and for President Porfirio Lobo to veto the bill approved by Congress. But when the marchers reached Tegucigalpa, “they told us we were too late,” said Moreno.

Lobo is expected to pass the law in the coming weeks.

“The problem is that neither the government nor the members of congress are properly reading the country, and when a mining company comes in to set up operations, for example in Santa Bárbara, where people are angry, instead of being a solution, this law will be a source of conflict and violence,” warned Moreno.

When they arrived in Tegucigalpa, the marchers also learned about the government’s plans to join EITI.

But Omar Rivera, executive director of the Civil Society Group, made up by a number of non-governmental organisations, has been closely monitoring the EITI process.

The main challenge, he said, is to strengthen the institutions in charge of controlling mining activity, in terms of taxation as well as the environmental impacts and potential violation of the rights of communities where mining operations take place.

“At present, the state and municipal government institutions responsible for enforcing the legislation related to the mining industry are insignificant, with poor technical capacities and no political power,” said Rivera.

The government has other expectations with regard to the EITI.

Roberto Herrera Cáceres, the high representative and national coordinator for the EITI in Honduras, told Tierramérica that one of the goals is to make the rules for exploration and exploitation in the extractive industries more transparent, with the assistance of the World Bank.

Vice President María Antonieta Guillén reported that the government has complied with all of the requirements to join the initiative, including the creation of a consultative board with participation by the academic, business and civil society sectors.

The objective is for everyone to know how much is paid in taxes and what these resources are invested in. “We want to lay the foundations for genuine transparency in this sector,” the vice president stated at a local press conference.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

The Comboni missionary-run hospital in Nzara, South Sudan provides counselling to former abductees of the Lord’s Resistance Army who were traumatised by the war and provides antiretrovirals for those living with HIV/AIDS. Credit: Raymond Baguma/IPS

Sungu Mizele, a Congolese national living in Yambio, in South Sudan’s Western Equatoria state, earns a living selling the fruit and vegetables that she grows in her backyard, at the local town market. On average, she earns nine dollars a day. But on a good day, when she has fresh supplies, she can earn up to 31 dollars.

She may not have much, but as someone who once lived in the Makpandu settlement camp, which houses some 5,700 refugees, she is at least able to support herself and her late sister’s six children.

Her family’s story is like that of the thousands of others in the camp – they were attacked by Joseph Kony’s rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which has spent the last two decades reportedly fighting for a biblical state in Uganda, and has been accused of recruiting child soldiers, killing, maiming and taking sex slaves.

The rebel group, which originally operated from Uganda and now operates mostly from the Central African Republic (CAR) and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), attacked Mizele’s home in Dungu, in northeastern DRC, in November 2010.

Mizele and her six nieces and nephews were released, unharmed, by the rebels a day later. However, her elder sister, the mother of the children, was shot dead as she struggled to flee from an LRA commander who tried to rape her.

While living at the camp with the other refugees, Mizele was determined to give her family a better life. She kept aside some of the food and cooking oil rations given to them by relief agencies and resold them. She also scavenged in the bushes near the settlement camp for firewood to sell. Eventually, she was able to earn enough to rent, for six dollars a month, a grass-thatched hut in Yambio, some 44 kilometres from the camp.

“I moved out of the camp and came to town where I started a small business for survival and to support the kids,” Mizele tells IPS.

The family is one of the many who are trying to pick up the pieces of their lives as attacks by the LRA on South Sudan have decreased over the last few years. From the DRC and CAR, the LRA reportedly carried out attacks in South Sudan’s Western Equatoria state, especially around harvest time.

In Nzara, a frontier outpost in Western Equatoria state, families have returned home to cultivate maize, pineapples, sorghum and peanuts. At local trading centres, business is brisk. Groceries and local pubs, which sell items imported from Uganda, are open till late, powered by solar or diesel generators.

Life here has been more peaceful of late. The LRA Crisis Tracker Report, released on Feb. 5 by the United States non-governmental organisations Invisible Children and Resolve, shows that out of the 275 attacks carried out by the LRA in 2012, none were carried out in South Sudan, while 225 occurred in DRC and the remainder took place in CAR.

Many here believe the drop in attacks was largely due to the Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF) opening a base in Nzara in 2010.

“We are glad that Uganda came. Without them, we would not have planted our crops and harvested,” Reverend Samuel Enosa Peni, of the Episcopal Church of Sudan, tells IPS.

In addition to the Ugandan military presence here, the Regional Task Force (RTF), which was created last September by the African Union, has been tasked with hunting down the LRA leaders in the region. The RTF is comprised of troops from South Sudan, DRC, CAR and Uganda, with the latter contributing 2,000 troops that are supported by 100 U.S. military advisers.

Peni, who is also the bishop of the Nzara diocese, which oversees 33 parish churches, says that the local community is still grappling with the traumatic effects of the conflict and the church is counselling them.

“We were born in war, grew up in war, and rehabilitation needs to be done,” Peni says. “People have no hope for the future and our job as the church is to reach out to them. Many have died, but those of us who are alive need to forget the past and go forward.”

Former abductees often require psychological counselling before they are integrated back into the community. Many of them are traumatised by the rejection they face upon returning home, he says.

Raphael Reba lives with the fact that her family may never accept her and her son, whose father is one of the LRA rebels who abducted her seven years ago from her home in Gangura Payam, which lies southeast of Yambio.

She was forced to become part of the LRA and was handed over to a rebel commander, who she only calls David, whose child she later conceived.

In 2010, she and David escaped from LRA captivity with their child. He returned to Uganda after surrendering, and she and her son came to her home in South Sudan.

Today, Reba lives in her brother’s house with her now four-year-old son. She cultivates other people’s gardens for a living.

Still traumatised by the atrocities she was forced to commit, including being ordered, during an attack in Aba in DRC’s Orientale Province, to kill and drink the blood of two babies, Reba says she is being ostracised by her own family. Even her father, Thomas Yepeta, cannot accept her or her son.

“If it (the insulting) continues, I will walk to the UPDF camp in Nzara so that they can take me to the father of my child,” Reba tells IPS.

She has undergone counselling from different NGOs here, but is worried that even though her son is innocent and undeserving of the anger directed at him, he will be forced to endure it as he grows up.

At St. Daniel Comboni Primary School in Nzara, missionaries look after formerly abducted children. The administrator, Sister Maria Teresa Carrasco, tell IPS that about 200 of the school’s pupils are ex-abductees brought to them by the Ugandan military, and that many are still traumatised by what they were forced to do while in captivity.

The Comboni missionaries also run the Rainbow Community Centre, which helps over 3,000 formerly abducted children rebuild their lives.

At the centre, formerly abducted mothers infected with HIV/AIDS during LRA captivity come here with their babies for psychosocial counselling and antiretroviral therapy.

“But we have challenges with antiretrovirals because Juba provides the drugs and they don’t arrive in time. We don’t have enough supplies of drugs,” Carrasco says.

Elia Richard Box, the Nzara County Commissioner, tells IPS that until Kony is caught, they will continue to live in fear of a resurgence of violence. “We feel the continued presence of Kony in the bush will not bring peace. Our fear is that the LRA is in DRC and could one day return.”

*Additional reporting by Joseph Nashion in Yambio, South Sudan.

Cuba’s Cienfuegos refinery, revived thanks to support from Venezuela. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Venezuela’s economic challenges, more than the uncertainty over who will succeed late president Hugo Chávez, could threaten the oil diplomacy he practiced in the region.

Cuba is the most obvious example. Oil imports from Venezuela cover half of the country’s energy needs, and have made Venezuela the Caribbean island nation’s top trading partner.

Cuba’s foreign trade grew fourfold between 2005 and 2011, to 8.3 billion dollars. And Venezuela’s share of the total increased from 23 percent in 2006 to 42 percent in 2011, according to an online article by Cuban economist Carmelo Mesa, who lives in the United States.

Cuba’s growing dependence on Venezuela has raised fears of a repeat of the severe shortage of essential goods, as well as frequent, lengthy blackouts, that Cuba suffered during the economic crisis of the 1990s triggered by the collapse of the Soviet Union and East European socialist bloc.

Cuban economist Pável Vidal, a professor at the Javeriana Pontifical University in Cali, Colombia, said “Venezuela today represents around 20 percent of Cuba’s total trade in goods and services, while the Soviet Union represented 30 percent, and dependence was even stronger.”

This means the actual risk is lower, although “a decline, even a gradual one, in the links with Venezuela would spark a recession,” he told IPS in an email exchange.

He said an econometric projection indicates that a decline in Venezuela’s trade with Cuba could lead to a contraction of up to 10 percent of GDP and a two to three year recession as a result of a drop in foreign revenue and investment, external financial restrictions, and more costly imports, without payment facilities for oil.

A crisis of this kind would require “a complex and painful adjustment process,” Vidal said.

But technological dependence is not as marked as it was with the Soviet Union, Cuba’s foreign trade has diversified, and Cuba now has a strong tourism industry, which did not previously exist, as well as new instruments of macroeconomic regulation, he added.

However, the country is not in a position to weather a new crisis, he stressed. “Public wage earners and pensioners paid for the adjustments made to survive the crisis of the 1990s, but they could not do so today, because their buying power is just 27 percent of what is was in 1989,” Vidal said.

Furthermore, the state, pressured by “growing foreign debt,” cut social spending, as reflected in a decline in health and education services. Against that backdrop, the economist said, it would be difficult to identify “who could shoulder the cost of a new crisis.”

But researcher Carlos Alzugaray is confident that bilateral ties will remain strong, because “they have gradually been institutionalised, and they benefit both parties.” He also said “the opposition in Venezuela would not be so irresponsible as to destroy them,” in the unlikely event of an opposition triumph in the Apr. 14 presidential elections.

While Cuba buys oil from Venezuela on preferential terms, it sends over 50,000 doctors, teachers, agronomists and sports coaches to Venezuela. The export of medical services, including some 30,000 physicians, is worth some 1.2 billion dollars a year.

The sudden return of so many people to Cuba would be another risk, but at the moment that is in the realm of pure speculation.

According to Cuban analysts, six years more of a Chavista government would be essential to allow Cuba to seek out new suppliers of oil on terms similar to those provided by Venezuela – possibly Angola or Algeria; make progress in developing its own oil industry; and expand on reforms that have already begun to be implemented.

In Nicaragua, another country that has benefited from Venezuela’s oil-discount programme, drastic changes are not expected as a result of the 58-year-old Chávez’s death from cancer on Mar. 5

Oil supplies, which since 2007 have been worth 500 million dollars a year, have enabled the impoverished Central American country to stabilise its economy and turn around the fiscal deficit, according to independent economist Adolfo Acevedo.

The country’s newfound economic fortitude, also achieved thanks to compliance with the recommendations of international financial bodies, would help Nicaragua withstand any change in Caracas, Acevedo told IPS.

Venezuela provided 2.56 billion dollars in oil cooperation to Nicaragua between 2007 and June 2012, according to Nicaragua’s Central Bank.

Both Bayardo Arce, economic adviser to Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, and Venezuelan ambassador in Managua, José Arrúe, said that cooperation would not be affected because it was based on agreements that were reached before Chávez came to power in 1999.

The San José agreement, under which Mexico and Venezuela jointly supplied oil on preferential terms to 11 Central American and Caribbean nations, was signed in 1980, the diplomat noted.

But Chávez drastically increased that development cooperation with the creation of Petrocaribe in 2005.

Venezuela also planned to build a 6.6 billion dollar refinery in Nicaragua – plans that will have to be renegotiated with the winner of the Apr. 14 elections, who is expected to be acting President Nicolás Maduro.

In Brazil, which does not depend on Venezuelan oil, economic problems in the neighbouring country would affect exports, which grew sixfold in the last 10 years, as well as the investments of transnational companies.

Trade with Venezuela represents just 1.3 percent of Brazil’s foreign trade. But it is important because it is fast-growing and due to the trade surplus, which stood at 4.06 billion dollars last year and is only smaller than the country’s surplus with China, said Rubens Barbosa, a retired Brazilian ambassador who now presides over the São Paulo Industrial Federation’s Foreign Trade Council.

Venezuela’s economic challenges could affect Brazil’s interests because Caracas “will have to adopt some measures” against the high inflation rate and hefty public debt, including unpopular ones like tax hikes and a gasoline price increase, Barbosa told IPS.

But he said no economic collapse would occur in Venezuela as long as oil prices remained high.

Barbosa said Brazilian construction companies were executing projects worth some 20 billion dollars in Venezuela.

In comparison, he said, Caracas provides Cuba with a total of seven billion dollars a year in oil at discounted prices and financial aid.

Economic interests link Brazil and Venezuela, above and beyond political considerations, neighbourly relations, the fact that they share the Amazon jungle, and the focus on regional integration, said another retired ambassador, Marcos Azambuja.

Under Maduro, there would be a “more rational” government, with no disadvantages for Brazil, he said. “The Venezuelan economy is a sub-product of oil” and Caracas will be able to “continue to be reckless” without sinking its economy as long as a barrel of oil costs more than 100 dollars, Azambuja said.

But Brazil has already suffered losses because of that “recklessness,” he said. He was referring to the Abreu e Lima refinery under construction in the northeast Brazilian state of Pernambuco, which is at least three years behind schedule and has cost eight times more than the initial projection.

Part of the problem, he said, was due to the failure to comply with an agreement by Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA, which was to provide 40 percent of the investment.

The delays in construction of the refinery, which is to be completed in 2016, has other costs for Brazil as well, which must import large quantities of gasoline and gasoil at high prices, even though it produces crude, which it exports at lower prices.

* With reporting by Patricia Grogg in Havana and José Adan Silva in Managua.

The Palestinian village Zaatara at the foot of Herodion. Credit: Pierre Klochendler/IPS.

If Herod the Great was a controversial figure of his time, 2,000 years on the controversy isn’t about his legacy; it’s about who holds the rights to excavate and preserve his artefacts.

A new exhibition at the Israel Museum which, for the first time, displays the king’s relics, might serve as a great tribute to him, but is also a powerful reminder of how the history of the Holy Land and today’s conflict between Israel and the Palestinians have become intertwined.

On top of a hill “raised to a greater height by the hand of man; rounded off in the shape of a breast,” as Flavius Josephus, Jewish historian of Rome described it, the old monarch had a fortress-palace erected as memorial for himself; and named it after himself – Herodion for Herod.

Herodion, from where the bulk of the exhibition originates, is visible from Jerusalem and dominates the Judaean desert, since 1967 part of the Israeli-occupied West Bank which the Palestinians seek as part of their future state.

Herodion is in Area C, namely 62 percent of the West Bank maintained under full Israeli control since the 1993 Oslo interim peace accords. An Israeli military base protects the site.

The Holy Land changed hands time and again since Herod’s time, but at 758 metres high, the lay of the land looks unchanged – at first glance.

Dotting the surroundings, Israeli settlements and Palestinian villages vie for rights to the land.

Appointed by the Romans, Herod ruled the vassal kingdom of Judaea, part of the Palaestina province of the Roman Empire, for 33 years between 37 and 4 BCE.

“He was a cultural bridge, working on both sides, caught between the exigencies of the Roman Empire and that of Judaism,” says David Mevorah, the exhibition’s curator. “By his people he was regarded as a convert Jew; by Rome as a client king. But Judaea prospered in his time.”

Exquisite tableware from glass and fine and glossy red roman pottery; a statue of Cleopatra, the last pharaoh of Ancient Egypt; a decorated basin, a gift from his patron Emperor Augustus, whose bust is on display; his royal highness’s bath – all were found in situ.

Adorned with stucco and rare frescoes of sacred landscapes and navy battles painted with pigments on plaster, also imported from Herodion is the royal chamber.

The jewel of Herod’s crown, so to speak, is the reconstruction of his mausoleum which sheltered what archaeologists believe is the sarcophagus in which his body was placed. The man surely possessed a taste for the arts – even on his deathbed.  “He was very aware of historic memory,” comments the curator.

Here nowadays, historic memory refers mostly to competitive national quests.

Excavations at Herodion began in 1972 under Israeli archaeologist Ehud Netzer. “No one asked us or consulted us, then or now,” protests Jamal Amro, a Palestinian scholar from Bir Zeit University familiar with the site.

“The Israelis plundered Herodion,” he adds. “Israel uses archaeology to shape history and validate the country’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”

After prolonged exploration, Netzer uncovered Herod’s tomb in 2007. Two years later, he died in tragic circumstances at the site.

It took three more years to move some 30 tonnes of carved masonry from Herodion to the museum. “We actually moved thousands of fragments to our laboratories, working intensively from here on restoration and reconstruction,” says Mevorah.

“We’ve performed quite an important role for world cultural heritage,” says Israel Museum director James Snyder. But the self-complimentary effusion has been short-lived.

Palestinians complain that Israeli archaeological activities in Palestinian territories are illegal. “According to international law, this is a crime,” declares Amro. “Israel must recognise the rights of the Palestinian nation to their historical sites.”

The Israeli government lists Herodion as a national heritage site. Granted full membership of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the Palestinian Authority now wants to nominate Herodion for recognition as a world heritage site.

“The Oslo Accord makes Israel responsible for custodianship over archaeology in the West Bank until a final settlement is reached,” retorts Snyder.

A ruthless ruler who had the last lineage of the Hasmonean dynasty that ruled before him executed, including high priests, opponents, his beloved second wife and three of his children, Herod was feared by his subjects. In Christianity, he’s ‘Horrid Herod’, thought of as a serial baby killer.

At the museum, he is mostly remembered as a master builder for his colossal projects, including expansion of the Second Temple in Jerusalem revered in Judaism. Centuries later, the Haram al-Sharif or Noble Sanctuary would be edified on its ruins.

For Amro, “Herod and Herodion are important not only to Jews but to Christians and Muslims. We should be in charge.”

“We borrowed the artefacts as authorised loans; we’ll retrocede them once the exhibition wraps by year’s end,” assures Snyder.

The question is where the relics will be returned to, and to whom. “To the authority in charge of archaeology in the West Bank,” clarifies Mevorah. That is, to the ‘Civil Administration’, a well-known euphemism for Israeli military authorities in the West Bank.

“They’ll never give back the artefacts to us, forget it,” protests Amro, not sure himself whether “it” refers to the site and its treasures or to the West Bank.

“When Israel signed the Camp David peace accord with Egypt in 1979 and withdrew from Sinai,” recalls Snyder, “there was a very intelligent division of material: what related to Egyptian heritage was returned to Egypt; what related to Jewish heritage stayed with Israel.”

Would such a model be applicable to Israel and Palestine were peace to be signed between them? “I’m just a museum director, but it was well done,” says Snyder.

Students in the Nilo Peçanha school lunchroom. Credit: Still image from video filmed by Vincent Rimbaux/IPS

Separating Maria Gomes Morais’ farm and a school in Rio de Janeiro are fields, hills and dirt roads that are impassable when it rains. But a school meal programme has forged a path linking the fresh produce harvested by small farmers like her with the need to provide nourishment to 45 million schoolchildren around Brazil.

Sabugo is only 60 km from the city of Rio de Janeiro. But the small rural town, where cars, bicycles and carts pulled by tired horses share the roads, feels as if it were a world away.

The arid landscape shifts subtly to different shades of green, survivors of the tropical
Mata Atlântica forest, as you wind your way through wild banana plants and bamboo groves to reach the Sítio Recanto da Alegria (Corner of Happiness) – Gomez Morais’s farm.

The 61-year-old Morais, who is known as “Neta”, has worked since the age of 10 on the three hectares farmed since her family occupied part of an old estate. She was later granted legal title to the property, as part of a government land reform process.

“I’ve never been afraid,” she tells IPS. “I go everywhere, I climb up and down the hills. I’m not scared of snakes or things like that. It’s as if they fled from me.”

“The big farmers have their machines. Ours are our hands,” she adds with a laugh, saying she would not trade her life in the countryside “for anything in the world.”

Her only support comes from a neighbour who helps her clear her land, where she grows okra, scarlet eggplant, and fruit like lemons, oranges, limes and maracuyá. Nature provides her with different varieties of native-grown bananas.

In the past, she sold to middlemen, and had to wait a long time to be paid.

“What did we eat? I’m not ashamed to say it: angú (cornmeal or plantain mush). Today’s meal programmes didn’t exist. You would wait for the middleman to come and make his monthly purchase. And in the meantime, your shelves would get empty and the kids would go hungry,” says Neta, whose three children are now grown up.

School lunches to the rescue

But through a Rio de Janeiro state cooperative, Unacoop, Neta became a supplier of Brazil’s National School Meals Programme (PNAE), which the United Nations Food and Agriculture Programme has taken as a model to replicate in other countries.

The PNAE was linked to family agriculture in 2009 through a law that establishes that 30 percent of the food served in school meals must be bought from family farmers in the same local area as the school.

Family farmers account for 10 percent of Brazil’s GDP.

The PNAE has two aims: to guarantee meals for school-age children and teenagers while improving the lives of 4.3 million small farmers like Neta.

“The good thing is that the prices they paid us have improved,” she says. Her home, which used to be adobe, now has several brick walls covered with plaster. And she has brought a refrigerator, stove and washing machine – which she is able to use because she also has electricity now.

The PNAE gives priority to rural settlements created by the land reform process, indigenous communities and quilombos, black communities that were founded by escaped or freed slaves.

A truck, or a tractor when it rains, picks up her fruit and vegetables and takes them to the local market. From there they are transported to the state of Rio de Janeiro agricultural supply centre, CEASA. They eventually end up at one of the more than 161,000 public schools included in the national meals programme, 83 percent of the total.

Neta supplies the programme with bananas, oranges, avocados, pineapples, cashews and cherries. “Everything has to be top quality for the school lunch programme,” she says.

Breaking the cycle of poverty

The PNAE has a long history. Born in 1955 as a welfare plan that targeted poor children, it was decentralised in the 1990s and its administration incorporated representatives of families, local communities, teachers, and the executive and legislative branches, the programme’s national coordinator, Albaneide Peixinho, tells IPS.

The programme was expanded by the governments of left-wing presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) and his successor Dilma Rousseff.

Since 2003, the PNAE’s budget has grown 300 percent, and it was enlarged to include middle-school students and adults taking literacy courses, Peixinho adds.

The CEASA is a beehive of trucks unloading merchandise in the wee hours of the morning. The products sold by Neta and the rest of the members of the cooperative go to a special section for small farmers.

In the CEASA, a rural extension service for family farmers provides advice on planning and diversification of crops.

“The small farmer does not yet have the training to plan production and delivery times,” the head of the area, Newton Novo, tells IPS. “For a school lunch, I can’t send a green banana like I could to a big market which supplies neighbourhood markets. It has to be ripe and ready for consumption.”

But the technical aid is insufficient. “They should go out to the fields, in order to analyse the soils and see what is best to plant on each farm,” the coordinator of Unacoop, Margarete Teixeira, remarks to IPS.

Nor is it easy to become a PNAE supplier, because the programme requires land titles to be in order – a challenge in a country like Brazil, where rural land ownership problems date back to colonial times.

Eating our veggies

But an expert on food law, Leonardo Ribas, underscores the results of the programme, saying it has strengthened local economies and family agriculture, which are key “in a society where, because of agribusiness, food has become merchandise.

“It has also improved the diets of children, because they have begun to eat locally-produced foods that are grown organically,” he tells IPS.

The cafeteria in the public school in the municipality of Nilo Peçanha, which serves children from poor neighbourhoods like the Mangueira favela, serves breakfast, lunch and afternoon snacks to 500 students.

The menus are planned on the basis of “nutritional standards for healthy foods, taking into account the age of the students, how many hours they spend in school, the harvest season for each product, the cost, and the eating habits of the students,” says the director of the Municipal Health Secretariat’s Nutrition Institute, Fátima França.

The school principal, Márcia Alves, says that while children tend to dislike vegetables, science classes help encourage consumption by teaching youngsters about their nutritional value.

The kids seem to have learned the lesson – at least, while the principal is standing nearby.

“I used to eat a lot of fast food, but now I eat a balanced diet, said 12-year-old Mariana Cristina.

“I used to eat more sweets than proper food, but in school, that’s changed,” says Elisangela, of the same age.

While the children are eating their vegetables in school, Neta is changing her clothes and heading into town to press for the purchase of a fruit ripening chamber and better organisation of the deliveries of local farmers, in order to improve the logistics of the local market, which would boost their incomes.

“I’m happy,” says Neta. “We’re helping to fight the hunger not only of the children, but of everyone.”

* With reporting by Fabíola Ortiz in Río de Janeiro.