Between February and May, 397 newborns died at the G.B. Pant hospital in this city, summer capital of northern Jammu and Kashmir state, underlining deficiencies typical of government-run health facilities across the country.

“My baby turned pale soon after a nurse administered an injection and he died moments after that,” Haleema Akhtar, a grieving mother, told IPS.  

“I saw over a dozen infants dying before my eyes in a matter of hours. The conditions at the hospital can only be described as inhuman. We could not afford to go to a private hospital,” a tearful Akhtar told IPS.

An official inquiry into the deaths, conducted by Dr. Showkat Zargar, eminent physician and ex-officio secretary to the state government, blamed inadequate staff and equipment.

“There is total apathy and mismanagement by the hospital administration,” Zargar said in his report.   

“Just one junior post-graduate student and a qualified nurse were looking after critically sick babies. I counted 27 (newborns) in a nursery, with no senior resident doctor posted in the neonatal intensive care unit,” Zargar reported.

Citing the hospital’s records, the report said the facility had witnessed 981 infant deaths in 2010 and 985 in 2011, averaging a high 20 percent mortality – twice the accepted rate for state-run hospitals in India. 

Another committee comprising legislators from the Jammu and Kashmir   assembly corroborated Zargar’s findings. Mustafa Kamal, a member of the state legislators’ committee, told IPS “the deaths occurred due to a lack of equipment, shortage of manpower and a pathetic sanitation system in the hospital.”

The spate of infant deaths at the G.B. Pant hospital mirrored a similar episode at the district hospital in Malda, in West Bengal state, in November 2011. No fewer than 26 babies had died in a space of two weeks because of infection.

On Mar. 20, India’s health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, called to account in Parliament, admitted that India’s infant (under one year of age) mortality rate (IMR) of 47 per 1,000 live births was worse than in the neighbouring countries of Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

“In India, the IMR is 47 per 1,000 live births, which translates into 1.25 million infant deaths per year,” Azad said. Only Pakistan had a worse IMR rate in South Asia, he said.

A report released Jun. 13 by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) as part of the ‘Countdown to 2015’ initiative placed India’s IMR rate slightly higher at 48 per 1,000 live births.  The initiative tracks country-level progress in reducing maternal, newborn and child mortality and involves various partners.

According to the UNICEF report, Pakistan has an IMR of 70  per 1,000 live births, followed by India with 47, Nepal with 41, Bangladesh with 38 and Sri Lanka with 26.

The UNICEF report said most of these deaths are preventable through access to health services before, during and immediately after childbirth.

In the case of Jammu and Kashmir, according to official data accessed by IPS, there are only 24 pediatricians available to take care of over a million children below the age of six years.

The Doctors’ Association of Kashmir (DAK) says that many of the hospitals not only lack child specialists but also basic life-saving equipment such as ventilators. “No doctor can work without the support of basic health infrastructure,” DAK president Nissar-ul-Hassan told IPS.

In a bid to lower the IMR, the government launched in June 2011 the Janani–Shishu Suraksha Karyakram (JSSK), a programme to protect mothers and newborns, by providing a range of services free to pregnant women in government hospitals across the country.

Cashless and free services under the JSSK include normal and caesarian section deliveries, care and proper diet for up to 30 days after delivery plus free transport from home to hospital and back.  

A sample registration system (SRS) survey carried out in 2010 by the Registrar General of India showed that initiatives to get pregnant women to avail of professional services were working with three-fourths of deliveries  already happening in institutional settings.  

But there are vast differences in how programmes aimed at lowering the IMR were being implemented across this country of 1.2 billion people living in 27 states in a wide variety of settings.

While states like Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh recorded less than one percent of births conducted by untrained midwives, Jharkhand state in central India still has 46.5 percent of births attended to by  untrained traditional birth attendants.

Prominent health activists welcome programmes like the JSSK but say the government needs to spend much more if it is to meet the millennium development goal (MDG) of reducing child mortality rate by two-thirds, between 1990 and 2015.

Dr. Mira Shiva, coordinator of the non-government Initiative for Health, Equity and Society, points to the fact that where India’s public outlay on health was six percent of GDP in 1991, it had been whittled down to a little over one percent of GDP by 2011.

“Naturally, such a drastic reduction in GDP spending has taken a toll on the public health delivery system – so it is not enough to get pregnant women to the hospitals and hand out doles,” said Shiva who is on several health committees.

In February, the government had announced that by the end of India’s 12^th five-year plan, due to be rolled out this year, spending on health would be increased to 2.5 percent of GDP – nominally placed at 1.67 trillion dollars in 2011.

But Shiva said that would still work out to less than half of what many countries in situations comparable to that of India, such as Brazil, are spending on the health sector.

According to a World Bank report published in 2010, public health expenditure in Brazil was 3.72 percent of GDP in 2008 but moved up to 4.13 percent of GDP in 2009.

(END) 

Boasting more than one billion global members, cooperatives have progressed significantly in the past decade, triggered by the wider availability of ICTs, such as telecommunications, computers or radio.

“Cooperatives are a reminder to the international community that it is possible to pursue both economic viability and social responsibility,” Ban Ki-moon stated at the launch of 2012 as the International Year of Cooperatives (IYC), which seeks to highlight the strengths of the cooperative business model as an alternative to other models.

Cooperatives can be used to further socioeconomic development throughout the world, and ICTs can play a major role in helping them achieve that goal.

“When people understand what co-ops are, they want to do business with them,” said Carolyn Hoover, chief executive officer of DotCooperation LLC, a new top-level Internet domain designed exclusively for cooperatives.

On Jun. 6, the United Nations (U.N.) headquarters in New York hosted a panel discussion, “Cooperatives and the Role of Information and Communication Technologies”, led by Lila Hanitra Ratsifandrihamanana, director of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) liaison office, Gary Fowlie, head of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) liaison office to the U.N., and Carolyn Hoover from DotCoop.

An alternative model

The three speakers emphasised the potential of cooperatives in achieving internationally agreed-upon goals such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which fight against poverty, hunger and disease.

This business model can be efficient across a broad range of sectors, according to the panelists, ranging from food security to electricity coverage, particularly in cases the private sector does not consider sufficiently profitable.

“I grew up in a rural area in the United States,” Hoover told IPS. “There was no electricity until co-ops came in, because the private companies just thought they couldn’t make enough money.”

“A co-op-based solution is sometimes the only way to break that mold,” Hoover said.

The speakers also stressed the need for the even wider availability and affordability of ICTs in order to help unleash the potential of cooperatives. In Kenya, for example, farmers can receive funds through mobile phone-based money transfer services that they can later invest in agricultural financial transactions.

According to Ratsifandrihamanana, ICTs can enhance accountability in cooperatives, thus giving them a valuable quality that the private sector often lacks. “Co-ops serve their members better and with more transparency,” she added.

ICTs have indeed become a must for cooperatives in the recent years. “If co-ops want to participate in the future, they have to be part of the way that people are communicating,” Hoover told IPS. “No choice.”

Promoting cooperatives

The panel addressed the main challenge currently faced by cooperatives: the lack of availability and affordability of new technologies in remote areas. They called on governments to help cooperatives overcome this infrastructure challenge by extending the scope of the ICT network.

“I don’t think that the governments do enough to promote co-ops,” Hoover told IPS.

“The share of governments is important. I think that if they don’t help with the infrastructure, it cannot work,” Ratsifandrihamanana explained. “Co-ops need to be recognised on the international agenda.”

But cooperatives also have to deal with the affordability of ICTs, such as the initial cost of computerisation or the cost of website hosting.

DotCoop, which has hosted numerous cooperatives around the world since 2002, is a key player in reducing these obstacles by helping co-ops increase their Internet exposure and web site traffic in an affordable way.

The company, whose motto is “One member. One vote. One domain”, offers a First Year Free Program through which co-ops can establish their web presence at no cost before they start making profits.

“They (the co-ops) just have to hear about it,” Hoover told IPS. “DotCoop was and is an innovation.”

Increasing access to technology

Cooperatives are also benefiting from the improvement in renewable energy, which has increased the accessibility of communication technologies, such as the recently launched solar-powered mobile phone, invented by the Kenyan Habiba Rage to overcome her village’s lack of access to electricity.

“It is very difficult to own a mobile phone because of the energy it needs to keep working,” Rage told journalists. With the solar-powered phone, the problem was solved, both for her and for many cooperatives worldwide.

“Co-ops are leaders in using the Internet to promote their ethical local regional business,” Hoover told IPS.

Global attention is now focused on the upcoming 2012 International Summit of Cooperatives in Quebec in October, where more than 130 speakers will discuss the future of the world’s 750,000 cooperatives.

Kathy Bardswick, chief executive officer of The Co-operators, a Canadian insurance cooperative, called the summit “a once in a lifetime opportunity…to ensure a healthy and dynamic future for the cooperative form of business”.

At Rio+20, the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) taking place in Rio de Janeiro Jun. 20-22, cooperatives will be discussed as part of the talks on achieving a more sustainable economic model in the world.

“I think that co-ops can provide an answer to almost any particular problem that the economy has,” Hoover concluded. “They are good solutions to tough challenges.”

This was the conclusion of a debate on the sustainability challenges facing the leading emerging economies in BRICS, at the People’s Summit being held in parallel to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, or Rio+20.

While countries like Brazil have not ceased to receive international aid, the size of their economies has turned them into global aid donors, said Adriano Campolina, country director for ActionAid Brazil.

While the government promotes family farming to combat poverty and inequality and improve food security, at the same time agribusiness is expanding in Brazil, with the growth of monoculture and the concentration of land tenure in a few hands, creating unemployment and harming the environment, Campolina told TerraViva.

“These contradictions wind up being reproduced in the development aid strategy,” he said.

On the one hand, the government promotes “good” cooperation with African countries, emphasising family agriculture and food self-sufficiency, for instance.

But on the other hand, it also practises “bad” aid policies, selling its own technology for producing ethanol from sugarcane and acquiring vast tracts of land in other countries for monoculture plantations of soybeans or sugarcane, replicating its national agribusiness model, he said.

Olga Ponizova of the Centre for Environment and Sustainable Development (Eco-Accord), a Russian NGO, described a similar strategy in her country, which subsidises the construction of nuclear power plants abroad by Russian companies.

“The challenge, as we grow richer, is for our aid not to repeat the imperialist strategy of development aid of the past,” said Vera Masagão of the Brazilian Association of NGOs (ABONG).

It is possible to implement “good” cooperation, based on solidarity, by exporting successful experiences that have arisen from years of social progress, she said.

The most serious problem, according to Sergio Schlesinger, is a different kind of development aid that does not appear in the official accounts, but is greater in terms of invested resources.

This is the participation of Brazil’s private sector in international cooperation, through subsidies granted by state institutions like the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES), said Schlesinger, of the Federation of Agencies for Social and Educational Assistance (FASE).

The subsidised assistance for projects in aid-receiving countries ultimately benefits Brazilian oil, mining, infrastructure and agribusiness corporations, he said.

Schlesinger described the Brazilian strategy of “multiplying the number of countries producing ethanol” in Africa, Asia and the rest of Latin America, rather than monopolising the global market.

“Brazil realised that its aim of being a major world supplier of biofuels would not be met if it remained the only producer, so it began to encourage other countries, mainly in Africa, to invest in ethanol production,” he told TerraViva.

This kind of assistance is muddied by self-interest, he said.

ABONG’s Masagão fears that “the banned practices for which countries of the global North were criticised, like making aid conditional on purchasing products or technology from the donor country,” may be replicated.

Adhemar Mineiro, who studies the BRICS economies, pointed to the social and environmental consequences of this scheme.

“As Brazil’s companies have become globalised, the country has turned into a major supplier of minerals, energy and commodity foods,” said the economist. In Brazil, such exploitation is criticised as “unsustainable,” but this country itself practices it abroad, he said.

Marcia Andrews, a South African activist with People’s Dialogue, an organisation building political and intercultural dialogue between Southern Africa and Latin America, said there should be more monitoring to examine and avoid “bad” cooperation mechanisms, as have been described for Brazil and China.

None of the BRICS has a clean sustainable development record, she said.

Andrews expressed concern over the inclusion of her country in BRICS, a move that she attributed to pressure from China, which views South Africa as a “gateway” to the African continent for Chinese trade and investment.

But making these contradictions manifest is not a simple matter in countries like South Africa or Brazil, that are governed by left-wing parties that which waged long struggles for freedom and democracy.

How can you build a viable opposition against governments that call themselves progressive? asked Andrews, expressing a concern shared by many at the People’s Summit.

The plan, called Policies of Institutional Self-Evaluation for Improving the Quality of Education, was designed by UNICEF experts for 1,600 schools in five provinces in northern Argentina, the poorest part of the country.

A student at the Francisco Aguirre school in Tucumán, which has taken part in the educational improvement programme. Credit: Courtesy of UNICEF

The programme was implemented using the Self-Evaluation of Educational Quality Instrument (IACE), by means of which school principals, teachers and parents assess a school’s performance and propose steps to be taken to improve quality.

“The culture of evaluation we have in Argentina and in the region in general is deficient and overly focused on what things look like from outside, with a focus on oversight. This gives us a more democratic and participative approach,” Elena Duro, a UNICEF expert on education in Argentina, told IPS.

Duro, who designed the IACE along with Olga Nirenberg, has been working since 2006 to decipher the aspects by which the different actors involved in the educational process define educational quality.

Based on their research, a primer was drawn up and underwent successive adjustments, to adapt the initiative to different contexts, including rural and indigenous populations.

The IACE provides teachers with a survey about the questions of school dropout, overage students, repetition, attendance, understanding the home life of students and their families, and other questions.

There is also a self-assessment form for teachers and a survey for parents about the school’s performance, the principal’s style – authoritarian or democratic -, whether the school respects the community, and other aspects.

Using the information gathered, an Action Plan for Improving Quality of Education is being drafted, with target dates for compliance.

With the backing of the provincial education ministries, the programme was carried out in Jujuy, Salta and Tucumán in northwestern Argentina and Chaco and Misiones in the northeast, reaching a total of 300,000 students and 19,000 teachers in 1,600 schools.

Duro said the proposal designed by Argentina has awakened a great deal of interest in eight other countries in the region, which asked that a meeting be held in Buenos Aires to enable them to learn about the experience. The meeting will be held in August.

“They want to talk with the people involved, learn about the tools used, and see what results have been achieved in practice,” she said. “Each country will certainly develop its own formula afterwards. The important thing is to promote a culture of self-evaluation.”

In Argentina, the programme was put into effect in 2008, and since then failure rates have clearly dropped in primary schools, family participation has increased, communication and learning have improved, attendance has gone up, and absenteeism among teachers has come down.

Isabel Valle is the principal at school number 4530 Teniente Benjamín Matienzo, in the northern province of Salta, one of the institutions where the self-evaluation system has been used.

In her rural school, which has 133 students, “the most urgent problem that we detected was in oral and written expression. The children were having trouble communicating in a comprehensible manner, and used to just stay quiet,” she told IPS.

To improve their communication skills, which were standing in the way of their academic achievement, the school held sessions to discuss and reflect on the challenges faced in the rural environment. “Our view was that these children should do as well as any others,” Valle said, referring to the need to raise expectations in schools in poor rural areas.

The school requested technical assistance from government academic institutions like the National Institute of Agricultural Technology, as well as training for teachers, and held workshops on hydroponics – a method of growing plants using mineral nutrient solutions instead of soil – and on raising silkworms.

“In the workshops, the children constantly interact with others, their curiosity is awakened, they raise doubts, and they have to write reports – all of which opens up the gates of communication,” the principal said.

Based on that experience, the students participated in local fairs where they gave oral presentations on hydroponics and silkworm-growing, and showed their experiments to the local community.

Duro said the experience has not been met with resistance. On the contrary, she added, it has been warmly welcomed by schools, as an instrument that has enabled them to work through obstacles and improve. It has even had the support of the teachers’ unions, she stated.

But she also said the schools and local communities are generally better at identifying their problems than coming up with solutions.

“Eighty percent of the schools find solutions for the main problems, but some are more close-minded, and there is also a problem with respect to goal-oriented planning,” she said.

To address that issue, the experts proposed the inclusion of a planning module, which serves as a guide. “The instrument is a living tool, which adjusts and adapts to needs,” Duro said.

Another principal, Leonardo Ledesma, told IPS that in his school they noted “a marked problem of loss of values, lack of respect for others, and aggression.”

“For that reason, we came up with different strategies for improving the situation, and we have also worked a lot with reading and writing,” said Ledesma, who is principal of school number 179 in Machagai in the province of Chaco, which has a student body of 812.

Although they had already been carrying out periodic evaluations, it went better with the IACE, he said.

The school began to produce a newspaper with the participation of the students, which is now distributed among them, so they can read news about their community, he said.

“People are not internalising the perception of risk, even when they know that their sexual partners might be infected. People are having sex without protection, because they don’t care if they get infected,” said Jorge Brito, one of more than 300 members of the AIDS Prevention Group (GPsida) in Cuba.

This network of HIV-positive and negative voluntary health advocates has been working for the past two decades to promote safe practices for curbing the spread of HIV and helping improve the quality of life for HIV-positive people, backing up the work of government health agencies.

According to the most recent figures available, about 14,000 HIV cases had been recorded in this country of 11.2 million people as of 2010.

“Fear of HIV/AIDS has been lost,” said Brito, who coordinates GPsida in the Havana municipality of Arroyo Naranjo, one of the network’s 16 points. “Ongoing work is needed to increase the perception of risk.”

“Living with HIV is difficult, despite the fact that there is medication now,” he told IPS.

The discovery of antiretroviral therapy turned HIV/AIDS into a chronic illness in many cases. Those who receive the treatment and follow medical advice, such as maintaining a healthy diet, can live for many years. In Cuba, the government covers 97 percent of the treatment free of cost in the country’s 16 provinces.

“One of the reasons (for unprotected sex) is the idea of ‘what do I care if I get infected, if medicine exists to keep me alive for many years!’” Echeverría said. Over the past decade, an increased number of cases of infection from contact with people known to be HIV-positive have been detected worldwide.

In Cuba, more specific studies are needed to learn about what proportion of cases fall into that category, and whether or not they are “intentional” or “non-intentional,” according to experts Angela Gala and Yasel M. Santiesteban, of the state-run Pedro Kouri Institute for Tropical Medicine.

The former refers to cases “where the express desire to be infected is demonstrated,” while the latter involves those “where no desire to be infected is demonstrated in sexual relations with a person who is known to be living with HIV,” the scientists said during the GPsida’s 9th National Scientific Event.

Every year the network organises a conference for its members with the goal of learning about “what is being done in the country, communities, research centres and universities.” The most recent conference was held Jun. 6-8 at the Centre for Comprehensive Services for People with HIV/AIDS in Havana.

Opinions of HIV-positive Cubans regarding forms of infection were brought to the conference by the two experts after being collected in discussion groups. After presenting the views of participants from Holguín, Santiago de Cuba, Camagüey and the capital, Gala and Santiesteban advocated new approaches to analysing risks of infection.

“This epidemic could be slipping out of our hands because of certain elements, and if we don’t take them into account and don’t investigate, we’re not going to beat this disease,” Santiesteban warned about the pandemic, which at the close of 2011 affected 34 million people on the planet, according to the World Health Organisation.

A sampling of about 3,000 outpatients was surveyed as part of the study “Survey of People with HIV/AIDS, 2009: A Tool for Action”, which looked into different causes of infection.

The study asked people in what circumstances they were infected with HIV, and 0.5 percent of those surveyed said they “wanted to be infected.”

Meanwhile, 15.8 percent said they did not believe there was a chance they would be infected, and 13.2 percent said “fate had played them a bad turn.”

The study, published in 2011 by the National Office of Statistics and Information, found that the leading risk factor was “not using a condom during sexual relations.” For that reason, educating people about safe sex continues to be one of GPsida’s main objectives.

This Caribbean island nation has an infection rate of just 0.18 percent in the 15-49 age group, described as “exceptionally low” by the joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS.

That situation actually makes it more difficult to make significant progress in terms of prevention, experts say. Carlos Aragonés, who founded GPsida in 1991 and is its national coordinator, explained to IPS that “very personalised work needs to be done” to be able to reduce the number of new cases annually.

“The first thing we want is to understand why people continue to be infected,” said Aragonés, who is also a computer engineer. He said that the network’s annual conference is “more of a necessity than a choice. It is a place for seeing whether or not our strategies are appropriate or whether we need to change them,” he said.

Some of the main challenges for the project include supporting patients in adherence to antiretroviral therapy. This “increases life expectancy and reduces the real possibility of HIV transmission. That is why it is so important,” he said.

A 30-billion-dollar Global Fund for Sustainable Development? A Financial Transactions Tax? A Sustainable Development Index? A Sustainable Development Council? A Global Fund for Education? A World Environment Organisation? An Inter-governmental Body on Tax Matters?

The proposals originated from environmental activists, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), human rights groups, the U.N.’s NGO Committee on Financing for Development and a High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability.

After continued stalemate – over issues relating mostly to financing and technology transfers – the 193-member Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) failed to reach agreement Friday on a blueprint for a green economy and sustainable development worldwide.

A consolidated document produced by Brazil, in its capacity as president of the summit (also known as the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development), is likely to be the final action plan titled “The Future We Want” to be endorsed by world leaders when they arrive in Rio Jun. 20.

The proposals, including the strengthening and upgrading of the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) in Nairobi to a full-fledged U.N. agency, are conditional on General Assembly approval.

On the creation of a new set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also to be created by the General Assembly, the action plan warns “the development of these goals should not divert focus or effort from the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).”

The target to achieve MDGs, including the reduction of extreme poverty and hunger by half, is the year 2015. The time frame for SDGs is expected to begin 2015 as an immediate follow up to MDGs.

Asked for specifics, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told reporters, “It’s very difficult for me to say anything which may give the impression that I am prejudging any future decision by member states.

“We have eight MDGs, and whether it will be five, seven, eight or 10 goals for sustainable development, that is now still under consideration,” Ban said.

“How are these SDGs to be achieved?” he asked, and pointed out that the United Nations needs institutional tools to help implement these goals.

One of the tools will be a revamped UNEP. Another would be the establishment of an intergovernmental high level political forum, building on the existing U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) to follow up on all sustainable development commitments.

The summit will recommend the first meeting of the high-level forum to be held during the 68th session of the General Assembly which begins September 2013.

There are two other new proposals in the plan of action: the creation of a capacity development mechanism, within the United Nations, for achieving SDGs and the establishment of an intergovernmental process, under the General Assembly, to propose options on an effective Sustainable Development Financing Strategy to facilitate the mobilisation of resources.

Still, the plan of action does not have any firm financial commitments or commitments to help transfer technology to the world’s developing nations.

“As a snapshot, out of 287 paragraphs, only seven begin with ‘we commit’,” said Daniel Mittler, political director of Greenpeace International.

“Voluntary” appears 16 times, while “as appropriate” – U.N. language for doing nothing – dominates with 31 entries, he said. Statistics are not everything, but these numbers show that governments, overall, are in the business of delaying and doing nothing in Rio, he added.

“One saving grace,” Mittler told IPS, is the commitment to an Oceans Rescue Plan for the High Seas.

“Whether governments commit to an Oceans Rescue Plan is now a key test of whether this Summit delivers anything at all,” he said.

But the blueprint for sustainable development bypasses some of the recommendations made by the 22-member panel, co-chaired by South African President Jacob Zuma and Finnish President Tarja Halonen, which produced a highly ambitious report last January.

The wide-ranging recommendations, directed at the Rio+20 summit, included the creation of a set of Sustainable Development Indicators (SDIs) that go beyond the traditional gross domestic product (GDP).

Providing a “timely contribution” to the Rio+20 summit, the panel also called for an annual Global Sustainable Development Outlook Report and the creation of a U.N. Scientific Advisor.

“If broadly adopted, the latest text from the Brazilian government would condemn the world to a future of pollution, plunder and destruction. There is no action here, no commitment, no future we want,” said Mittler of Greenpeace.

The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio resulted in the creation of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and the drafting of three U. N. conventions covering climate change, biodiversity and desertification.

Tricia O’ Rourke of Oxfam International told IPS, “Our topline view is that (the Brazilian text) is a more streamlined text, more likely to be agreed, less likely to deliver sustainable development.”

She said it has been skillfully constructed to clear controversy and promote consensus, but even if agreed it would not re-orient economic growth towards putting people and planet first.

*This story was originally published by IPS TerraViva.

Cilantro is the favourite “because of the flavour it adds to beans, meat, pasta – everything,” said Silvia Santana Santos, a beneficiary of the Projeto Gente de Valor (PGV), a project that has helped families create “productive backyards” in 34 municipalities in the state of Bahia, where poverty is aggravated by water scarcity.

A small farmer in Macururé, in the semi-arid Northeast, in his new garden. Credit: Regional Institute for Appropriate Small Farming and Animal Husbandry

The taste for cilantro has drawn families to get involved in initiatives that are enabling people to deal better with the semi-arid climate in the state and improving living conditions in the 282 poorest rural communities in Bahia, as identified by the Regional Action and Development Agency (CAR), the government body that is carrying out the project.

The PGV’s three main goals are to install small-scale water tanks for harvesting and storage of rainwater, boost production, and provide training. The total investment is 60 million dollars, half of which is financed by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the other half by the Bahia state government.

“No one buys beans, but they do buy cilantro,” said Julio Santos, who lives with Silvia Santana and their seven children in the community of Sitio Taperinha of just over 100 families, in Jeremoabo, one of the municipalities included in the project, which IPS visited.

The drought destroyed the maize and bean crops, but “we sell our vegetables every 15 days” without interruption, said Santos, who agreed to abandon his traditional grain crop, which is vulnerable to the risks posed by the semi-arid climate of the Northeast, a region that is home to 22 million of the country’s 198 million people.

Vegetable gardens could become the main activity of families in the future, he said. A profit margin is ensured by irrigation using water from two 5,000-litre half-buried rainwater tanks built with support from the project, which capture water that runs along the ground.

During drought conditions, the water harvested by the tanks is used up in two months. But the Santos family also has a pump to draw water from a nearby spring, which has allowed them to continue growing fresh produce. In addition, with assistance from the project, they have begun to produce honey.

As of February, the project had created 5,644 gardens, which have “changed people’s eating habits,” said Gilberto de Alcántara from Curralinho, a community in the municipality of Itapicurú, 175 km south of Jeremoabo, a town of 35,000 people that is the seat of the municipality.

The project has also “helped people understand what a valuable role women play,” because it is women who care for the terraces where the vegetables are grown around their houses, said Cleonice Castro, a young community activist from Jeremoabo who works with the Pastoral da Criança, a Catholic organisation working on behalf of children that has helped reduce child mortality in Brazil.

And everyone is eating better, she added: “without poisons, because we don’t use toxic agricultural chemicals.”

“The excellent focus on the poorest communities” and the active participation of women and young people are aspects that make the PGV “one of the best of the experiences we have carried out in a number of countries,” said Ivan Cossio, IFAD country programme manager for Brazil.

The beneficiaries of the programme have also received training to administer the funds and assistance they have received “in an efficient, transparent manner,” he added.

The project has helped increase incomes by expanding traditional local activities like sheep and goat farming, beekeeping, production and gathering of cashews and native fruits, the production of yucca-based products, and craft-making.

Techniques have also been introduced to increase productivity in the vegetable gardens. For example, plastic sheeting has been placed underneath the traditional terraces to keep water from seeping into the ground, and shade screens are stretched over the crops to protect them from sun damage and curb evaporation, said Carlos Henrique Ramos, an agronomist with the CAR and assistant coordinator of the PGV.

Increasing food security and incomes are the production-related targets, Cossio said.

The “productive backyards”, with the double rainwater harvesting tanks and larger underground tanks used to provide drinking water, training in water use and management, and agricultural technical assistance are the mainstays of the project, which has benefited 36,500 people directly and 55,000 indirectly.

Eight local NGOs under guidance from the PGV have been involved in implementation of the project, with the goal of reaching “the poorest of the poor,” said Cesar Maynart, the coordinator of the project.

These social organisations form part of a broad movement involved in the development and expansion of low-cost technologies aimed at helping people “coexist” better with the semi-arid environment. One of the main actions of this movement was the installation throughout the Northeast of 400,000 16,000-litre tanks used to harvest rainwater from the roofs of houses.

Another of the PGV’s activities is harvesting and storing drought-resistant local plant species of the semi-arid “caatinga” region for forage, to guarantee animal feed during the most severe, lengthy dry seasons.

“I learned a lot, I didn’t know the moringa could be used as forage,” said Gilberto Alcántara, from the community of Curralinho.

The moringa tree (Moringa oleifera), also known as the drumstick or horseradish tree, is originally from India, grows in dry terrain, and adapted well to the climate conditions in the Northeast.

“I didn’t know the guandú (a perennial woody shrub), which I have been familiar with since I was a boy, also serves as forage,” added 26-year-old João dos Santos, a “subterritorial development agent” or ADS from Curralinho.

The ADS’s are promoters of the PGV who are generally young people chosen in the subterritorial divisions, as the groups of participating communities are known.

Forage from local species of plants is essential, especially in the municipality of Macururé, in the north of Bahia, where goats are raised because of their greater resistance to dry climate conditions. The local ADS, Adriano Souza, is heading an “agroecological experiment” there, growing 17 species as forage.

Miguel José dos Santos, 67, said he was getting ready “to sell everything I have left” for fear that the drought will linger. He said he has nine cows, “which are worth a lot” – around 450 dollars each. He explained that it had become too expensive to feed them “because the price of maize has doubled,” and added that he would now dedicate himself to raising goats.

Small farmers in the area continue to raise cattle because they see cows as “savings, or a reserve” for times of trouble, Ramos said. But they lose them to the drought, or are forced to sell them off for a song.

Europe and the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) grouping ended their joint ministerial conference here Friday by urging the international community to deliver on its commitment to help developing countries deal with the impact of climate change and other environmental issues as well as achieve sustainable development goals (SDGs) by at least 2030.

Christian Friis Bach speaks to reporters following the Europe/ACP ministerial conference. Credit: Peter Richards/IPS

In a joint declaration, they said the U.N. conference, better known as Rio+20, provides “a unique opportunity to ensure a renewed political and international commitment for advancing the sustainable development agenda” and that they must adopt decisions coherent with the outcomes of earlier conferences such the Durban Conference on Climate Change, the Nogoya Conference on Biodiversity and the Changwon Conference on Diversification.

Both Europe and the ACP have pledged to work “constructively” during the Jun. 20-22 conference in Brazil “to ensure an ambitious and action oriented outcome that would advance the sustainable development agenda in a comprehensive manner, on the basis of common but differentiated responsibility”.

Danish Minister for Development Cooperation Christian Friis Bach told reporters that that the declaration “is a statement that emphasises that the green economy is a win-win opportunity and suddenly we have turned the environment and climate negotiations a little bit on the head”.

He said that instead of looking at constraints and quotas, “We are looking at opportunities and investments in coming together and building a green economy as a building block of sustainable development.

“It is a statement that stresses the need for institutional innovation in sustainable development, creating a mechanism that can hold us accountable by having a review mechanism and strengthening the United Nations.

“It is a statement that also stresses the need for improving our management of marine resources and the oceans in what is called the Blue Economy – a message very critical for this region (the Pacific)” said Bach, who is also president of the European Council.

Alva Baptiste, St. Lucia’s foreign affairs and international trade minister, said that the European Union and the ACP grouping will go to Rio with a common platform, with the essential aspects being “the continued commitment to the fight against poverty, strong commitment to sustainable development, dealing with new global challenges such as climate change, energy, food security, water, the environment and biodiversity”.

He said regarding the so-called “Blue Economy” the fundamental aspects of that would include technology transfer capacity and financing.

“We also note that Small Island Developing States (SIDS), Least Developed Counties (LDCs), landlocked ACP states and countries affected by drought, desertification and floods are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of those trends as well as the impact of natural disasters and their increased frequency,” the declaration said.

It also calls for the transformation of the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) into an international specialised institution for the environment, based in Kenya.

According to the declaration, Europe and its former colonies agree that in order to achieve success in Brazil, the agreed themes of sustainable development, green economy and poverty eradication “must be addressed with the understanding that each country is free to determine its own path to development”.

Bach described as a “unique achievement” the coming together of the EU and the ACP countries in sending a strong message to the rest of the international community particularly as it relates to “sensitive issues” such as governance, sustainable development and the green economy.

“Those are sensitive issues in the negotiations and here around the table we have been able to reach a consensus and that is an important signal,” he said, noting that the negotiations would also depend on the means of implementation and not only finance.

“It’s under very difficult circumstances and I am not saying it is going to be easy to achieve it, but the commitment is there,” Bach added.

Friends of the Earth, a grassroots environmental group, is one of the groups concerned about the influence that private sector lobby groups hold over the U.N.

“Increasingly we see U.N. policies that do not serve the public interest but rather support the commercial interests of companies or business sectors,” the group said in a statement. “The U.N. is captured by the corporate sector.”

A petition released by Friends of the Earth, described as a “civil society statement to reclaim the U.N. from corporate capture”, has received several hundred signatures from activists from Catalonia to Canada.

One of the top priorities of the Rio+20 summit is to discuss ways in which to offset the global impact of consumption, urbanisation and pollution. Also on the agenda is the transition to a “green economy” – a new economic paradigm that limits the toll of ecological and environmental loss.

According to a United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP)-backed study on the 3,000 biggest public companies in the world, the total cost due to corporate environmental damage was 2.2 trillion dollars – approximately equal to the total GDP of the world’s eighth-largest economy, Italy.

Most of the cost is attributed to emissions of greenhouse gases, local air pollution and the depletion and pollution of fresh water.

There are numerous civilian protests and campaigns scheduled in anticipation of the Rio+20 summit. The Occupy movement is also planning to have a presence at the movement and have released a “people’s petition” online, with one of the main issues protested in the petition being the role of business lobbying at the talks.

Daniel M. Kammen, professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at U.C.-Berkley, disagrees that business involvement has a negative effect, saying that business plays a crucial role in the talks.

“It has to be part of a conversation, of a dialogue,” he says. “Without the private sector, the climate just becomes a debate between national leaders.”

U.S. President Barack Obama has received criticism for his policies regarding corporate interests, much to the chagrin of environmental activists and labour unions.

A document recently leaked by Public Citizen, a consumers’ rights group, found that under new trade provisions, multinational corporations operating in the U.S. would be able to appeal laws regulating trade to a more-lenient international tribunal, which has less strict measures on environmental policy.

Brazil has itself recently been the victim of corporate environmental pollution. In March, FUP, the Brazilian oil workers’ union, filed a lawsuit against the American energy company Chevron and the offshore drilling corporation Transocean, as the result of offshore oil spills off the coast of Brazil last November.

The lawsuit attempts to revoke those companies’ abilities to operate within the country of Brazil. The oil spill leaked about 3,000 barrels of oil into the Atlantic Ocean.

Transocean, one of world’s largest offshore drilling corporations, was also involved in the 2010 BP oil spill that released 4.9 million barrels into the Gulf of Mexico, the largest spill ever in U.S. territory.

Previous summits have dealt with these kinds of problems. The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio took place a year after the Kuwaiti oil fires and Gulf War oil spill, the largest oil spill in modern history.

The U.N. has taken steps to improve energy efficiency, in an effort to negate the rampant need for oil, through the Sustainable Energy for All initiative, spearheaded by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The proposal was meant to correspond with an increased focus on global economic and environmental sustainability.

“If current patterns of production and consumption of natural resources prevail, and cannot be reversed and decoupled, then governments will preside over unprecedented levels of damage and degradation,” said UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner.

In its quinquennial report, UNEP stated that globally there had been significant progress on only four of the 90 most important environmental issues that they had previously laid out, indicating that humans consume at their own expense.

The resulting depletion of biodiversity and resources in the two decades between the conferences threatens to get worse.

“We will face even greater economic and environmental disaster in the future if we do not urgently address the loss of our natural capital and reset our economic compass,” Pavan Sukhdev, an adviser to UNEP, said.

“We have an ethical duty to act now – to delay is immoral.”

Nepal is among the world's most climate vulnerable countries

“My family (of four children) will starve if I don’t work harder on the farms this year. I just hope that it rains well in the monsoon season (June-September),” Arati tells IPS in her village of Lamahi in the remote Dang district, 500 km west of Kathmandu.

Agricultural experts believe that failing agriculture in the western hills is exacerbating an existing trend of male migration to neighbouring India – a country that allows Nepali nationals free access and the right to work there.

“The quality of soil has gone down, there is extreme water shortage and frequent disasters like landslides, pests and crop diseases have reduced cultivable acreage,” Krishna Raj Aryal from Support Activities for Poor Producers of Nepal, a non-governmental organisation (NGO), told IPS.

While Nepal has largely recovered from the severe 2008-2009 drought, the worst in 40 years, a World Food Programme (of the United Nations) bulletin released in February said 3.33 million people in the country were still suffering from acute food insecurity.

The same bulletin warned that the situation was likely to deteriorate in Karnali and the far-western hill and mountain districts over the first quarter of the year with food stocks depleting.

According to the state-run Nepal Agricultural Research Centre,  agricultural production only meets the country’s requirements for three to eight months per year.

As food insecurity grows, more Nepali families are becoming dependent on their male members finding alternate livelihoods in India rather than stick with uncertain farming. This is particularly true of the impoverished far western districts.

With over 80 percent of Nepal’s 27 million people dependent on farming, the export of male labour means that the burden of dealing with climate change falls squarely on the women.

Arati understands that rain has been erratic over Nepal over the last few years but, being illiterate, she is not quite sure what the constant talk of global climate change is all about.

“The weather has always been hard to predict, though the monsoon rains have become noticeably scantier and more erratic,” she said.

Arati’s situation of being left to her own devices to cope with the vagaries of the weather  is no different from that of thousands of female-headed farming households in the western region.

NGO leaders like Aryal worry that, in spite of the talk in the cities about climate change, little is being done to educate rural women on how to adapt to changing weather patterns or provide tangible support.

Government officials deny that the issue is being neglected and say things will improve gradually in a country that is still finding its feet after a debilitating ten-year civil war that ended with the  abolition of the monarchy in 2008.

Nepal is yet to give itself a new constitution that is acceptable to all parties and ethnic groups. On May 27, Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai announced that parliament, elected in 2008 to write the constitution, would be disbanded and elections held in November.

“Adaptation programmes need careful planning and we are seriously working on minimising the impacts of climate change,” Deependra Bhadaur Kshetri, vice-chairman of the National Planning Commission, told IPS.

The country’s National Adaptation Plan of Action is still under process. Separately, the environment ministry is preparing a gender strategy that is expected to address the problems faced by female-headed households dependent on agriculture.

Nepal is placed among the most climate vulnerable countries in the world due to its extreme geography (climbing from 60 m to over 8,800 m above sea level) and its impoverished, natural resource dependent population.

A 2007 study on the impact of climate change in Rasuwa district by Resource Identification and Management Society (RIMS), an environmental NGO, found steady increases in temperatures in the summer and monsoon seasons between 1978 and 2007.

Analysing data for that period, RIMS found that in addition to the temperature rise the average annual rainfall had dropped by about one mm a year, with implications for agriculture in the region.

Nepal’s agriculture sector is greatly dependent on timely rainfall (only 17 percent of land is irrigated), making farming highly vulnerable to variations in rainfall patterns.

Almost 80 percent of Nepal’s annual rainfall occurs within the monsoon months of June to September when Nepal is flooded with rain while facing scarcity or drought in the other eight months of the year.

“There is little knowledge on climate change in the rural areas and we need to educate people, especially women, on what is happening,” says Gehendra Gurung, head of the disaster risk reduction and climate change programme at Practical Action, an international NGO.

Gurung says women in the remote areas are seriously disadvantaged because of low literacy rates and lack of access to information. Compared to 75 percent literacy rate among Nepali males, the female literacy rate is only 54 percent.

The last labour force survey carried out by the government and released in 2008 showed a rise in female-headed households from 14 percent to 22 percent over a decade. Experts believe that even more women are now heading households.

“The impact on the livelihoods of women is direct since, apart from household work, they are more involved in farming and livestock keeping than ever before,” says climate change expert with Practical Action, Dinanath Bhandari.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (of the United Nations), countries such as Nepal, India and Bangladesh have about 60 percent of the female workforce engaged in agriculture.

In Nepal, the gender divide is pronounced with women involved in  agricultural, pastoral, wage labour and household work, according to the 2011 U.N. Environment Programme report, ‘Women at the frontline of climate change – gender risks and hopes.’

Women in Nepal’s mountain regions carry out over 6.6 times the agricultural work than men, according to the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development. 

Women are also more dependent on natural resources since they are charged with the responsibility of securing water, food and fuel for cooking and heating in rural Nepal.

“Overall there has been little focus on the gender component and this needs to be recognised first of all,” says Bhandari.

Practical Action runs an adaptation programme where farmers have replaced their rice farms with banana plantations, which are less vulnerable to the vagaries of the weather.

“Ultimately it is the government that should take the call on running adaptation and mitigation programmes,” says Gurung. “The voluntary sector is limited to pilot and demonstration projects.”

Some NGOs are already implementing adaptation projects involving large numbers of women. For example, a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) project is engaged in improving agricultural production in the mountainous district of Langtang.

Here some about 100 women are involved in promoting local seed varieties and discouraging farmers from taking to hybrids which are not viable in the long term due to the constant climate change.

“We have engaged these women to run the project and train local people in adapting to extreme climatic conditions,” said Anil Manandhar, country chief of WWF-Nepal.

The women collect and preserve local seed varieties and sell them to female farmers at subsidised rates. In addition, WWF-Nepal runs a Krishak Pathsala (Farmers’ School), where irrigation and water conservation methods are taught.

“It is important that women are directly engaged in climate change projects because they are now more involved than ever before in farming and are the real victims of climate change,” said Manandhar. 

* This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.