The choice is not between an unmanageably open meeting and a completely closed process. What matters is that observers have some direct line into the negotiations and can see that their expertise and proposals are genuinely considered. Credit: Albert Oppong-Ansah/IPS.

By Craig Boljkovac
GENEVA, Aug 24 2026 (IPS)

In 2022, the United Nations Environment Assembly mandated an Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) to develop a global, legally binding instrument addressing the full life cycle of plastics, from production and product design to disposal. After the resumed fifth session adjourned without consensus in Geneva in August 2025, the divided process moved into informal consultations before INC-5.4 in March 2027.

The exclusion of observers from the June 2026 Heads of Delegation meeting in Nairobi and the next meeting in Bangkok points to a forced separation between governments and observers during these decisive months. At the moment the negotiations most need scientific knowledge, practical experience, public scrutiny and political confidence, they are becoming less inclusive.

Governments negotiate treaties and take decisions; observers do not claim either function. Meaningful observer participation is nevertheless a mainstream feature of United Nations environmental negotiations, not an optional courtesy or a privilege that must be earned by reorganizing civil society into a form administratively convenient to the Chair and Secretariat

There should be no misunderstanding about roles. Governments negotiate treaties and take decisions; observers do not claim either function.

Meaningful observer participation is nevertheless a mainstream feature of United Nations environmental negotiations, not an optional courtesy or a privilege that must be earned by reorganizing civil society into a form administratively convenient to the Chair and Secretariat.

At the online consultation with observers on 14 July 2026, I personally asked Chair Julio Cordano whether there would be any opportunity for observers to participate face-to-face with governments in the pre-negotiations before INC-5.4.

His answer, although somewhat circuitous, was clear: there would not. The official roadmap currently places governments in informal in-person meetings while observers are offered separate webinars in which they may share their views with the Chair.

The webinars may be useful, but they are not participation in the negotiations. Observers speaking to the Chair while governments negotiate separately is consultation at a distance. Direct observer engagement with governments may therefore be almost entirely prevented until INC-5.4, with no certainty about how meaningful participation will be even then.

Bangkok is important, but it is not the fundamental issue. The question is whether the remaining process will rebuild trust and establish genuine engagement rather than maintain parallel tracks.

The Chair’s statement that INC-5.4 will follow previously agreed participation arrangements, including observers, is cautiously positive, but it does not replace clear modalities or direct engagement while the political package is being shaped.

None of this is intended as disrespect toward Ambassador Cordano. He inherited an exceptionally difficult negotiation, with a fractured text and a political divide between the High Ambition Coalition and the Like-Minded countries.

The June Heads of Delegation meeting reportedly produced a more constructive atmosphere, and confidential spaces for governments to test compromises are sometimes essential. But confidentiality and meaningful observer engagement are not mutually exclusive.

The Stockholm Convention negotiations set an admittedly high bar. Civil-society networks organized themselves, developed technical and policy positions and built working relationships with governments throughout the process.

The International Pollutants (formerly “POPs”) Elimination Network – IPEN – itself emerged at the first Stockholm Convention INC in 1998 as a self-organised public interest entity for engagement in such negotiations.

The Rotterdam and Stockholm Convention secretariats continue to recognize NGOs as important stakeholders and provide for their representation as observers at meetings of Convention bodies. These negotiations did not succeed ‘despite’ observer involvement; they benefited from the expertise, organization, implementation knowledge and political attention observers brought.

The plastics negotiations should aim to meet or exceed that standard, not retreat from it. Plastics are chemical products, made with chemical inputs, that generate enormous pollution and waste-management challenges. The negotiations belong within the chemicals and wastes tradition, where constructive observer participation has been part of both treaty development and implementation.

The UNEA mandate points in the same direction. Resolution 5/14 stressed the need for the widest and most effective participation possible, opened participation to relevant stakeholders consistent with applicable UN rules and requested UNEP to facilitate their participation and cooperation.

More generally, UNEP accreditation gives civil-society organizations observer status at UNEA and its subsidiary bodies, with opportunities for written and oral contributions. A process that progressively removes stakeholders from the settings in which substantive discussions occur diminishes the practical meaning of that mandate.

The Chair’s continuing emphasis on “organizing” and “rationalizing” observer participation is therefore understandable as an attempt to manage a large and diverse community at a particularly fraught point in the negotiations, but it becomes concerning when substantive proposals from major observer groups receive no meaningful response.

Better coordination may improve participation; it cannot be a prerequisite for access. Indigenous Peoples, scientists, waste pickers, workers, public-health organizations, environmental NGOs, consumer groups, local authorities and business coalitions have distinct mandates and cannot simply be compressed into a few convenient voices without losing the diversity that gives observer participation its value.

There is, however, a practical way forward. the process that the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control has made a distinction between observers with “vested interests” (i.e. the tobacco companies and their associated interests) and the “public interest.” This possible approach has also been suggested during the negotiations, with no substantive response received.

Alternatively, UNEP already has a recognized Major Groups Facilitating Committee, composed of elected representatives of the nine Major Groups and supported by the UNEP Civil Society Unit, whose responsibility includes facilitating accredited civil-society participation in UNEP’s intergovernmental processes.

The Chair could ask this existing mechanism to invite each Major Group to nominate one or two organizations, selected for relevant expertise and balanced representation, to attend informal governmental meetings as silent observers or, where appropriate, to contribute at designated sessions.

This would resemble the approach used under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, where the secretariat contacts constituency focal points to nominate a limited and balanced number of observer representatives for smaller workshops and meetings.

The model is imperfect: UNEP’s Major Groups do not neatly encompass every constituency engaged in the plastics negotiations, and limited representation at informal meetings must not replace broad access at formal INC sessions. It would nevertheless remove the claim that observers have failed to organize themselves, place responsibility within an existing and recognized UNEP process, and avoid the Chair or Secretariat choosing preferred interlocutors.

The choice is not between an unmanageably open meeting and a completely closed process. What matters is that observers have some direct line into the negotiations and can see that their expertise and proposals are genuinely considered.

The present separation also carries financial and political risks. The INC has depended heavily on voluntary donor support. As of 25 March 2026, UNEP reported more than USD 40 million in contributions, including more than USD 7.2 million from Norway and approximately USD 2.5 million from Switzerland. Norway’s subsequent review and reported hold on aspects of its wider UNEP funding was already a warning that financing cannot be treated as politically unconditional.

No donor has announced that restrictions on observers will cause it to withdraw support. Donor governments may nevertheless ask why they should continue financing a process that repeatedly postpones decisions, accommodates the least ambitious actors and limits access for many of the organizations supplying evidence, implementation experience and public accountability. A process that loses legitimacy also places its financing at risk.

INC-5.4 is the final credible test of whether the UNEP process can produce a treaty reflecting the mandate agreed in 2022. The session cannot arrive after months of closed governmental discussions with observers presented with a largely completed political package. The Chair and Secretariat should clarify participation modalities now and establish structured, direct engagement with observers before March, using UNEP’s existing civil-society architecture if necessary.

If INC-5.4 produces another continuation or a lowest-common-denominator text stripped of meaningful lifecycle measures and effective controls on products, production and chemicals, high-ambition governments should be prepared to pursue an Ottawa-style diplomatic process.

That is not the preferred outcome; a strong global treaty concluded through UNEP remains the better course. But the UN process cannot demand political loyalty, donor financing and stakeholder expertise while progressively closing the door on those stakeholders.

Rebuilding trust with observers will not solve every substantive division in the plastics negotiations. It is, however, a necessary test of whether the process still intends to be ambitious, legitimate and capable of delivering an effective treaty. If that test cannot be met, countries serious about ending plastic pollution may need to create a different pathway.

Craig Boljkovac is Executive Director of Green Cross International and has more than 35 years of experience in international environmental policy and sustainable development. He is a co-founder of IPEN. He has participated in several sessions and related meetings of the global plastics treaty negotiations. The opinions expressed are his own.

Supporters of the Cockroach Janta party rally against the Minister of Education in Kolkata, India, 24 July 2026. Credit: Debarchan Chatterjee/NurPhoto via AFP

By Andrew Firmin
LONDON, Aug 21 2026 (IPS)

India’s strongman leader, Narendra Modi, has just been forced to do the thing he likes least: making concessions in response to protests.

It all started on 15 May, when the country’s Chief Justice, Surya Kant, told a courtroom that unemployed young people who protest and speak out on social media are like cockroaches. The remark, revealing the establishment’s contempt for the country’s young people, spectacularly backfired. Within days it had spawned a nationwide movement, the Cockroach Janta Party. Its central protest demand was the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. Pradhan quit on 25 July. But that may not be enough to satisfy the demand for change the movement has unleashed.

Birth of a movement

India has more Gen Z people than any other country. Around 407 million Indians, some 30 per cent of the population, are aged 14 to 29. They face extraordinary competition to access education and struggle to find jobs.

Kant’s remark sparked a fire. Communications strategist Abhijeet Dipke asked on social media: what if all the cockroaches came together? That question kickstarted a viral movement under a name, the Cockroach Janta Party, that playfully echoes that of the ruling Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). What began as a satirical website quickly became a movement. Within two weeks, it had 22 million Instagram followers.

The cockroach movement fits into a broader global pattern. Recent years have seen Gen Z mobilise in numbers in many countries where governments are demonstrably out of touch and economies and political systems fail young people. Movements are characterised by collective leadership, mass protests and strategic use of social media. India’s time to join the wave had come.

The movement soon found its galvanising cause. India’s education system relies on make-or-break entrance exams, with results deciding the career prospects of millions. In the medical college exam, some 2.2 million students compete for 130,000 places. Families make sacrifices and students spend years preparing. But corruption means questions are often leaked in return for bribes. Two weeks before Kant’s outburst, the national medical college entrance exam paper was leaked and the exam was cancelled. Students despaired. Then they got angry.

Protest prevails

Protesters camped out for weeks in central Delhi, demanding Pradhan’s resignation. Volunteers supplied food, water, medicines and camping equipment. The movement broadened well beyond Gen Z, with people of all ages joining. Sonam Wangchuk, an environmental and education reform activist previously jailed for protesting, further raised the protest’s profile with a weeks-long hunger strike.

For seven weeks the government tried ignoring the protesters, and when that failed, it turned to violence. After authorities forcibly hospitalised Wangchuk, thousands of protesters marched from the protest site to parliament. Security forces responded with pellet guns and teargas, beat protesters and bystanders with batons and wooden sticks and detained many. The violence, widely documented on social media, was shocking for a country that prides itself on being the world’s biggest democracy. It was impossible to ignore, sparking protests in other towns and cities. The government was finally forced to hold talks.

Looking ahead

The government has promised fast-track courts for exam leakers and a review of the exam and education systems. In return, the movement called off the protests, having also secured a promise that no protester would face repercussions. But that’s not the way of a government that has long repressed dissent. Modi’s administration has a track record of detaining activists, using force against protests, censoring critical voices and passing restrictive laws. India has recently been added to the CIVICUS Monitor Watchlist because of its deteriorating civic space. Since the cockroach protests ended, police have detained and harassed hundreds of students and reportedly targeted their families.

Pradhan’s resignation was a remarkable event. The government had never before responded to pressure by sacking an unpopular minister. But the BJP doesn’t appear to have learned much. During a recent by-election campaign, its national president, Nitin Nabin, described protesters as ‘a virus and a cockroach gang devoted to breaking the country’.

Modi may have bought breathing space, but the underlying problems remain. The causes are both economic, with high youth unemployment and evident inequality, and political, with a high-handed government that doesn’t listen to young people or respect their right to dissent. Further protests look likely. One, sparked by similar corruption complaints over a civil service entry exam, has mobilised in Jharkhand state.

This isn’t the first time Modi’s government has bent to pressure. In 2021, sustained farmers’ protests forced it to drop farming law changes. Modi’s support fell in the 2024 general election, forcing him to rely on coalition partners. More recently, his party looked to be on the up again, winning power in West Bengal state for the first time in April following controversial changes to the electoral roll that removed over nine million names, disproportionately Muslim voters and others less likely to support the BJP. But it has just lost the by-election where Nitin Nabin repeated the cockroach slur.

The cockroach movement may present Modi’s biggest challenge to date, because it cuts across class, party and religious divides, making it much harder to dismiss. The BJP built its base among Hindus by vilifying Muslims, yet at the Delhi protest, people from both religions prayed side by side. The movement’s social media cut-through is also significant. It bypassed a conventional media largely co-opted by the BJP that typically parrots its lines and downplays other viewpoints.

The government should read the room, but there’s every chance it will learn the wrong lesson and go after protest leaders. That will be a recipe for further protests and a repeated cycle of state violence and criminalisation. If India is to live up to its promise as the world’s biggest democracy, it must deepen democratic freedoms, recognise the value of dissent and acknowledge that the young people it branded cockroaches have much to contribute to their country’s future.

Andrew Firmin is CIVICUS Editor-in-Chief, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Passersby take part in a pickup football game organized by civilian search collectives on Mexico City's Paseo de la Reforma during the World Cup, July 2026. © 2026 Jorge Peniche/Human Rights Watch

By Jorge Peniche
Aug 19 2026 (IPS)

Weeks have gone by since the World Cup ended. Its aftermath has sparked a broader conversation about who football’s biggest tournament belongs to and how it should look in 2030. One postscript to that conversation comes from Mexico.

In a country with more than 100,000 people registered as disappeared, families searching for their loved ones confronted an unusual question: how do you participate in a national celebration while carrying the grief of a missing loved one?

While fans immersed themselves in 104 matches and the outcome for the teams they were cheering for, the answer by the civilian search collectives, who come together to find missing relatives amid state inaction and often face considerable risks, was disarmingly bold: neither to ignore the tournament nor reject it, but to claim a place in it.

In a country where football pitches can be found from volcanoes to fields of Mexican agave plants, they carved out a pitch of their own in the country’s most emblematic avenue. And then they played football.

Around 9 a.m., the chalk lines for another pitch began to appear on the asphalt of Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City. It was Mexico’s final day as a World Cup host. Sixteen kilometers north of the Azteca Stadium, the “Glorieta de los Desaparecidos,” a roundabout reclaimed by families as a memorial in 2022, was preparing for another game. These were among the pickup games that collectives organized as spaces of remembrance during the tournament. Pickup games took place the days Mexico was playing.

In a country with more than 100,000 people registered as disappeared, families searching for their loved ones confronted an unusual question: how do you participate in a national celebration while carrying the grief of a missing loved one?

The games followed a simple script: small teams of three to five faced off until they reached a set number of goals. Some were part of the collectives; others –including football fans– were passersby who joined. Some became regulars; children particularly. In that convergence, football became a vehicle for telling stories of absence. 

“Preparations started one year before the initial kick-in,” Jorge Verástegui, one of the initiative’s organizers, told me. 

His brother and nephew, Antonio and Antonio de Jesús, disappeared in the northern state of Coahuila in January 2009, when the Zetas cartel dominated much of the region.

“We were coming from a very frustrating year of dialogues with the government, so many of us, searching for our loved ones, asked how to engage with a World Cup taking place in Mexico,” he said, wearing a Mexican national team jersey emblazoned with a large picture of his brother. Organizers distributed over 300 similar jerseys, so families could add photos of their missing loved ones. Search collectives joined from across the country. 

For César Contreras, a lawyer at Centro Prodh, a human rights group that has represented families for decades, football became a way “to collectivize joy but also reflect on how we got here.” The interventions wanted to challenge the stigma of disappearances as a “sad topic that nobody wants to hear about.”

When children joined, one father told Contreras he would later explain to his son who he had been playing with.

Supporters created the “Ajolote Buscador” a reworking of the salamander that is the  city mascot, that became a regular presence at the pickup games. In Guadalajara, another Ajolote denounced the lack of resources for identification.

Mobilization was not without backlash from government authorities. U.N. experts raised concerns about restrictions faced by families while trying to make their voices heard. And violence against those seeking answers or accountability continued. During the World Cup, two searchers were killed, one in Guanajuato and another in Sinaloa. 

Yet, as Andrea Horcasitas, one researcher who has worked alongside search collectives put it, “in a context marked by exclusion from the city and restricted access, collectives sent a message of belonging: this celebration is also ours, and here we are,” 

Among the families who joined the pitches were Javier Barajas and María del Tránsito Piña, teachers who were originally from Guanajuato. 

Their daughter, Guadalupe, disappeared in Salvatierra in February 2020. Her brother, Francisco Javier, joined the local search commission and helped locate her remains in one of Mexico’s largest mass graves. Three months later, he was killed. Investigations linked both crimes to the same criminal group. Their parents were later displaced from their home state.

Football was a family ritual, their mother told me. Francisco Javier and his mother watched matches together, while Javier and Guadalupe prepared the snacks.

“Now, I can’t watch football. It’s just too painful,” she said.

Yet the couple eventually found their way to the pitches. Barajas played several matches as a tribute to his son and daughter. For his wife, the pickup games offered a distinct space: “I can feel them when I wear that jersey with their photos.”

The resistance to FIFA’s commercialization projects is a reminder that we ultimately cherish these tournaments because of the stories they leave behind. Mexico’s search collectives offer one of them.

For the families, the work continues. Ensuring their security remains an urgent task, particularly in places where lethal violence against them concentrates. So does advancing investigations grounded in local realities and reducing the backlog in forensic identification. 

Their message still resounds: this tournament was also theirs, because their stories are part of Mexico. 

Jorge Peniche is a senior Americas researcher at Human Rights Watch.

The 13th of August marked the 100th birthday of Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz – in short Fidel Castro. Amidst an intensified US siege and the threat of invasion, Cubans commemorated their dear leader’s centenary birth anniversary with events that included an International Book Fair, art exhibitions, concerts and gatherings of delegates from left-wing organisations across the continent.

Anis Chowdhury

Wayne Smith, a US diplomat with a long experience in Cuba, believes Fidel Castro will be remembered because “he stood up to the United States and survived”. When Castro died in 2016, the leading US news media CBS carried an opinion piece, entitled, “How Fidel Castro stood up to the U.S., and won”.

The illegal blockade of Cuba contributes to shortages of food, medicine, fuel, and essential supplies, increasing the cost of everyday life for the Cuban people. However, when Castro welcomed Pope John Paul II in 1998 and let the pictures do the talking, the world saw Cuba surviving in spite of the US trade embargo.

Castro’s legacy

Castro’s legacy was best summarised by Ken Livingstone, former mayor of London. In 2006, during his visit to Cuba, Livingstone said, “What’s amazing here is you’ve got a country that’s suffered an illegal economic blockade by the United States for almost half a century and yet it’s been able to give its people the best standard of health care, brilliant education… to do this in the teeth of an almost economic war is a tribute to Fidel Castro”.

Thus, Cuba attained high human development measured by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)’s Human Development Index (HDI). In comparison with the world average of 0.746 based on 185 countries, Cuba’s HDI was 0.762 in 2023. In 1994, Cuba’s HDI reached 0.887. Underlying the above global average HDI is a high adult literacy rate of nearly 100% and a high life expectancy of approximately 78.1 years at birth.

These are the results of free health care and free education for all, considered a right. Cuba has the highest ratio of doctors to patients in the world, at 9.8 per 1,000 people (2021), which was 0.9 in 1960. Its infant mortality of 3.86 per 1,000 live births is one of the lowest in the world. At the William Soler Paediatric Hospital in Havana, more than 90% of the new-borns who needed neonatal surgery survived their procedures.

Malaria, polio, tetanus, and measles have been eradicated in Cuba due to years of investment in primary care and assiduous attention to the population’s health. Cuba’s long-standing commitment to health has led to a successful COVID-19 pandemic response. Cuba spends a larger proportion of its gross domestic product on education than any other country in the world.

Unfortunately, the recent tightening of the unilateral illegal blockade by the Trump administration is inflicting heavy costs and reversing Cuba’s unique development gains.

A true internationalist

Castro was a true internationalist leader of the proletariat and stood by freedom fighters, especially in Africa. At a rally of approximately 1 million Cubans in 1962, Fidel Castro presented the Second Declaration of Havana, a call to revolutionary action to anti-imperialist and working-class fighters internationally. Castro often reiterated, the Cuban people’s internationalist aid to liberation struggles was “paying our debt to humanity.”

Castro sent his first batch of military support to Algerian President Ben Bellah in 1963. Castro’s Cuba trained the revolutionaries in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Namibia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Cape Verde and fought with them against the colonial rule. Castro branded apartheid “a creation of Western capitalism and imperialism”, and his Cuba helped bring down the system of apartheid in South Africa by providing resources and training to African National Congress (ANC) fighters.

Despite the hardship illegally imposed on it by the US, Cuba always stood by the world’s oppressed and hapless people. In 1960, Cuba joined the relief effort after the Chilean earthquake. In 1963, it sent health-care workers to assist the newly independent state of Algeria.

Castro’s Cuba has been despatching cadres of health-care professionals all over the world to combat disasters and epidemics. Cuban doctors were on the scene in Haiti during the cholera outbreak that followed the 2010 earthquake; they arrived in west Africa during the 2013–16 Ebola crisis. And when COVID-19 spread to Europe, two Cuban health professional teams landed in Italy. By the end of April, 2020, more than 1000 Cuban health-care workers were helping foreign countries respond to COVID-19.

Castro conceptualised and implemented an inclusive model of healthcare that brought doctors to the people. He extended Cuban medical aid to other countries, demonstrating the essentially internationalist and human nature of the Cuban Revolution.

Clare Wenham, assistant professor of global health policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science observed, “The international health programme is about solidarity; Cuba believes that healthy populations are the bedrock of global society and they want to support that any way they can”.

Mandela and Castro

Like many revolutionaries and freedom fighters in the Global South, Nelson Mandela was inspired by the Cuban Revolution’s triumph in 1959. Charged with the task of starting a guerrilla army in 1961, Mandela looked to the writings of Cuban Communists for guidance.

Mandela visited Cuba in 1991 to express his gratitude to Castro, calling Castro’s Revolution “a source of inspiration to all freedom-loving people”. Mandela further added, “We admire the sacrifices of the Cuban people in maintaining their independence and sovereignty in the face of a vicious, imperialist-orchestrated campaign. We, too, want to control our own destiny.”

During a public event in Havana, Mandela asked Castro to visit South Africa. Referring to Castro, Mandela asked, “Who trained our people, who gave us resources, who helped so many of our soldiers, our doctors? … “You have not come to our country – when are you coming?”

Castro attended Mandela’s presidential inauguration in May 1994. Barbara Masekela, South Africa’s former ambassador to the US and who accompanied Mandela to Cuba in 1991, said Mandela’s friendship with Castro had been “born in the trenches of the freedom struggle”.

A true friend of the oppressed

Norberto Fuentes, a writer once close to Castro and now living in exile, believes the Cuban leader’s relevance is as “the spokesman for silence, for the man who has no army, no Congress, no face. The man who has nothing”.

Thousands of Cuban internationalists contributed to decisive battles for independence of African countries, while fostering cooperation in the fields of health, education, and training.

Despite hardships due to the US’s illegal blockade, Castro’s Cuba has remained a shining example of internationalism and holds a special place in the history of people’s struggles against imperialism.

Anis Chowdhury, Emeritus Professor, Western Sydney University (Australia). He held senior UN positions in Bangkok and New York and served as Special Assistant to the Chief Advisor for Finance (with the status and rank of State Minister) in the Professor Yunus-led Interim Government. E-mail: anis.z.chowdhury@gmail.com; a.chowdhury@westernsydney.edu.au

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

A poster depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as wanted by the International Criminal Court is displayed in a corridor of the European Parliament in Brussels, June 2026. Credit: Frédéric Pétry/HansLucas via AFP

By Andrew Firmin
LONDON, Aug 17 2026 (IPS)

In a recent Wall Street Journal piece, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio pledged to ‘dismantle’ the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Trump administration intends to pressure states into quitting the court, threatening sanctions, travel bans, visa restrictions and ‘increased scrutiny’ of states that receive its funding. At stake is the court’s ability to stand with victims of the gravest of human rights crimes.

Challenging impunity

Established in 2002 following years of civil society advocacy, the ICC prosecutes atrocities, including crimes against humanity, genocide and war crimes, when national or regional courts can’t or won’t. It prosecutes individuals, and national leaders enjoy no immunity. It has secured several convictions, including of warlords from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali and Rwanda. Among ongoing cases, former Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte awaits trial on crimes against humanity charges. Civil society plays a key role in collecting evidence. Filipino women-led groups, for example, have documented thousands of extrajudicial killings.

The court has 125 members, but the USA is among several powerful states, including China, India, Israel and Russia, that have never joined. US hostility intensified in 2020, when the ICC opened an investigation into crimes against humanity and war crimes in Afghanistan, including those committed by US forces.

A current US campaign could merit the court’s attention. In the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, the US military is bombing boats it claims are being used by drug cartels to smuggle fentanyl and other illicit substances. It started the strikes as a way of building pressure on then Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, but has continued after US forces invaded Venezuela and abducted him, now seemingly with the purpose of communicating US strength and contempt for international rules.

US forces have killed over 200 people. All are civilians, leaving little doubt the strikes are illegal under international law. Last October, a group of UN human rights experts concluded that the strikes amount to extrajudicial executions. UN human rights chief Volker Türk called for an investigation, saying he believed the campaign violated international law. The USA responded by lining up with Israel, North Korea and Russia to oppose Türk’s second term.

The victims include nationals of Colombia, St Lucia and Trinidad and Tobago, all ICC members. The ICC could investigate any strikes carried out in member states’ territorial waters or against vessels registered with them.

Defending Netanyahu

Donald Trump is also determined to defend his prize ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He’s said as much, undermining Rubio’s lofty rhetoric about sovereignty. In November 2024, the ICC issued arrest warrants for crimes against humanity and war crimes against Netanyahu, former defence minister Yoav Gallant and Hamas commander Mohammed Deif, later confirmed to have been killed by Israel. Israel doesn’t recognise the court, but the warrants stand because Palestine does.

Netanyahu’s warrant is back in the headlines because he’s due to visit New York for the annual high-level opening of the UN General Assembly in September. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has called for his arrest, but the Trump administration has confirmed it will ignore the warrant. This may have fuelled the latest offensive, which goes further than the Trump administration’s 2025 decision to impose sanctions on nine ICC judges and officials. Early in his second presidency, Trump issued an executive order that declared a ‘national emergency’, arguing the court was a threat to the USA and Israel, and pledging sanctions against anyone who takes part in its investigations. The order was used to impose sanctions on Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Fearing criminalisation, US-based organisations may feel pressured to end cooperation with the ICC. Last year, two US-based civil society organisations pulled out of the ICC’s annual meeting. Civil society is however fighting back. In July, two US groups filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, arguing the sanctions violate constitutional free speech protections.

International system under attack

The Trump administration’s attack on the ICC is part of its broader assault on the international system, and particularly its human rights functions. It’s withdrawing from some bodies, defunding others, trying to bend others to its will, forming alternatives it controls, such as the Board of Peace, and showing outright hostility towards those seen to stand in its way.

The USA isn’t the only one. Three military-run Sahel allies – Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger – have begun their withdrawal from the ICC, a process that takes a year. They previously quit the Economic Community of West African States, including its Community Court of Justice, leaving victims of human rights atrocities amid jihadist insurgency with no international routes to justice.

Venezuela set the same course under Maduro. Last December, parliament voted to repeal the law ratifying the Rome Statute, the treaty through which states accept the court’s jurisdiction. That path hasn’t changed under US-compliant Interim President Delcy Rodriguez, whose government recently declared its withdrawal ‘irrevocable’. The US government has welcomed the decision, which will deny justice both to victims of Maduro’s repression and the families of Venezuelans killed in boat strikes.

Others have rallied to the court’s defence. A European Union spokesperson said the bloc ‘stands firm’ behind it. Hungary, which under right-wing nationalist Viktor Orbán had committed to pulling out, reversed that decision under its new government.

Time to rally round

The court faces this onslaught while leaderless. On 24 July, member states voted to remove chief prosecutor Karim Khan following disciplinary proceedings triggered by a sexual abuse complaint from a former staff member. It’s vital that his replacement be a strong and independent leader who can continue the court’s work.

The ICC is under attack by the Trump administration because of its promise to hold the powerful to account. Its member states must defend the principle that no one is above the law by refusing to bow to US pressure.

Andrew Firmin is CIVICUS Editor-in-Chief, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Zambia’s Green Revolution campaign generated stagnant productivity and rising hunger. Credit: Timothy A. Wise

By Timothy A. Wise and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
CAMBRIDGE, MA, USA / KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Aug 17 2026 (IPS)

As AGRA turns 20, a new report exposes its worsening failure to double productivity and incomes and halve undernourishment in participating African nations as promised.

AGRA still failing Africa’s farmers
The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, now known simply as AGRA, was established in 2006.

Timothy A. Wise

After considerable evidence of failure became apparent, it abandoned its original ambitious goals in 2022, adopting AGRA 3.0, focusing on food systems and policy reforms.

It also ‘rebranded’ by changing its name to AGRA, removing its explicit association with the much criticised Green Revolution. Wise’s 2020 assessment of AGRA up to 2018 found progress on its own declared goals quite modest and uneven.

Wise’s latest review finds even slower productivity growth and worsening hunger under AGRA compared to before 2006. Its improved seeds and fertilizer promotion did not even achieve sustainable intensification, i.e., growing much more food on the same land.

Dubious progress
Increased food production and sales were supposed to reduce rural poverty and food insecurity.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

High-yielding seeds and related agrochemicals were not widely adopted by most smallholders except when heavily subsidised.

But subsidies have encouraged planting favoured crops on new farmland. Modest yield growth often failed to cover the costs of more expensive inputs, leaving farmers in debt.

Meanwhile, cultivation and yields of millet, a nutritious climate-resilient staple, has declined over the last two decades.

Instead of halving the number of hungry, undernourishment has risen by 58% in participating countries since 2006. Tragically, the number of hungry in the 13 AGRA countries nearly doubled over the last six years!

AGRA unmonitored
The African Union was induced to support AGRA by encouraging more government investments in food agriculture. In 2006, it launched the Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Program (CAADP).

Despite generous Green Revolution subsidies in Malawi, hunger continues to rise. Credit: Timothy A. Wise

CAADP called for dramatically raising government spending on agriculture to 10% of government budgets. However, most governments failed to provide the required funding.

But many governments, particularly in AGRA countries, have spent large shares of their scarce public resources on agriculture. Many have invested in Green Revolution programmes.

Despite setting similar productivity, income, and hunger objectives, by 2025, no country met CAADP’s targets according to its rigorous biennial progress reports using more benchmarks.

High-yielding seeds and related agrochemicals were not widely adopted by most smallholders except when heavily subsidised.

AGRA’s main initiatives, involving input markets and industrial farming, are too costly for most small-scale farmers, benefiting wealthier farmers more.

For Wise, the poor outcomes are not solely or even primarily due to AGRA. Instead, he blames the Green Revolution approach, previously strongly supported by private foundations and now by the World Bank Group.

In contrast, Senegal, not one of the AGRA 13, has succeeded in halving hunger, with more diversified policies supporting a wider range of crops and farming methods.

What failure?
AGRA has never reported actual progress against its original goals of doubling productivity and incomes while halving hunger for 30 million farming households.

With fewer measurable goals, progress reports now focus on the number of commercial seeds produced, private financing generated, and enterprises launched.

Instead, AGRA claimed, “we directly reached 11 million farmers and indirectly reached 26 million farmers. This achievement significantly outstripped our initial targets to reach 30 million smallholder households.”

‘Reaching’ 37 million farmers, mostly ‘indirectly’, says little about its actual impacts on farmers. Unsurprisingly, most donors have cut support for AGRA.

Now, AGRA is influencing national and continent-wide policymaking to accelerate agricultural commercialisation. Its new focus on food systems and policies shifts attention as its website now makes little mention of productivity or small-scale farmers.

Whither AGRA?
Yield growth has been slow and uneven, mainly for a few food crops prioritised by AGRA. Those modest yield gains often did not cover the costs of expensive inputs, leaving many farmers in debt.

Increased food production and sales were supposed to reduce rural poverty and hunger. Instead, malnutrition has risen in most AGRA countries, as dietary diversity has declined with crop diversity.

Asia’s Green Revolution offered far more support to farmers than Africa’s, although its achievements have been more mixed than typically claimed. Africa’s Green Revolution has offered much less, mainly improved commercial seeds.

AGRA still denies the failure of its earlier policies. Instead, it now pays lip service to low-input approaches including agroecology.

In 2025, AGRA president Agnes Kalibata acknowledged, as she stepped down from her post, “Part of why [AGRA] rebranded was that the Green Revolution ship has sailed. We can’t continue pursuing what’s not working for others.”

After twenty years, AGRA should take heed of that advice.

The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa will release its report, drawing on Wise’s research, on August 24.

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Downpours flood the streets of Dhaka. Credit: Farid Ahmed/ IPS

By Mohammad Zaman
DHAKA, Bangladesh, Aug 13 2026 (IPS)

Dhaka’s recent and recurrent flooding is often treated as a natural disaster, but rain is only the trigger. The deeper causes are political, planning and ecological failure: wetland loss, canal encroachment, unplanned growth, weak enforcement, fragmented institutions and short-term engineering fixes. Dhaka is not drowning because it rains; it is drowning because it has been built as if water had nowhere to go.

Historically, Dhaka was part of a watery landscape of rivers, canals, ponds, floodplains and low-lying retention areas. These were not vacant lands; they were essential drainage infrastructure that stored rainwater, slowed runoff and carried excess water toward surrounding rivers. As the city expanded, this blue-green network was filled, narrowed or severed, leaving drains unable to cope even with moderate rainfall.

Mohammad Zaman

Drains and canals have also deteriorated. Many are clogged with waste, narrowed by illegal structures or disconnected from smaller drains. Box culverts, often promoted as modernisation, have in some places buried waterways rather than restoring them as living drainage corridors. Drainage fails not only because pipes are small, but because the wider hydrological system has been cut apart.

Climate change adds pressure through shorter, heavier and less predictable rainfall, but it should not excuse bad planning. World Bank work on urban flooding in Greater Dhaka has warned that the city already has an adaptation deficit. The real problem is that Dhaka has reduced its own capacity to absorb shocks, treating flooding as a pipe-sizing seasonal issue rather than a citywide water-management challenge.

The consequences appear first in transport paralysis. When major roads in Mirpur, Dhanmondi, Green Road, Motijheel, Shantinagar, Old Dhaka and other areas go underwater, commuters lose hours, public transport stalls and businesses suffer. The cost includes damaged vehicles and inventories, delayed logistics, lost productivity and the daily stress of moving through a city that cannot function after rain.

Flooding also deepens inequality. Low-income residents in informal and low-lying settlements face contaminated water entering their homes, loss of daily income, damaged belongings and higher disease risk. Floodwater mixed with sewage, waste and pollutants increases infections and waterborne illness. The poor pay twice: through greater exposure and weaker access to healthcare, savings and political voice.

The scale of impact shows this is not a seasonal inconvenience. A 2023 GIS and remote-sensing study found that almost 35 percent of Dhaka falls within high or very high waterlogging-vulnerability zones, with slum households disproportionately concentrated there. Recent rainfall confirms the risk: Dhaka recorded 130 millimetres of rain in six hours on 12 July 2024, while another episode brought 196 millimetres in 24 hours in 2025, submerging major roads despite large drainage investments.

Infrastructure spending has not produced resilience. The two Dhaka city corporations reportedly invested more than Tk 262 crore over four years up to 2024 to build 334.19 kilometres of drains, box culverts and related infrastructure, yet large areas still flooded. Planning data show that Dhaka lost 3,440 acres out of 9,556 acres of designated flood-flow zones, retention areas and waterbodies since the 1995 Detailed Area Plan, while central-city waterbodies reportedly fell from 20.57 percent in 1995 to 2.9 percent in 2023. The city is paying to drain water while allowing the systems that make drainage possible to disappear.

This failure is reinforced by institutional fragmentation. Responsibility is divided among Dhaka WASA, the two city corporations, RAJUK, the Bangladesh Water Development Board and others. Each controls part of the problem, but no single body manages the full catchment: drains, canals, retention areas, pumps, river outfalls and land-use control. The result is scattered action followed by renewed flooding.

Weak enforcement makes plans meaningless. Master plans and Detailed Area Plans have identified flood-flow zones, retention ponds and wetlands, yet these areas continue to disappear under housing, roads and commercial development. Encroachment survives because it is profitable, politically protected or administratively tolerated.

Accountability is also weak. Spending is reported, but outcomes are rarely evaluated. Dhaka does not need another narrow drainage project; it needs the political courage to enforce existing plans, recover waterways and protect the remaining wetlands.

The city must treat canals, wetlands, ponds and flood-flow zones as critical public infrastructure. Remaining wetlands should be protected, encroached canals demarcated and recovered, and major waterways restored as open drainage corridors connected to surrounding rivers. Dhaka also needs an integrated flood-management platform with clear authority over land-use approvals, canal recovery, drainage investment, pump operation, solid-waste control and emergency response.

Future planning must also centre vulnerable communities. Informal settlements, low-income neighbourhoods, street vendors, schoolchildren and daily-wage workers face the harshest effects but are rarely treated as planning partners. Community reporting of blocked drains, health warnings, emergency transport plans and compensation for repeated losses should be part of resilience policy. A flood-safe Dhaka requires ecological restoration, institutional discipline and social justice.

Dhaka’s flooding is a warning about planning against nature. The city has tried to engineer its way out of a crisis created by land conversion, institutional weakness and ecological neglect. Until it restores and governs its blue-green network as essential infrastructure, each monsoon will bring the same result: a megacity halted by rain it once knew how to live with. The choice is no longer between development and drainage; it is between protecting people and flooding them in the name of progress.

Dr. Mohammad Zaman is an international development consultant whose work across Asia and Africa focuses on social safeguards, displacement, resettlement and inclusive development. He lives in Vancouver, Canada, and can be reached at: mqzaman.bc@gmail.com

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Exiled Nicaraguans hold a national flag in the Church of San Francisco in San José, Costa Rica, at a service held on 19 April 2026 to commemorate the anniversary of protests in 2018. Credit: Ezequiel Becerra/AFP

By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Aug 12 2026 (IPS)

On 19 July, the 47th anniversary of the Sandinista revolution that first brought him to power, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega declared that his country would hold ‘no more elections’ so that the opposition could never again try to ‘seize power’. Just like that, he scrapped a presidential vote that had previously been pushed back to 2027, abandoning even the fiction of democratic legitimacy. The move changes little in practice, since no free vote had been possible for years. But it’s still revealing: a government that controls the army, the courts, the electoral machinery and the police, and will still not risk even a stage-managed ballot, is one that has lost confidence in its people.

Civil society dismantled

The abolition of elections is the political capstone of a longer-term project to eliminate every organised space beyond the ruling family’s control. A constitutional overhaul ratified in January 2025 extended Ortega’s term, elevated his wife, Rosario Murillo, from vice-president to ‘co-president’, and handed the couple control over every branch of the state, with their son, Laureano Ortega Murillo, positioned as monarchical heir apparent. Scrapping elections that had already been emptied of any meaning removes the last formal mechanism through which power in Nicaragua might, however unlikely, have changed hands.

Since 2018, the government has shut down over 5,500 civil society organisations, close to 80 per cent of what existed. Its net has encompassed trade unions, women’s groups, universities, independent media and religious bodies, with the Catholic Church a particular target. The legal profession is the latest victim. In early July, some 2,000 lawyers found their licences to practise revoked overnight, without notice or appeal, effectively leaving many Nicaraguans without legal defence.

The Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua, mandated by the UN Human Rights Council, has concluded that the government has weaponised every arm of the state and its abuses amount to crimes against humanity committed as deliberate policy. It has documented chains of command linking the presidency to local officials, and named 54 officials responsible for the repression.

Repression beyond borders

Persecution has forced over 935,000 people, roughly one in eight Nicaraguans, into exile since mass protests in 2018, which security forces suppressed by killing more than 300 people. But exile offers no safety. A 2025 report by the Group of Human Rights Experts shows the regime runs an extensive transnational intelligence and surveillance network using the army, police, foreign service and informal agents to track critics abroad, monitor their communications and threaten their families back home.

For a growing number, surveillance leads to violence. In June 2025, Roberto Samcam, a retired army major turned prominent critic, was shot dead at his home in Costa Rica by an assassin posing as a delivery driver. He was one of at least four exiled opposition figures killed in Central America since 2022. Many more have survived attempts on their lives.

The regime has also stripped hundreds of critics of their nationality, including 222 political prisoners it expelled to the USA in 2023 and 135 it shipped to Guatemala in 2024, and made changes to the Penal Code to prosecute ‘crimes against the state’ committed abroad.

Aware that international bodies offer a route to accountability, the regime is moving to close it off. Having quit the Organization of American States in 2023, Nicaragua withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council and four other multilateral bodies in 2025. Yet some mechanisms do not need its consent. Two months after the government announced it was quitting, the Human Rights Council renewed the Group of Experts’ mandate for a further two years. An Argentine judge, acting under universal jurisdiction, has issued arrest warrants for Ortega, Murillo and other senior officials. The legal instruments exist, but the will to use them is often missing.

Democratic states have supplied little of that will. The USA does not recognise Ortega’s government, yet in September 2025 the Trump administration terminated Temporary Protected Status for Nicaraguans, asserting that the country was now safe for their return, a claim at odds with UN findings. This left thousands exposed to deportation.

Ortega has meanwhile leaned on autocratic friends, with China now his main source of funding and Russia supplying intelligence and security advice and training.

Long-term pressure needed

Ortega will have watched Venezuela closely. In 2024, Nicolás Maduro allowed the holding of an election he was sure he had won in advance, having stopped the main opposition candidate standing, only to see a little-known substitute become the catalyst for years of pent-up discontent. Scrapping elections spares Ortega that danger, at least in the short term.

Over the long term, pressure for the restoration of democracy will depend on the endurance of Nicaraguan civil society, at home and in exile, and on democratic states being willing to hold the regime to account. Neither can be taken for granted. The movement best able to sustain the fight has been driven abroad, where it also faces persecution, and the government best placed to shelter these exiles is busy sending them back home.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She is also a Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Should anyone be surprised that Israel has rebuffed Donald Trump? The unconditional support of the US and its Western allies for Israel has emboldened the rogue state. Thus, Israel continues its genocide against the Palestinians in defiance of international humanitarian law and the Genocide Convention, and despite the so-called ceasefire agreement under the Trump plan. This is the pay-back for protecting Netanyahu from his arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Anis Chowdhury

The creation of Israel in the Palestinian land was a western project. The West ignored the fate of the Palestinians and granted impunity to Israel in the guise of Israel’s right to exist. The genocidal intent of the Zionists founders of Israel was well-known. It became an open fact in 1948 when 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced and dispossessed to pave the way for the creation of the State of Israel. The Palestinians refer to this as “Nakba”, meaning catastrophe in Arabic.

Between 1947 and 1949 Zionist forces captured more than 78% of historic Palestine even though the State of Israel was supposed to get around 56% of the land under the United Nation’s plan. The Zionist forces ethnically cleansed and destroyed about 530 villages and cities, and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in a series of mass atrocities, and more than 70 massacres. In less than six months, from December 1947 to mid-May 1948, Zionist armed groups expelled about 440,000 Palestinians from 220 villages.

Since the establishment of Israel, the state has extended its systematic ethnic cleansing while the West looked the other way. Even though the Zionist project fulfilled its dream of creating “a Jewish homeland” in Palestine in 1948, the process of ethnic cleansing and displacement of Palestinians never stopped.

The West’s Frankenstein now dreams of a greater Israel from “the River to the Sea”. The Zionist Israel always finds excuses to scuttle any peace plan or ceasefire agreement. This time, Netanyahu rejected Trump’s so-called peace plan demanding that Hamas be “genuinely” disarmed first.

Trump says “the relationship is very good,” even as Netanyahu rejects Gaza peace plan. No surprise; Netanyahu’s predecessor, Ariel Sharon, former Prime Minister of Israel was reported to have said to his Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, “Don’t worry about American pressure; we control America”.

However, to be fair, Israeli sources denied that Sharon made any such comment. Nonetheless, Israel’s control over the US and its Western allies is visible to the naked eye.

The West has no clothes

The Western allies of the rogue State Israel give a lip service to the fate of the Palestinian in the guise of a so-called “Two-State solution” while takes no real actions against Israel’s continued expansion of settlement in the Occupied Palestinian Territory in defiance of the verdict of the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

On 19 July, 2024, the ICJ issued an advisory opinion declaring Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory – including the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza – illegal under international law. The court demanded that the occupation must end as rapidly as possible.

Meanwhile rising settler violence, aided by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) against the Palestinians continues unabated.

In arrogant defiance Israel’s parliament (the Knesset) voted 68 to 9 on July 18, 2024 to pass a resolution rejecting the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

Yet, there is no protest from the US and its Western allies. Even the Western countries that symbolically recognised the State of Palestine remain silent as the Frankenstein tightened its grip on its creators.

They are loud in demanding Palestinian disarmament as condition for so-called peace while the rogue State of Israel defiantly reject the Palestinian’s right to have their own sovereign state and basic human rights.

If the Palestinians are asked to disarm then the rogue state must also be asked to rescind its bill rejecting the creation of an independent Palestine. It must also dismantle its illegal settlements in the Occupied Territory– including the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza as demanded by the ICJ.

Anis Chowdhury, Emeritus Professor, Western Sydney University (Australia). He held senior UN positions in Bangkok and New York and served as Special Assistant to the Chief Advisor for Finance (with the status and rank of State Minister) in the Professor Yunus-led Interim Government. E-mail: anis.z.chowdhury@gmail.com; a.chowdhury@westernsydney.edu.au

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

I have spent my life on an island. From the granite hills of Mahé, one can watch the sun rise over an ocean that has fed, protected and defined the Seychellois people for centuries.

James Alix Michel

The horizon no longer glows only with the soft light of dawn. Across Canada, Europe and the Americas, it has glimmered this year with the harsh, reddish hue of wildfire smoke. “The Earth is burning” is no longer a slogan. It is a description of an ordinary Tuesday in Ontario, or a July afternoon in Barcelona.

Consider what has actually happened these past months. Canada has watched more than three million hectares of forest burn this year — an area roughly the size of Belgium — prompting the government to declare its highest level of national fire preparedness and to deploy its armed forces alongside thousands of firefighters. In northwestern Ontario, a single blaze, the Thunder Bay 36 fire, has become the largest ever recorded in that province’s history. Researchers who studied the season found that nearly all of that destruction, some 94 percent of it, occurred in just five weeks, as heat and drought converged.

Across the Atlantic, the story repeats with a different accent. This past June was the hottest ever recorded in western Europe, and the world’s oceans registered their warmest June surface temperatures on record, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Spain’s Fabra Observatory in Barcelona logged 40.5°C on 8 July, its hottest reading in more than a century of measurements. Germany saw 252 weather stations break all-time records. France recorded its hottest day ever, with a national average temperature of 30°C, and declared a red heat alert across 58 of its departments — nearly the entire country.

I did not grow up believing a nation the size of France could be placed, almost in its entirety, under a single heat emergency. This year, it happened.

In the Middle East the temperature this year has exceeded 52 degrees.

None of this is accidental, and none of it is isolated. It is one planet, one atmosphere, one ocean, responding as any system does when energy keeps being added to it.

I am not a scientist. But I have spent decades in rooms with scientists, diplomats, fishermen and island elders, and I have learned to translate what they know into language anyone can use. Burning oil, coal and gas fills our atmosphere with gases that trap heat close to the Earth, much as a blanket traps warmth against the body. The thicker that blanket becomes, the more aggressively a hotter atmosphere pulls moisture from soil and vegetation — what scientists call rising vapor pressure deficit, and what the rest of us might simply call atmospheric thirst. A thirsty atmosphere turns living forests into dry tinder faster than rainfall can replace what has been lost. At the same time, this extra heat is disturbing the great rivers of wind that once reliably carried cooling weather across a region and moved on. Increasingly, they stall, and heat domes settle over a country for weeks rather than days. When millions of hectares then burn, they release carbon stored for decades, adding still more heat-trapping gas to the air. Fire feeds warming, and warming feeds fire.

It is a loop that does not correct itself. We must correct it.

Small island states are not spectators to this crisis; we are its early warning system. Seychelles does not burn as Ontario or Andalusia does, but our coral reefs bleach and die in ocean heat that barely registers as news elsewhere, and our fishing communities feel shifts in current and temperature years before those shifts appear in a headline.

This is why, a decade ago, my government joined nearly two hundred nations in Paris in agreeing to hold the rise in global temperature well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and to pursue every effort to limit it to 1.5°C. That agreement entered into force in November 2016. It remains, imperfect as it is, the clearest promise the nations of the world have ever made to one another about the only atmosphere we share.

We are not keeping that promise quickly enough. Scientific trackers that once projected we would not cross 1.5°C of warming until the middle of this century now estimate, per Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, that we could cross that threshold as early as 2029.

That is not a distant date. Children born this year will not yet be teenagers when it arrives.

I refuse fatalism, because fatalism has never protected a single reef, forest or coastline. What the science asks of us is not mysterious: cut greenhouse gas emissions sharply and immediately, retire dependence on coal, oil and gas far faster than current pledges allow, and invest seriously in the resilience of communities already living through fire seasons, heatwaves and rising seas.

It also asks something specific of leadership. Every government that signed the Paris Agreement carries a responsibility to honor it not as rhetoric for a summit stage, but as a commitment kept in national budgets, energy policy and disaster preparedness. And it asks something of every citizen: to demand of our leaders the urgency the data requires, not merely the urgency that is politically convenient.

The forests burning in Canada, the heat scorching Spain and France, and the reefs bleaching in the Indian Ocean are not separate stories. They are chapters of the same story, and we are the ones still writing its ending.

The Earth is burning. Whether it keeps burning, or whether we finally act as one species sharing one planet, remains, for now, our choice to make.

The author served as President of the Republic of Seychelles from 2004 to 2016 and is a longtime advocate for ocean conservation and the blue economy.

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Increased longevity presents both new opportunities and significant challenges for individuals, families, healthcare systems, and societies. Credit: Shutterstock

By Joseph Chamie
PORTLAND, USA, Aug 10 2026 (IPS)

Upon reaching the age of 80, men and women are living longer than ever before. 

These gains in longevity among octogenarians represent a remarkable demographic achievement. The additional years of life provide new opportunities for older adults and their families while also presenting important social, economic, and healthcare challenges for societies.

In 1950, the global life expectancy at age 80 was 4.8 additional years for men and 5.3 additional years for women. Over the following decades, these figures increased steadily, reaching an estimated 7.7 years for men and 9.1 years for women in 2026. This upward trend is expected to continue, with life expectancy at age 80 projected to increase to 8.8 additional years for men and 10.1 additional years for women by 2050 (Figure 1). 

Source: United Nations.

Behind these global averages, however, lies considerable variation among countries. More developed countries, such as Japan and France, have relatively high life expectancy at age 80, with men expected to live an additional 10 years and women approximately 12 years. In contrast, less developed countries, including Nigeria, Niger, and Mali, are at the lower end of the distribution, where both men and women who reach age 80 can expect to live about 5 additional years (Figure 2).

Source: United Nations.

The proportion of the world’s population surviving to age 80 and older has increased steadily over recent decades. In 1950, approximately 0.6% of the global population was 80 years or older. By 2026, that proportion had doubled to 1.2% and is projected to increase further to 2.1% by 2050 (Table 1).

Source: United Nations.

Although octogenarians continue to represent a relatively small share of the world’s population, their numbers and proportions are increasing rapidly, reflecting continued improvements in survival and the ongoing ageing of populations worldwide. 

The proportion of octogenarians in a population varies widely across countries. The highest percentages are found in more developed countries, while the lowest are seen in less developed countries. In 2026, for example, 11% of Japan’s population and 8.1% of Italy’s population are aged 80 years and older. In contrast, the corresponding proportions are 1.1% in India and 0.3% in Nigeria.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), although genetics influence certain aspects of health among people aged 80 years and older, most differences in health outcomes are shaped by physical and social environments, as well as personal characteristics such as sex, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. 

Reaching advanced age in good health depends to a great extent on maintaining healthy habits throughout life. These include eating a balanced diet, engaging in regular physical activity, avoiding tobacco and drug use, limiting alcohol consumption, and maintaining strong social connections.

The growing prevalence of chronic diseases and the increasing demand for long-term care have important implications for governments, healthcare systems, and families. Meeting the needs of a rapidly expanding population of octogenarians will require increased investments in healthcare, long-term care services, and age-friendly communities

Together, these health-promoting behaviors help reduce the risk of chronic diseases, preserve physical and cognitive functioning, and delay the need for long-term care, thereby improving both longevity and quality of life in old age. 

However, many people in their 80s face significant challenges, including managing chronic health conditions, accessing long-term care, maintaining financial security, and coping with social isolation.

The proportion of adults aged 80 years or older living alone varies considerably across countries, reflecting differences in cultural norms, family structures, income levels, and public support systems. In many developing countries, fewer than 10% of octogenarians live alone, whereas in high-income countries the corresponding proportion typically ranges from 30% to 50%.

Older adults also frequently experience ageism, with stereotypes portraying them as frail, dependent, or a burden to society. Such attitudes can lead to discrimination and may influence public policies in ways that limit opportunities for healthy and active ageing.

Although some octogenarians remain physically and mentally capable well into their 80s, functioning at levels comparable to people decades younger, most experience some decline in physical and cognitive abilities and live with at least one chronic health condition.

The growing prevalence of chronic diseases and the increasing demand for long-term care have important implications for governments, healthcare systems, and families. Meeting the needs of a rapidly expanding population of octogenarians will require increased investments in healthcare, long-term care services, and age-friendly communities.

At the same time, caring for older adults raises important questions about the appropriate balance of responsibility between governments and families. As populations continue to age, determining how these responsibilities should be shared will become an increasingly important policy challenge. 

While governments often expect families to provide the primary care for their ageing relatives, families believe that governments should provide the financial resources, services, and the support needed to meet those care needs. This continuing debate underscores the importance of developing sustainable policies that strike an appropriate balance between public responsibility with family caregiving.

A comprehensive public health response must address the diverse experiences and needs of people aged 80 years and older. Supportive physical and social environments enable octogenarians to continue engaging in activities that are meaningful to them despite age-related declines in physical and cognitive functioning. Such environments include safe and accessible public buildings, age-friendly transportation systems, affordable housing, and community-based health and social care services. 

When adults aged 80 years and older are able to spend their later years in good health and within supportive environments, they can maintain independence, participate actively in family and community life, and enjoy a quality of life comparable to that of younger adults. In contrast, when these additional years are marked by physical frailty, cognitive impairment, and mental health challenges, the consequences extend beyond the individual to affect families, healthcare systems, and society as a whole.

Many octogenarians face complex health and lifestyle challenges arising from multiple chronic conditions, functional decline, and age-related impairments. 

Globally, many adults aged 80 years and older live with a combination of chronic physical illnesses, cognitive impairment, geriatric syndromes, and psychological changes. These often overlapping and interrelated challenges require coordinated, person-centered health and social care that emphasizes disease prevention, continuity of care, multidisciplinary collaboration, and sustained support for both older adults and their caregivers.

At age 80, the major global health challenges for both men and women include heart disease (such as heart attacks and heart failure), dementia (including Alzheimer’s disease), and geriatric syndromes. These syndromes encompass a range of age-related conditions, including frailty, osteoporosis, hearing and vision impairment, urinary incontinence, and an increased risk of falls.

Falls are among the leading causes of injury, disability, hospitalization, loss of independence, and injury-related death among older adults. Age-related loss of muscle strength and balance, vision impairment, medication side effects, cognitive decline, and neurological disorders all contribute to an elevated risk of falling.  

Although many medical conditions affect both sexes, biological differences, lifestyle factors, and women’s longer life expectancy contribute to distinct health profiles for men and women at age 80. 

For women, the principal challenges at age 80 often involve maintaining mobility, preventing fractures resulting from osteoporosis and bone fragility, and coping with social isolation. Because women generally outlive men, they are more likely to be widowed, live alone, and experience loneliness, financial insecurity, and the need for long-term support. 

In addition, women account for a larger share of dementia cases, including Alzheimer’s disease, owing in part to their greater longevity, making cognitive decline an especially important health concern in advanced age. 

Despite these serious challenges, many older adults maintain a positive outlook and a sense of humor.  One observation, often attributed to various older speakers, captures that spirit: “People tell you that you’ll lose your mind when you grow older. What they don’t tell you is that you won’t miss it very much.”

For male octogenarians, the leading health risks often include fatal acute cardiovascular events, metabolic diseases, and serious psychological crises. In many populations, men in this age group also experience higher rates of certain cancers and type 2 diabetes than women of the same age. Among the cancers most commonly diagnosed in older men are prostate and bladder cancer. 

Although depression is diagnosed more frequently in women, men aged 80 years and older have substantially higher suicide rates. These deaths often occur in the context of bereavement following the loss of a spouse, declining physical health, social isolation, chronic pain, or a diminished sense of identity and purpose associated with major life transitions.

Another important issue facing many people aged 80 years and older is their ability to continue driving. Most countries do not impose a mandatory upper age limit for driving. Instead, they require periodic medical evaluations, vision testing, and more frequent driver’s license renewals to determine whether older adults remain fit to drive safely. These measures seek to balance the independence and mobility that driving provides with the need to protect public safety.

A notable exception to this global practice is Peru, where individuals aged 80 years and older are no longer permitted to renew a driver’s license. The policy was introduced as part of the government’s efforts to reduce traffic accidents, reflecting concerns about age-related declines in vision, hearing, reaction time, cognitive function, and physical mobility.

Reaching the age of 80 and living longer than previous generations is a remarkable demographic achievement. It reflects substantial advances in medicine, public health, nutrition, education, and living standards.  

At the same time, increased longevity presents both new opportunities and significant challenges for individuals, families, healthcare systems, and societies.

Meeting those challenges will require policies and programs that promote healthy ageing, support independence, expand access to high-quality health and long-term care, and enhance the quality of life for the growing population of octogenarians.

Many octogenarians worry about losing their independence, developing a chronic illness, becoming a burden to their families, or dying alone. Concerns about the dying process can often be eased when individuals receive compassionate care, remain as comfortable as possible, and have their preferences for medical treatment and end-of-life care respected.  

For many octogenarians, however, death gradually becomes less frightening as it draws nearer. Having experienced the loss of spouses, relatives, friends, and contemporaries, many come to view death not as an unfathomable mystery but as a natural and inevitable part of life. 

This perspective often fosters a deeper acceptance of mortality. Rather than dwelling on fear, many choose to focus on the present, cherish meaningful relationships, and appreciate the time that remains. For some, this acceptance brings a greater sense of gratitude, purpose and peace as they approach life’s natural conclusion. 

Joseph Chamie is a consulting demographer, a former director of the United Nations Population Division, and author of many publications on population issues. 

UN Indonesia Solar power is widely used on the islands of Java, Madura, and Bali. Credit: UN News

By Delia Paul
MELBOURNE, Australia, Aug 10 2026 (IPS)

In much of the Asia-Pacific region, energy is a success story. Electricity access has greatly increased and the use of clean cooking fuels is now widespread. The region has kept pace with the rest of the world in adopting renewable energy. Many countries have made energy efficiency gains; the Republic of Korea is one of those in the lead worldwide. Progress has continued even in the face of recent energy crises sparked by the war in Ukraine and conflict over the Strait of Hormuz.

Yet, this year’s High Level Political Forum on sustainable development (IHLPF) in New York— a yearly event to review progress on the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) —sounded some warning bells.

With SDG 7 on energy, the international community agreed to ensure universal access to affordable, reliable and modern energy services. Clean cooking fuels are part of that transition. SDG 7 also set targets to increase substantially the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix, and double the rate of improvement in energy efficiency. On all these measures, Asia-Pacific countries have done well. This year’s HLPF, however, raised some important questions.

Firstly, success is a matter of definition. In 2010, Central and South Asian countries accounted for 36 per cent of the world’s electricity-access deficit; by 2024, that proportion had shrunk to just 3 per cent, a turnaround that the UN’s latest report of progress on SDG 7 attributes to rapid grid expansion, regional power market integration, and rising incomes. That achievement is nuanced, however, when we consider the livelihood dimension, where many countries still face challenges especially in rural areas.

Vijay Modi, a professor at Columbia University and director of its Laboratory for Sustainable Energy Solutions, addressing HLPF delegates on the first day of the talks, noted that access is not the same as affordability. Affordable energy is needed, for example, to run the water pumps for farm irrigation, and to light shops that may want to extend their opening hours — aspects of electricity access that are missed, if focusing only on household-level energy services.

Secondly, generalised statistics can mask the true scale of the challenge that still remains. The share of people using clean fuels and technologies for cooking has nearly doubled across most of Asia since 2010. Central, South, East and Southeast Asian countries have done especially well: India alone is responsible for about 40 percent of the worldwide reduction in the clean-cooking access deficit, China for roughly 30 percent, and Indonesia for about 10 percent.

In terms of percentage points, this all looks great. In terms of absolute numbers, though, India still has the largest numbers of people without access to electricity services and clean cooking fuels; China ranks third in the world; Indonesia ranks 16th. These are countries with large populations, where a percentage point gained in access represents many more people than a percentage point gained in a smaller country. While their progress should be applauded, the challenge is far from over.

Third is the question of financing. From 2023 to 2024, international financial flows for clean energy fell in Central, South, East and Southeast Asia. That is a troubling trend, given that much remains to be done. The role of public utilities remains crucial.

In the 1990s and 2000s, Cambodia’s state utility, Electricité du Cambodge, transformed the fragmented, war-torn nation’s power grid into a unified network, partnering with independent power producers, using foreign investment to build transmission lines and power stations, and prioritising electricity connections and financing for low-income households. Such success is not a given.

Damilola Ogunbiyi, Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Sustainable Energy for All and Co-Chair of UN-Energy, reminded the HLPF that in Africa, some utilities have not achieved viability and are facing bankruptcy. “It’s about finance, at the end of the day,” she said, while highlighting that renewable energy is the least-cost pathway to meeting energy needs worldwide.

The current geopolitical situation only strengthens the case for increasing uptake of renewables and decreasing reliance on traditional fossil fuels, said Francesco La Camera, Director-General of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). This process, he noted, could be accelerated through mini-grids, peak time management (strategies to reduce and shift electricity consumption away from peak demand times), and removal of trade barriers to renewable energy technologies. Some of this is already happening in Asia, but with just four years to go until the 2030 deadline for achieving the SDGs, UN monitoring shows that progress is insufficient.

Globally, four structural trends are holding back progress. They are explained in the 2026 UN report, “Tracking SDG 7: The Energy Progress Report.” Progress on reducing energy intensity has mainly been achieved in industry, and is now slowing. Energy efficiency standards don’t necessarily match the technology available in the marketplace. Demand for air conditioning has increased, pushing up electricity demand. Growth in electricity demand now outstrips the supply of renewable energy that is actually available. Tackling just one of these barriers — let’s say energy intensity, for example — would require tripling the rate of progress in the next four years.

For now, the UN has launched a new work programme to accelerate action leading up to the 2030 deadline for the SDGs. On the current rate of progress, the world will probably not meet all the SDG 7 targets. But, given the energy gains already made in this region, Asia-Pacific countries may do better than others.

Dr Delia Paul is an associate of the International Institute for Sustainable Development, and is affiliated with Monash University’s Global Peace and Security research hub in Australia.

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Young people facing Hiroshima’s Atomic Bomb Dome as storm clouds give way to morning light—a metaphor for humanity’s choice between living under the nuclear shadow and building a world without nuclear weapons. Credit: INPS Japan

By Katsuhiro Asagiri
HIROSHIMA, Japan, Aug 7 2026 (IPS)

This year’s Hiroshima Peace Declaration did not begin with words of remembrance alone. It opened instead with what the declaration called “military invasions using nuclear weapons as tools of intimidation,” “imperious actions by major powers in violation of international law,” and the failure of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT, Review Conference — for the third consecutive time — to adopt a final document.

The order was deliberate. The catastrophe of 81 years ago is not a memory sealed off in the past. It is directly connected to a present in which nuclear weapons are once again invoked as a means of projecting state power and coercing adversaries.

Hiroshima’s mayor, Kazumi Matsui, described a world in which distrust breeds retaliation, and retaliation is used to justify further violence. Such cycles, he warned, could ultimately result in “another Hiroshima or Nagasaki.”

At the same ceremony, Izumi Nakamitsu, the U.N. under-secretary-general and high representative for disarmament affairs, delivered a message from Secretary-General António Guterres that distilled the warning into a single question: What has humanity learned from Hiroshima? Will it choose a peaceful future, or continue to live under the shadow of nuclear annihilation?

This was not a rhetorical flourish reserved for a commemorative ceremony. What followed was an account of a world in which decades of nuclear arms reductions are being reversed, the norm against nuclear testing is under strain, military spending is surging and nuclear threats are increasingly used as instruments of intimidation.

One message spoke through the memories of survivors; the other through the crisis confronting the international system. But both arrived at the same place. Will the world continue to call an order sustained by fear “security”? Or will it restore dialogue, diplomacy, international law and trust — all of them slow and difficult — to the center of security policy?

The remains of the Prefectural Industry Promotion Building, after the dropping of the atomic bomb, in Hiroshima, Japan. This site was later preserved as a monument. Credit: UN Photo/DB

At the heart of the Peace Declaration was not nuclear strategy, but human experience.

It recalled a woman who could never forget her sister, whose skin had peeled away and whose face had been horribly disfigured by the bombing. It spoke of another woman who was exposed to the bomb at the age of 3, suffered repeated illnesses and lived in fear of what disease might strike next.

And there was a man who survived the bombing at 9. Watching civilians die in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he told young people that building a world without conflict must begin with overcoming the impulse toward conflict within themselves and making an effort to understand the perspectives of others.

Credit: UN photo

Such testimony is a reminder that the damage caused by nuclear weapons does not end with the blast. Radiation-related illness, the loss of family, discrimination and anxiety about the future can shape a life for decades. When strategists calculate the value of possessing nuclear weapons, it is this long span of human time that most easily disappears from view.

Mr. Guterres’s message noted that as the number of hibakusha, the atomic bomb survivors, declines, the importance of their words only grows. Their testimony is more than a record of tragedy. It is evidence that brings the abstract concept of nuclear deterrence back to the reality of human bodies and human lives.

Mr. Matsui called on citizens and young people to build connections across national borders with those who hold different values. Mr. Guterres urged governments to choose dialogue over division and cooperation over confrontation. The proposals may appear to operate on different scales, but they share a premise: Distrust among nations deepens when societies lose the capacity to understand those they see as different.

The Nuclear “Bargain” Nations Can No Longer Agree On

To understand the present crisis, it is necessary to examine the bargain on which the NPT rests.

Non-nuclear-weapon states agree not to acquire nuclear arms. Nuclear-weapon states undertake to pursue nuclear disarmament in good faith. And all parties retain the right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy under international safeguards. The treaty bound these three commitments together as a single grand bargain.

The framework was never complete. India, Pakistan and Israel remain outside the treaty, while North Korea has declared its withdrawal. Nor have the nuclear-weapon states recognized by the treaty fully honored their longstanding commitment to disarm.

NPT under pressure. Credit: INPS Japan

One dispute over the final document concerned language stating that Iran must not seek nuclear weapons. The United States and others pressed for stronger wording on Iran’s uranium enrichment and its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA. Iran objected to being singled out and argued that attacks by the United States and Israel on its nuclear facilities had themselves damaged international law and the nonproliferation regime.

But Iran was not the sole cause of the breakdown. It was where a deeper fracture came to the surface.

In the war in Ukraine, the safety of nuclear-related sites, including the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, has repeatedly been placed at risk. In the Middle East, a zone free of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, first promised in 1995, has still not been established. And under AUKUS, the security partnership among Australia, Britain and the United States, the planned transfer of nuclear-powered submarine technology to a non-nuclear-weapon state has raised questions about safeguards and the precedent it may set.

Meanwhile, China is expanding its nuclear forces, arms control between the United States and Russia is receding, and all nine nuclear-armed states are modernizing their arsenals. If nuclear powers and their allies place ever greater importance on deterrence while demanding restraint only from non-nuclear states, suspicion will inevitably grow that the treaty is less a mechanism for preventing proliferation than a system for preserving the privileges of those that already possess the bomb.

The NPT Review Conference has now failed to agree on a final document three times in succession — in 2015, 2022 and 2026. The last consensus was reached in 2010.

The treaty will not disappear tomorrow, and there is no alternative framework with anything close to its near-universal membership. But institutions do not always collapse overnight. Each time promises are deferred, criticism of violations is applied selectively and a conference ends without agreement, a little more faith is lost in the proposition that states are safer when they abide by the system.

As Ms. Nakamitsu observed after the Review Conference, nonproliferation and disarmament are two sides of the same coin. Nuclear-weapon states cannot indefinitely demand that others forgo nuclear arms while failing to meet their own obligations under Article VI of the NPT. The problem is not the wording of the treaty. It is whether governments still believe in the bargain it represents.

An AI-generated conceptual illustration shows opposing rows of strategic missile launchers beyond a broken restraint, symbolizing the collapse of binding arms-control limits and a renewed nuclear arms race in which each side’s pursuit of security increases the danger for all. Credit: Katsuhiro Asagiri

The signs of eroding trust extend far beyond the conference room.

The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, which imposed verifiable limits on the strategic nuclear forces of the United States and Russia, expired on Feb. 5, 2026. For the first time in more than half a century, the strategic arsenals of the two countries that possess most of the world’s nuclear weapons are no longer subject to legally binding limits.

The norm against nuclear testing is also under pressure. In 2025, the U.S. president spoke of resuming “testing,” without making clear whether he meant nuclear explosive tests or missile trials. Against that backdrop, the United States became the only country to vote against a draft resolution in the U.N. General Assembly’s First Committee calling for the entry into force of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, or CTBT. Even if no explosive test takes place, ambiguity from a major power about its support for a longstanding norm can give other countries a pretext to weaken it in turn.

Military spending is climbing as well. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, or SIPRI, global military expenditure reached a record $2.887 trillion in 2025, marking an 11th consecutive annual increase in real terms. Spending rose by 14 percent in Europe and by 8.1 percent in Asia and Oceania.

Every government has an explanation: Russia’s invasion, China’s rise, uncertainty about alliance commitments, preparations for regional conflict. Considered separately, each can be understood as a response to a security concern. But one country’s defense appears to another as a threat. One side arms in response to the other, prompting the other to build up again. This is the security dilemma: Actions taken in the name of safety can make the system as a whole more dangerous.

Supporters of nuclear deterrence point to the fact that nuclear weapons have not been used in war since Hiroshima and Nagasaki as evidence that deterrence works. Yet there have also been numerous episodes in which false alarms, equipment failures, misread intelligence or errors of judgment brought the world dangerously close to nuclear war.

At a discussion held alongside the 2026 NPT Review Conference, the lesson was expressed in a stark phrase: “Luck is not a security strategy.” Nuclear deterrence requires every future leader, every intelligence assessment and every communications system to function correctly in every crisis. As artificial intelligence is incorporated into warning and command-and-control systems, faster decision-making could also leave less time to recognize and correct a mistake.

Whether nuclear deterrence played a role in the past and whether it can remain safe indefinitely are not the same question.

What the Ban Treaty Can Do — and What It Cannot

The 2nd meeting of state parties to TPNW toook place at the United Nations Headquarters in New York between 27 November and 1 December in 2023. Credit: Katsuhiro Asagiri, President of INPS Japan.

Tonga’s accession in July 2026 brought to 100 the number of countries that have signed, ratified or acceded to the treaty. Of these, 75 are states parties.

The TPNW comprehensively prohibits the development, testing, production, possession, use and threat of use of nuclear weapons. It also requires states parties to assist people harmed by nuclear weapons use and testing and to remediate contaminated environments.

That is where it differs from the NPT. While the NPT primarily manages the relationship between nuclear-weapon and non-nuclear-weapon states, the TPNW treats nuclear weapons themselves as a humanitarian issue and a matter of international law. It asks not who should be permitted to possess nuclear arms, but whether possessing them can be considered acceptable at all.

The Review Conference is expected to focus on a political declaration rejecting nuclear use and threats of use without exception; progress in carrying out the 2022 Vienna Action Plan; the work of the Scientific Advisory Group; mechanisms for victim assistance and environmental remediation; the designation of an international authority to verify the elimination of nuclear weapons; and the further universalization of the treaty.

Particular attention will fall on a proposed international trust fund for victim assistance and environmental remediation. The effects of nuclear weapons use and testing are still felt in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan, in the Marshall Islands and across other Pacific islands. If the fund takes shape, disarmament will no longer be only a negotiation over future numbers of nuclear warheads. It will also become a question of nuclear justice: Who bears responsibility for harm already done?

The TPNW has an obvious limitation. No nuclear-armed state has joined it, and the treaty alone cannot compel the elimination of nuclear warheads. Ignoring that fact would obscure the distance between establishing a prohibition and achieving actual disarmament.

But three consecutive failures at NPT Review Conferences have also shown that waiting for agreement among the nuclear powers will not produce progress on its own. The NPT can preserve the legal obligation to disarm, while the TPNW develops the norm of prohibition and practical approaches to victim assistance, environmental remediation and verification. The two treaties can be treated not as rivals, but as complementary frameworks, each addressing gaps left by the other.

Where Does Japan Stand?

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, signed 20 September 2017 by 50 United Nations member states. Credit: UN Photo / Paulo Filgueiras

Attending as an observer would not commit Japan to immediate accession. Some NATO countries that rely on the U.S. nuclear deterrent have attended previous meetings of states parties after explicitly setting out their differences with the treaty.

Japan’s participation would expose the tension between its reliance on nuclear deterrence and its identity as the only country to have suffered atomic bombings in war. But it would also allow Japan to draw on its extensive experience in medical care for survivors, research on the effects of radiation, preservation of testimony, victim assistance, environmental remediation and disarmament education to help build practical mechanisms.

For years, the Japanese government has described its role as a “bridge” between nuclear-weapon and non-nuclear-weapon states. But building a bridge requires listening, in the same room, to what each side fears and what each considers unjust. That claim loses credibility if Japan remains anchored to only one bank.

Rethinking What We Call “Reality”

Both messages called on citizens to act because nuclear policy is not shaped by governments and experts alone.

Through education, journalism, elections, culture, investment and everyday language, societies learn to regard nuclear weapons either as a guarantee of security or as an unacceptable humanitarian threat. That shared understanding, in turn, defines the range of policies a government believes it can pursue.

A future lived under the shadow of nuclear fear may not be chosen all at once by a single leader. It can also be chosen through an accumulation of small acts of acceptance: tolerating nuclear threats when they come from one’s own side, equating military expansion with security, and confining the testimony of atomic bomb survivors and nuclear test victims to commemorative anniversaries.

A world without nuclear weapons will not be achieved at a single conference, either. It will require people to learn what happened in the atomic bombings and nuclear tests; speak with those who hold different views; reject nuclear threats whether they come from an ally or an adversary; press governments to fulfill their disarmament obligations and attend the TPNW conference; and support victims and disarmament education. Each step may be modest. Each can also help change the standards by which society judges nuclear weapons.

What Hiroshima offered the world this year was not an optimistic prediction. It was a choice.

A future in which humanity continues to balance one nuclear terror against another — or a future in which nations build a common security that no longer requires nuclear weapons.

No one needs to be an expert to answer that question, and no one needs to wait for a government’s permission. Can security that depends on the threat of incinerating cities truly be called security? Asking ourselves that question is the first political act.

This article is brought to you by INPS Japan in collaboration with Soka Gakkai International in consultative status with UN ECOSOC.

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Excerpt:

Burkina Faso’s junta leader Captain Ibrahim Traoré attends a meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Moscow on 10 May 2025. Credit: Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP

By Andrew Firmin
LONDON, Aug 7 2026 (IPS)

Burkina Faso’s charismatic young military leader, army captain Ibrahim Traoré, has stopped pretending. In April, he declared that people should ‘forget about the question of democracy’ because ‘democracy isn’t for us’. When Traoré seized power in September 2022, ousting a leader who’d staged a coup earlier that year, he promised elections by June 2024. The junta broke that pledge, pushing any transition back to 2029. Now Traoré has confirmed he has no intention of restoring democracy. Instead, Burkina Faso’s military junta is tightening its repression, while working with neighbouring states to internationalise its dangerously undemocratic model.

Crackdown intensifies

Repression has unfolded in a context of jihadist insurgency. Frustration with the democratically elected government’s security failures helped fuel the conditions that led to military rule, but the army hasn’t turned things around. The insurgency has grown, and civilians are paying the price. All sides are accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes, and since the coup, there’s evidence that Burkina Faso’s armed forces and allied militias have increasingly targeted civilians, particularly members of the Fulani ethnic group.

A military seen to be failing against the insurgency and killing civilians would lose any claims to legitimacy. That makes the junta determined to control the narrative, silence dissent and crush any perceived challenge to its power.

Traoré backs his anti-democratic rhetoric with actions. In January, the government dissolved all political parties, claiming they sowed division and weakened the social fabric. The junta is also targeting civil society organisations (CSOs). In recent months, authorities have suspended over a thousand organisations. In April, the government dissolved 118 CSOs, citing non-compliance with a July 2025 law that imposed strict and onerous registration, compliance and reporting requirements. The law supposedly gave CSOs a year to comply, but the government dissolved them before the deadline expired. It targeted human rights organisations such as the African Meeting for the Defence of Human Rights, the Burkinabè Coalition for Women’s Rights and Christian Action for the Abolition of Torture.

Religious associations and student groups have fared little better. Association As Salam and the Coordination of Young Muslims of Burkina have no explicit human rights focus, but authorities have suspended both for alleged public disorder and activities said to fall outside their stated purpose. In May, the government suspended the General Student Union of Burkina Faso, the country’s biggest student group, after it issued a statement criticising the government’s security record, which the government claimed glorified terrorism.

Authorities have suspended several media outlets, typically over their reporting on the security situation. In May, the state media regulator indefinitely suspended French TV channel TV5 Monde, accusing it of siding with terrorist groups.

Anybody who speaks out risks arrest, detention, enforced disappearance, forced conscription into the armed forces and torture. Burkina Faso’s LGBTQI+ people are particularly exposed, since in 2025 the junta criminalised same-sex relations, with jail sentences of up to five years. The government has also granted itself the power to strip citizenship from anyone deemed to be acting against the national interest. Last December, repression took an even more ominous turn when the junta announced its intention to reinstate the death penalty.

Due to these actions, Burkina Faso has recently been added to the CIVICUS Monitor Watchlist, which identifies countries where a severe deterioration in the quality of civic space is taking place.

Repressive alliance

Burkina Faso isn’t working alone. Under Traoré, it has forged close relations with two neighbouring military regimes, Mali and Niger. Together, they’re promoting a model that rejects democracy and international scrutiny. In January 2025, they completed their joint withdrawal from the key regional organisation, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), a year after forming their rival Alliance of Sahel States. The move was clearly a response to ECOWAS pressure to restore civilian rule.

The three states have now formally begun the process to leave the International Criminal Court (ICC). They’ve denounced the court as a ‘tool of neocolonial oppression’ and promised to set up an alternative, although any body they create is unlikely to retain the ICC’s power to issue arrest warrants against sitting heads of state and other senior figures. For survivors of human rights atrocities, withdrawal from the ICC and the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice removes vital potential routes to justice.

In February, Burkina Faso suspended the UN Human Rights Office, which had operated in the country since 2019, in retaliation for a statement by UN human rights chief Volker Türk urging the junta to reverse its ban on political parties and open up civic space. The UN has now concluded it has no choice but to close its office.

These moves shield military leaders and security forces from external accountability. They’re part of a wider realignment that has seen Burkina Faso and its allies turn away from former colonial power France and other democratic states and towards Russia, a partner with no interest in human rights. Burkina Faso’s relations with Russia have extended beyond military cooperation to stronger economic ties. Last year the two countries signed a gold-mining deal.

Even as he rejects international scrutiny, Traoré has cultivated a global following. Through adept use of social media and a steady stream of disinformation, he casts himself as a pan-African leader in the mould of liberation-era icons such as Thomas Sankara, Burkina Faso’s revolutionary former president. His message taps into real anger about colonialism and the power imbalances in relations with western states.

But the people whose rights he tramples aren’t westerners. The civilians being slaughtered by the army and the activists and journalists being silenced are Burkinabe people. There’s nothing un-African about democratic freedoms, and nothing pan-African about a leader who denies them. African democracies have the most to lose if Traoré’s model spreads, and are the most able to challenge it. They should refuse to normalise his narrative and press him to restore fundamental freedoms, rebuild a path to democratic rule and recognise the value of international accountability.

Andrew Firmin is CIVICUS Editor-in-Chief, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Action Against Hunger holds a commemoration event for the 17 staff members killed in Muttur, Sri Lanka on August 4th, 2006. Credit: Action Against Hunger

By Rotimy Djossaya
NAIROBI, Kenya, Aug 7 2026 (IPS)

This summer, an ambush on a marked humanitarian convoy in Duk County, South Sudan, left 17 dead and five injured. While the UN called for an immediate investigation, history suggests the victims’ families will wait indefinitely for answers.

We suspended field movements in the area pending a security review, which means communities already facing crisis levels of hunger lost access to life-saving assistance, at least temporarily.

The emblem on a vehicle or a vest once offered protection: a shared understanding, codified in international law, that those delivering food, water, medical care and other basic relief would not be targets of violence. That understanding is breaking down.

In the past three years, more than 1,000 humanitarian workers have been killed, most notably in Gaza, Sudan, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Worryingly, 2024 was the worst year on record with 383 aid workers killed worldwide. That’s more than one each day.

This year, the recent ambush brought the toll to 29 in South Sudan alone — and it is only August. Roughly 90% of those attacked are local and national staff, the people furthest from headlines and closest to the danger.

Twenty years ago this month, seventeen of our colleagues were executed in our office in Muttur, Sri Lanka, wearing shirts that clearly identified them as humanitarian aid workers. It remains one of the deadliest attacks of its kind. Two decades later, despite evidence pointing to the likely responsibility of state security forces, no one has been held accountable. We are still calling for a new, independent investigation.

Rotimy Djossaya, Chief Impact Officer for Action Against Hunger

There is a framework for addressing this. In 2024, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2730, which calls on States to respect and protect United Nations and humanitarian personnel in accordance with their obligations under international law. Last year saw the introduction of the Declaration for the Protection of Humanitarian Personnel, a commitment to uphold international humanitarian law, prevent attacks, and pursue accountability. Over 110 countries have signed on, from every region and political tradition. While the issue still generates broad agreement, it is increasingly polarized, and the declaration’s enforcement is weak.

When a marked humanitarian vehicle is attacked with impunity, the international laws designed to protect humanity become nothing more than abstract targets.

The recent cuts to international aid budgets make a challenging situation even harder. Although it’s not clear that recent funding cuts led directly to any violence, it’s evident that NGOs have far less money to spend on security response management. The 2025 Aid Worker Security Report documented what the funding collapse means for safety: organizations are cutting security positions, communications, and risk analysis, with the danger falling overwhelmingly on local organizations.

In principle, localization is smart, and the humanitarian reset is a chance to build a system that is locally led, globally supported, and more efficient. But it only works if resources move with the risk. Local NGOs are routinely excluded from security funding, training, and data-sharing. They are expected to work in the world’s most dangerous places without the protections international agencies take for granted. They face a difficult choice: abandon some of the people and places they serve or accept greater risk to the safety of their staff.

The aid workers this summer were traveling in a marked humanitarian convoy. Five of them were staff of our local partner, the John Dau Foundation, an organization founded by one of the “lost boys” of South Sudan, who fled unimaginable violence as a child and answered it by building clinics and feeding children in the very county where this attack took place. That people who devoted their lives to healing were met with this violence shows how badly protections for humanitarian workers have eroded. The markings on their vehicle were supposed to shield them, but they did not.

As we mark World Humanitarian Day on August 19 and approach the UN General Assembly in September, the global community and member states must act. They must mandate and fund security allocations directly for local partners, insist on independent investigations for harmed personnel, and enforce UN Security Council Resolution 2730. Commitments on paper only protect lives when perpetrators face consequences. Those who step into the crossfire to feed the world’s forgotten children should not have to pay for that humanity with their lives.

Together, let’s honor those who have served, stand with those who continue to serve, and act for humanity.

Rotimy Djossaya is, Chief Impact Officer at Action Against Hunger.

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Woman milks a cow in northern Mongolia. Credit by Katiekk, Shutterstock

By Solange Bandiaky-Badji
WASHINGTON DC, Aug 6 2026 (IPS)

This is supposed to be the year the world finally sees and recognizes pastoralists. The United Nations has designated 2026 as the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists, bringing long-overdue attention to communities who have sustained some of the world’s most fragile and important landscapes for generations.

Yet right now, the world is on fire… quite literally. All eyes are on the wildfires in France, Spain, and Canada. California is coming up on wildfire season. And scientists are predicting the strongest El Niño in history.

As climate-fueled disasters become more frequent and severe, now is an important moment to learn from pastoralists, whose traditional knowledge, adaptive land management practices, and deep understanding of living with climate variability have helped sustain people and landscapes through centuries of environmental change.

In August, governments will gather in Mongolia for COP17 of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD COP17), where rangelands, land degradation and climate resilience will be central to the global agenda.

This will be the first UNCCD COP since the e.stablishment of the Caucus of Indigenous Peoples and the Caucus of Local Communities—hard-won victories at COP16—with “Land and People Day and tenure rights included formally on the COP17 agenda.

Dr. Solange Bandiaky-Badji is Coordinator and President of the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI)

Yet the scale of what is at stake is enormous. Rangelands cover more of the Earth’s surface than any other land use type, and up to 500 million people directly rely on pastoralism for their livelihoods. These lands are central to food security, biodiversity, climate resilience, and the survival of communities across Africa, Asia, Latin America and beyond. Yet pastoralists remain among the least protected and understood land stewards in the world.

This year of recognition must become more than a symbolic milestone. Unless governments and institutions use this moment to move from visibility to rights, pastoralists will continue to be praised in speeches while being pushed further to the margins in law, policy and investment.

Resilience Is Not Invulnerability

Pastoralists are incredibly resilient. Across drylands, savannahs, mountains and rangelands, they have adapted to shifting seasons, scarce water, and fragile ecosystems through sophisticated systems of mobility, customary governance, and ecological knowledge. Their way of life is one of the world’s most climate-adapted livelihood systems. But resilience should not be confused with invulnerability.

At a New York Climate Week event last year focused on Indigenous pastoralist knowledge and nature-based solutions, pastoralist leaders described the reality their communities face every day. One speaker from the Sahel spoke of droughts, severe flooding and wildfires that continue to destroy livelihoods and cost lives. She recalled stories from her grandmother about struggling to find even a grain to eat in order to survive and warned that extreme weather is threatening their lives.

While Climate change is intensifying the pressures on lands and livelihoods that were already under strain, it is only part of the story. Pastoralists are also being squeezed by policies and development models that misunderstand and overlook how their systems work and focus on a narrative that pastoralists are a threat to ecosystems. Their livelihoods depend on mobility, but many legal frameworks are built around fixed land ownership and permanent settlement. Their governance systems are collective and customary, but many governments recognize only formal administrative structures. Their territories include grazing corridors, water points and seasonal routes, but these are rarely treated as essential infrastructure. Even where policies exist focusing on pastoralism, they often do so from restrictive approaches that only center pastoralists as part of a chain of production or tourism exploitation.

The Gap Between Recognition and Rights

A recent analysis by the Rights and Resources Initiative across Kenya, Niger, Tanzania, Mongolia, Nepal, Bolivia and Peru found a persistent gap between recognition on paper and protection in practice. While governments may acknowledge pastoralist land access in some form, mobility—the foundation of pastoralist livelihoods—is rarely protected in law. Among the countries studied, Niger stands out as the lone exception explicitly recognizing mobility as a fundamental right. The legal gap among the rest of the countries has real consequences.

Across regions, rangelands are being fragmented by agricultural expansion, infrastructure projects, extractive industries, conservation restrictions, carbon initiatives and green energy projects. These pressures are often presented as development or climate solutions. But when they are imposed without pastoralists’ full participation and consent, they deepen inequality, fuel conflict and weaken the very systems that have protected rangelands for generations.

Invisible in Data, Invisible in Policy

That exclusion is also statistical. Pastoralists are too often missing from the data systems that shape national priorities, development financing and climate policy. When governments do not accurately count pastoralist communities, map their mobility routes, measure their economic contributions, or document the pressures they face, their needs and contributions remain invisible. When communities are invisible in the data, they are often invisible in budgets, laws and global commitments.

This is especially alarming given the scale of pastoralists’ contributions. In Africa, pastoralists produce much of the continent’s milk and a significant share of its meat. They sustain local markets, support rural economies, manage vast rangelands and carry knowledge that is essential to climate resilience and biodiversity protection. Yet their contributions are rarely matched by legal protection, public investment or meaningful political representation.

Women face even greater barriers. Pastoralist women are central to livestock economies, food systems, households and community resilience. But they are often excluded from land ownership, mobility rights, leadership and formal decision-making. Any serious effort to strengthen pastoralist systems must address women’s rights directly, not as an afterthought.

Tenure Redefined

At COP17, land tenure returns to the agenda as a standing policy item, carried forward from previous sessions alongside rangelands and pastoralists. That is progress. But tenure conceived as titles, boundaries and fixed parcels cannot secure people whose security depends on movement. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants (UNDROP) already names transhumant, nomadic and semi-nomadic communities as rights holders and requires states to protect their land rights, an obligation that cannot be met by extending sedentary tenure models to mobile peoples. Pastoralist tenure must be redefined: adaptive, embedding mobility, recognizing shared use, seasonal occupation and overlapping claims and anchored in customary governance. For pastoralists, secure tenure is flexible tenure.

The Solutions Are Clear

The good news is that pastoralists are not waiting for the world to act on their behalf. They are organizing. There is a growing movement across Africa, Asia and Latin America. They may be communities separated by continents and colonial borders, but they are connected by shared histories, livelihoods and struggles.

First, governments must recognize pastoral mobility as a legal right. Movement is not a weakness of pastoralist systems; it is what allows communities to manage climate variability, protect ecosystems and sustain livestock in changing conditions.

Second, states must protect the physical infrastructure of pastoralism, including grazing corridors, water points, dry season reserves and seasonal migration routes. These are as essential to pastoral economies as roads and ports are to national economies.

Third, customary governance systems must be legally recognized and supported. Pastoralist communities have long managed land, water and conflict through local institutions that are adapted to their realities. Replacing these systems with rigid, top-down frameworks weaken both rights and resilience.

Fourth, pastoralist women must have equal rights to land, mobility, resources and leadership. Climate resilience cannot be built while half the community is excluded from decisions that affect them and shape our collective future.

Finally, climate finance, conservation funding and development investments must reach pastoralist communities directly and respect their rights. Projects that restrict access to land without consent or compensation undermine both livelihoods and global environmental goals.

COP17 in Mongolia is an opportunity to turn this year of recognition into a year of action. Governments should arrive prepared not only to discuss rangelands, but to listen to the people who know them best. Pastoralists must be at the table as rightsholders, experts and partners.

The world cannot meet its goals on climate resilience, food security, biodiversity or land restoration while ignoring the communities already holding these systems together.

This is the year of pastoralists. Now it must become the year the world finally recognizes their rights.

Dr. Solange Bandiaky-Badji, is President and Coordinator, Rights and Resources Initiative

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Workers are patrolling in a wind power plant on Tan Thanh beach, Go Cong city of Viet Nam. Countries in Asia and the Pacific are moving towards green transitions in the wake of higher oil prices. Credit: Unsplash/Thompson Le

By Michał Podolski
BANGKOK, Thailand, Aug 5 2026 (IPS)

Inaction and maintaining the status quo of fossil fuel dependence carry significant costs. The recent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, for instance, caused enormous losses to the global economy, with many Asia-Pacific countries bearing disproportionately larger adverse impacts. Had these economies had a more diversified energy mix, they would have benefited from such resilience under current circumstances.

Green transition, however, comes at a significant cost – investment in environmental sustainability. This investment brings tangible returns and benefits, such as cleaner air, better health, a vibrant natural environment or reduced negative climate impacts. What is the overall balance of these costs and benefits, opportunities seized or lost, innovation, or status quo maintenance?

This overall balance amounts to decisions for a faster or slower shift towards environmental sustainability and green transition. Each carries fiscal, investment and financing consequences with differing socioeconomic outcomes. Overall, because of these countless dimensions, decision-making for green transition is inherently complex. In principle, humanity has never undertaken a green transition before and lacks established blueprints.

ESCAP’s Economic and Social Survey of Asia and the Pacific 2026 sheds light on this challenge. The report identifies decarbonisation pathways that offer lower costs and higher benefits, highlights bottlenecks that inflate expenses, clarifies current priorities, and examines socioeconomic impacts. In short, the Survey 2026 identifies cheaper options with greater impacts.

For instance, in some Asia-Pacific countries, the choices on decarbonisation are relatively straightforward. With limited fossil fuel dependence, low risks of asset stranding and minimal vested interests in coal, oil and gas industries, these economies are advancing renewable energy expansion. They are leapfrogging decarbonisation hurdles and reaping steady benefits from carbon-free energy.

However, economies heavily reliant on fossil fuels are confronting tougher dilemmas. Faster carbon withdrawal brings higher immediate costs, offset only by longer-term benefits. Labour markets face greater pressure from anticipated reskilling and green sector development. These economies face elevated risks and must proceed cautiously. Ultimately, the green transition demands strong and prosperous economies capable of delivering goods and services to build a carbon-free world.

As for labour markets, net employment effects of green transition can be positive overall, yet uneven across countries and sectors. Fossil fuel job losses, potentially abrupt ones, are often concentrated in mineral-rich areas, with knock-on effects on related industries. Historical coal phase-outs without prompt government support reveal prolonged unemployment, youth out-migration, and community decline. Older workers are particularly at risk of exiting the labour force permanently. In contrast, green jobs emerge more gradually, often elsewhere, and require different skills. This mismatch highlights the need for proactive government planning – including funded reskilling and economic diversification – to redeploy skills from declining sectors.

Inflation provides another example of dilemmas faced by policymakers that are or want to pursue green transition. Higher inflation undermines economic activity and complicates transition-oriented policymaking. For instance, green transition policies, such as carbon pricing, can gradually increase prices, and thus inflation. This can raise interest rates, hinder capital-intensive green investments and pose financial stability challenges for central banks. Economies may tolerate modest and stable inflation, but high and volatile inflation will undermine the green transition efforts.

The Survey 2026 also highlights that government interventions like subsidies can be beneficial but can also lock-in suboptimal technologies. Too much of a good thing can be harmful. Government policies should guide objectives and priorities, for example, the need for better and cheaper energy storage, and enable people and enterprises to discover the most effective solutions. Market-friendly policy tools, such as technology-neutral emission limits, clear long-term plans and streamlined permitting, are all important policy adjustments.

“Take the right decisions, allow markets to work in a fair way” was a message on climate action by the UN Secretary-General António Guterres in 2025. The Survey 2026 builds on this, emphasising that market mechanisms can drive decarbonisation by identifying the best opportunities. The report also reinforces the call for “right decisions” to ensure a just and inclusive transition.

There are often easier and harder paths to the same goal. With due regard to diverse national circumstances, Asia-Pacific economies must progressively move to a low-carbon future, while safeguarding socioeconomic well-being of their people. There is no universal set of policies, but there is one clear direction. Although some costs may seem high today, inaction would prove far more expensive. At the end, optimal paths require pragmatic, evidence-based judgement: gradual where necessary, ambitious where feasible, and always mindful of who bears today’s costs versus tomorrow’s benefits.

Michal Podolski is Associate Economic Affairs Officer, ESCAP

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Credit IMF Photo/Nicholas Karlin

By Kristalina Georgieva
WASHINGTON DC, Aug 4 2026 (IPS)

My first meeting in Buenos Aires began with an unexpected gift. Economy Minister Luis Caputo presented me with an Argentine national team jersey bearing my name and the number 10—Lionel Messi’s iconic number.

It was a fitting start to my first official visit. When Messi finally lifted the World Cup in Qatar, he was 35 years old—an age when many footballers have already retired. His triumph was the culmination of years of perseverance, setbacks, and relentless dedication. It underscored how great achievements require persistence—and can take longer than expected.

Economic transformation follows a similar path. Restoring stability is difficult. Making it endure is even harder. The greatest rewards come only after years of persistence.

That stuck with me during my visit to Argentina this week. Everywhere I went, I encountered people looking beyond today’s challenges and asking what their country could become over the next decade.

For a country that has spent much of its recent history focused on the next crisis, shifting attention to a longer horizon was, I found, to be the most encouraging sign of all.

Impressive stabilization

Only two and a half years ago, Argentina faced one of the most difficult economic moments in its modern history. The government was running constant deficits. Inflation exceeded 200 percent. The economy was contracting. Poverty had climbed above 50 percent. Families watched the value of their wages and savings fall. Businesses found it difficult to plan beyond the next few weeks.

Today, the picture is markedly different.

Argentina has delivered two consecutive years of primary fiscal surpluses for the first time in 15 years. The economy is growing. Inflation has fallen to around 30 percent. Poverty has declined. The central bank is rebuilding international reserves. Sovereign borrowing costs have fallen.

All three major credit rating agencies have upgraded the country. In addition, more than $45 billion in investment projects have already been approved under Argentina’s large investment incentive framework. The pipeline under development is more than twice that size. These achievements reflect the commitment to stability and determined policy actions by Javier Milei’s administration and, above all, the perseverance of the Argentine people.

From stability to growth and opportunities

Stabilization gives a country back something that isn’t easily measured: time. When families believe prices will remain stable, they start to save instead of simply protecting themselves against inflation. When businesses believe policies will remain predictable, they invest for years rather than months. Banks extend longer-term credit. Governments can focus on improving institutions instead of responding to the next emergency.

In other words, stability extends a country’s time horizon. I know how transformative that can be because I experienced it in my own country.

When Bulgaria suffered hyperinflation and a banking crisis in the 1990s, my mother’s lifetime savings disappeared almost overnight. I kept my own modest savings in dollars, in a tin box hidden in the cupboard. Restoring stability required difficult reforms, stronger institutions, and persistence over many years.

The results did not appear immediately. But because Bulgaria stayed the course, confidence gradually returned. Investment increased. People found work. Living standards improved. Earlier this year, Bulgaria adopted the euro—a milestone that would once have seemed impossible.

The lesson was not simply that stabilization can succeed. It was that its greatest rewards emerge only with time.

That challenge is even greater today. The global economy is becoming more uncertain. Trade patterns are shifting. Geopolitical tensions remain elevated. Artificial intelligence is reshaping industries and labor markets at remarkable speed. Capital is increasingly selective, flowing to countries that combine sound policies with predictable institutions.

In this environment, macroeconomic stability is not merely desirable—it is a prerequisite for attracting investment, creating jobs, and remaining competitive.

Unleashing potential

I saw that opportunity very clearly at the fast-developing Vaca Muerta oil and gas fields, in Neuquén province. That Argentina enjoys world-class natural resources has long been known. Yet Vaca Muerta shows that it also has talented engineers, entrepreneurs, and public and private leaders committed to developing them. And it is doing so at a moment when the world is looking for secure and reliable energy supplies.

Vaca Muerta is only one example of a broader opportunity. Mining investment is accelerating, knowledge-based services export nearly $10 billion annually, and agriculture remains among the world’s most competitive sectors. Beyond its natural resources, Argentina boasts world-class entrepreneurs, strong universities, and exceptional human talent.

The next phase is to ensure that these opportunities spread across the broader economy.

That message came through clearly in my discussions with business leaders. They welcomed the country’s renewed stability and growing investor confidence, while emphasizing the importance of reducing barriers to investment and broadening the recovery across more sectors.

It also came through in two very different conversations.

On my first morning in Buenos Aires, I met Marina, a makeup artist who kindly helped me get ready for the day ahead. She told me she works three jobs and that life remains difficult. Yet she also told me she hopes the country stays the course. Her circumstances have not changed overnight. What’s changing is her confidence that progress can last.

I later met renowned tango dancer Mora Godoy. Beyond her celebrated career, she has built a dance school and offers scholarships to young people who otherwise might never have the chance to learn.

Different stories, different professions—but both reflected the same belief that investing today can create opportunities tomorrow.

I heard that same longer-term perspective from students. Their questions were not about the next six months. They were about artificial intelligence, innovation, leadership, and Argentina’s place in the global economy. They wanted to know how their country could compete—not just next year, but over the coming decades.

Across these conversations with business leaders, workers, and students, I heard a common, encouraging message: Argentina is beginning to look beyond the next crisis to the opportunities ahead.

In the end, success will not be measured only by lower inflation, stronger reserves, or healthier public finances. It will be gauged by whether more businesses invest, small and medium-sized enterprises expand, workers find better jobs and higher wages, and more Argentines see the benefits of economic growth in their daily lives.

The next steps

That same long-term perspective guides the IMF partnership with Argentina.

Our role is to support the policies and institutions that make lasting stability possible. The government’s proposal for a stronger and more independent central bank can help ensure that progress on inflation endures. A durable fiscal responsibility framework, with clear rules and strong institutions, can help future governments preserve today’s hard-won gains. These reforms allow families to plan, businesses to borrow and invest, and governments to look beyond the next crisis.

Argentina’s economic transformation will also take time. The country has laid the foundations for a more stable future. The challenge now is to stay the course—to keep building the institutions, confidence, and opportunities that will allow today’s progress to become lasting prosperity.

Kristalina Georgieva is Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, Washington DC.

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

President Trump has blamed trade liberalisation advocated by globalists for US deindustrialisation. Instead, his own weaponisation of economic policies, instruments and institutions purport to ‘make America great again’ (MAGA).

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

While rejecting globalists’ claim that trade liberalisation enhances growth, employment and incomes for all, his own ‘America First’ policies are slowing the world economy, including the US.

Post-war trade policy
The US has dominated international relations and institutions, including multilateral economic governance, since World War Two (WW2). The US Congress rejected the 1948 Havana Charter proposing the International Trade Organisation (ITO).

Selective trade liberalisation was key to the ‘neoliberal’ Washington Consensus, which has been recommended, if not required, by multilateral economic institutions from the 1980s.

Meanwhile, the neoliberal era has been associated with slower, more volatile growth than the post-war Keynesian ‘Golden Age’ of the first quarter-century after WW2.

The West pushed for the World Trade Organization (WTO) to consolidate the international economic order on a neoliberal basis. The 1994 Marrakech Agreement establishing the WTO left little room for development policy initiatives.

For many in the West, neoliberal trade liberalisation ended with the first Trump presidency from 2017. However, the reversal had begun earlier in the 21st century, especially after the 2008-09 global (actually Western) financial crisis.

However, Trump should be acknowledged for brazenly weaponizing international trade and investment instruments against the rest of the world, including US allies.

Hegemony
Free trade advocate Jagdish Bhagwati showed that anything less than trade multilateralism, including plurilateral and bilateral free trade agreements, is sub-optimal and unfair.

Compromises, including those promoted by international financial institutions and the OECD, have, instead, strengthened US and Western hegemony.

Postwar decolonisation of Asia and Africa has seen discontent grow in multilateral institutions, prompting selective Western undermining of multilateralism after the Cold War.

Unable to ensure the WTO’s dispute settlement system consistently protects and advances its interests, the US has paralysed it by blocking key appointments since the Obama presidency.

Collective assertiveness by developing countries in multilateral fora has mitigated some adverse consequences of international economic integration under Western auspices.

Partial and uneven trade liberalisation has constrained Global South industrialisation. Recent deindustrialisation has reduced manufacturing’s share of national output in many developing countries.

Little new manufacturing capacity has developed in Africa beyond some minimal import-substituting and resource-processing activities protected by high transport costs.

Divide and rule
Economic concessions, such as trade preferences, to developing countries have been used to divide the Global South, including the ‘least developed countries’ and ‘small island developing states’, effectively weakening their collective negotiating strength.

Trade liberalisation has also reduced tariff revenue, especially important for the poorest developing countries, where it often accounted for up to half of total tax collected.

Additional taxes, typically from consumption or income, have never compensated for tariff revenue losses due to trade liberalisation. This has undermined their already weak fiscal capacities, often requiring them to borrow even more.

Promoting food agriculture in supposedly ‘land-abundant’ African countries was supposed to make them more food-secure and even export-competitive but there is no evidence this has happened.

Developing nations have long unsuccessfully asked the Global North to eliminate agricultural subsidies, tariffs, and non-tariff import barriers that protect their output.

This would make food production in developing countries more competitive. But rich countries have long insisted that developing countries must first ‘reciprocate’, e.g., by eliminating their manufacturing tariffs.

Structural adjustment has also undermined agricultural infrastructure and smallholder productivity in many developing countries. Meanwhile, lower farm subsidies in Europe have raised many food import prices in the South.

Gains from trade?
Purported gains from trade liberalisation are often either merely theoretical or one-time gains from static understandings of comparative advantage, with no cumulative potential.

Claims of gains from trade liberalisation presume internationally competitive productive and export capacities capable of generating a strong positive supply response.

Such preconditions are unlikely in most developing countries, especially the poorest, and need to be developed, typically by protecting against external market pressures.

Most studies of realistically achievable outcomes of WTO Doha Round negotiations from 2001, including those for the World Bank, projected net losses for most developing economies, except for a few Asian economies.

There is also no robust evidence of trade liberalisation significantly reducing poverty and hunger. Developing countries, especially the poorest ones and those in sub-Saharan Africa, would be worse off.

One may well ask why developing countries have to be bribed with ‘aid for trade’ if it is in their own best interests to commit to trade liberalisation, multilateral or otherwise.

Worse, trade liberalisation has made sustainable development nearly impossible by significantly reducing policy options for aspiring developmental states, especially for trade, industrial, investment and technology policies.

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Credit: Joseph Barrientos on Unsplash

By James Alix Michel
VICTORIA, Seychelles, Aug 3 2026 (IPS)

Earlier this year, I called publicly for a precautionary pause on deep-sea mining, arguing that it is not a rejection of progress, but a commitment to sound science.

I made that appeal because I believed governments meeting this year at the International Seabed Authority (ISA) would finally choose caution over haste. Watching the results emerge from Kingston, Jamaica, over these past weeks, I must admit to real disappointment.

But I want to be equally clear: disappointment is not defeat, and there is still every reason for hope.

The 31st session of the ISA concluded its work in Kingston with the Council ending two weeks of negotiations on 24 July without adopting the long-debated Mining Code. Unresolved issues, ranging from environmental safeguards and liability to inspection, compliance and benefit-sharing, remain exactly that: unresolved.

Governments including France, Costa Rica, South Africa, Mexico, Germany, Palau and Brazil rightly insisted these gaps must be closed before any commercial mining is contemplated. That the Authority could not bridge them after fifteen years of negotiation tells its own story about how far science and governance still lag behind commercial ambition.

James Alix Michel

That pressure has an external source too. The United States, which is not a party to the Law of the Sea Convention and sits outside the ISA altogether, has continued to advance its own unilateral licensing process for the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, the vast Pacific seabed that holds the largest concentration of exploration contracts on Earth. Five applications are already on record, with reports suggesting more may follow. When a single state can simply step outside a multilateral framework and issue permits for a shared global commons, it does not just threaten the ocean floor; it threatens the very idea that humanity can govern anything collectively. That, to me, is Kingston’s deeper failure: not that a code went unfinished, but that the multilateral system protecting our common heritage was tested, and did not hold as firmly as it should.

And yet.

I have spent much of my life in rooms where the odds seemed stacked against the ocean, and I have learned that setbacks in these negotiations are rarely the last word. There is real cause for hope in what else happened in Kingston.

When four deep-sea mining companies sought observer status at the Assembly, dozens of governments pushed back, and the decision was postponed rather than rushed through. Vanuatu brought forward an agenda item on “Ensuring Adequate Scientific Understanding to Support Informed Decision-Making,” precisely the argument I have been making since earlier this year: that we cannot regulate what we do not yet understand. And crucially, the Council did not simply walk away. It agreed a roadmap for further work, inviting states and observers to submit written proposals on the outstanding issues by 1 October 2026. The door to a properly safeguarded process remains open. It has not been slammed shut.

Most encouraging of all is the growing number of nations refusing to be rushed. When I first raised this call earlier this year, more than 40 countries had already backed a moratorium or precautionary pause. Today that number stands at 45, including seven Pacific nations, alongside outright bans by France and by Palau and New Caledonia within their own waters. They are joined by more than 70 companies, 82 financial institutions representing some €24 trillion in assets, and over 900 scientists from more than 70 countries, all saying the same thing: we do not yet know enough to proceed safely.

This is not an anti-mining movement. It is a pro-science movement. Nobody serious is arguing that the world will never need these minerals, or that the seabed must remain untouched forever. What I am arguing, and what the evidence increasingly supports, is that decisions with potentially irreversible consequences for ecosystems we have barely begun to map should not be made under commercial or geopolitical pressure. Scientists directly observed less than a tenth of the size of Belgium’s worth of deep seafloor before these negotiations began. This year’s IUCN Red List found that 62 percent of molluscs known only from hydrothermal vents are now at risk of extinction, many of them identified within the last decade. We are still discovering what we might destroy, and we are only beginning to understand the deep seabed’s role in storing carbon and regulating ocean chemistry.

I say this as someone who has governed a small island nation whose entire future is tied to the health of its ocean. Seychelles did not treat marine protection and economic progress as opposing forces. Through marine spatial planning protecting thirty percent of our waters, and the world’s first sovereign blue bond, we showed precaution can be financed and delivered without halting development. That experience is precisely why I believe a precautionary pause on deep-sea mining is a down payment on progress, not a brake on it.

Small island developing states cannot afford to gamble with the ocean systems that feed us and anchor our economies. I say this with humility: Seychelles has banned deep-sea mining in its own waters under our Marine Spatial Plan, yet is not among the 45 nations formally backing the international moratorium. That gap between what we protect at home and what we champion abroad is one I hope Seychelles, and others like it, will now close.

So my message to fellow leaders, particularly across Africa and the small island states that depend most on healthy oceans, is this:

Kingston’s disappointment is real, but it is not the end of the story. Forty-five nations have already shown that caution and ambition can coexist. I urge every government that has not yet done so, especially those still weighing their position ahead of the October deadline for written proposals, to add its voice to that growing coalition. This is not about obstructing progress; it is about demanding the evidence that ensures whatever progress we make does no lasting harm to the seabed we all share. I also urge regional bodies, from the African Union to Pacific and Caribbean groupings, to adopt common positions, so no single small state stands alone against powerful commercial interests.

The common heritage of humankind deserves patience as much as ambition. Kingston reminded us how much work remains. It also reminded us how many are still willing to do it.

James Alix Michel is the former President of Seychelles (2004-2016), Founder of the James Michel Foundation and the University of Seychelles, and a global advocate for the blue economy, ocean conservation and climate resilience.

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Anti-FGM activists protests outside the National Assembly in Banjul, The Gambia, on 18 March 2024, as lawmakers discuss a bill seeking to lift the ban on FGM. Credit: by Muhamadou Bittaye/AFP

By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Aug 3 2026 (IPS)

Last August, a one-month-old girl in The Gambia bled to death after being subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM), a practice that had been illegal in the country since 2015. FGM is a human rights violation, whatever the appeals to faith or tradition made in its defence, but now the Gambian Supreme Court is being asked to strike the country’s ban down. This is the second attempt in two years to make FGM legal again.

Civil society stopped it the first time. When a repeal bill reached the National Assembly in 2024, the Network Against Gender-Based Violence brought survivors to testify, lobbied legislators, ran radio programmes and obtained a ruling from Cairo’s Al-Azhar University saying that FGM is not required under Islam. The bill fell in July 2024.

The ongoing fight in The Gambia is a measure of how fragile advances in the recognition of rights are. FGM is in retreat across most of the countries where it is practised, the result of decades of campaigning by survivors and community organisations. But holding that ground is becoming harder, as the money supporting those campaigns dries up and a resurgent anti-rights movement works to recast FGM as a traditional practice under foreign attack.

A practice in retreat

Over 230 million girls and women alive today have undergone FGM, with an additional four million cut every year. But the direction of travel has changed. A 2024 UNICEF report found that half of the decline in prevalence over the past 30 years has come in the last decade, with rates among adolescent girls halved or cut by 30-plus percentage points in countries including Ethiopia, Kenya and Sierra Leone. Attitudes have shifted too. Around 400 million people in practising countries, two-thirds of the population, now say they want FGM to end.

That change has a clear source. The Joint Programme run by UNICEF and the UN Population Fund found that the sharpest reductions come where communities are supported to deliberate and then commit, publicly and collectively, to abandoning the practice. The UN channels funding and provides coordination, but the dialogues, declarations and door-to-door persuasion are the work of community activists, national organisations and survivor networks. Thanks to these civil society efforts, in 2025 alone, over 7.5 million people took part in community dialogues and over 190,000 religious leaders and community influencers publicly denounced FGM.

The tools that work

Where campaigners have targeted the religious justifications that sustain FGM, results have followed. In 2025, Islamic scholars in Djibouti, Eritrea and Somalia issued a joint ruling saying that nothing in the faith requires FGM. Litigation has proved another powerful tool. In July 2025, the Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States found Sierra Leone in breach of its international obligations for failing to criminalise FGM, and said that, when intentionally inflicted, the practice meets the threshold of torture. In India, the Supreme Court has begun hearing whether cutting among the Dawoodi Bohra community should lose constitutional protection as an essential religious practice. And this June, Colombia became the first country in Latin America to ban FGM, driven by Emberá Indigenous women campaigning against a practice carried out in their own community.

Prohibition is now the norm rather than the exception, with Djibouti and Guinea writing bans into their constitutions in 2025. But laws alone don’t necessarily change what happens on the ground, and enforcement remains thin. Arrests and prosecutions rose sharply in 2025, yet there were still only 711 FGM court cases all year. In The Gambia, the fine imposed on the country’s first convicted cutters was paid by a prominent imam, an act that helped galvanise the campaign seeking to repeal the ban.

The movement’s defunding

The tactics that drove three decades of progress are now being starved of funding, with budget cuts falling hardest on the survivor-led and grassroots groups that are most effective but always face the toughest struggles for support. Funding for the Joint Programme fell from US$29.6 million in 2024 to US$16.3 million in 2025. The dismantling of USAID removed the largest single source of civil society funding worldwide, and total US foreign aid halved in a year. The UK, once the biggest funder of FGM prevention, is winding down its flagship programme with no replacement, so it can spend more on weapons.

The economics make no sense, because every dollar invested in prevention brings a tenfold return. The Joint Programme estimates that treating the health consequences of FGM currently costs US$1.4 billion a year. Politics, though, is playing a big part. In global north countries, political shifts are driving the withdrawal of aid, and far-right parties invoke FGM to stigmatise migrant communities while also opposing the gender justice policies that would make a difference. In practising countries, prohibition is increasingly recast as a foreign imposition on culture and faith. What unites these arguments is a shared sleight of hand that treats FGM as a question of cultural identity rather than a violation of fundamental human rights.

Elimination by 2030, the target that states set when they agreed the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, is already out of reach. But the evidence on what works is not in dispute, and it points towards communities and grassroots movements. The question is whether governments that claim to value human rights will keep supporting those delivering progress, or let a generation of girls pay the price of retreat.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She is also a Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

For the last few years, Artificial intelligence has been making increasingly intrusive demands for our attention.

It burst onto the scene like a child prodigy, enthralling us with feats of brilliance. With consummate ease, it removed drudgery from our tasks and began helping us achieve our personal and workplace objectives.

Daud Khan

As is the case with adolescents, there have been calls to set rules and regulations on AI, applying appropriate limits on what AI can and cannot do. The aim being to allow us time to deal with its immediate impacts on, for example, the jobs market, on media and communication, and on its military use.

But would government imposed regulations solve the problem? The answer is no for several reasons.

Firstly, there is the siren call of easier access to vast stores of knowledge, top quality writing skills and polished images and infographics. It is hard to resist the temptation to delegate boring tasks to AI, such as drafting emails that respond to routine messages. From there it is a slippery slope towards AI writing our university or job applications, office memos, or manuals and instructional content. However, these are tasks that define who we are and how others perceive us. And this reliance on AI kills creativity, individuality and human relations – there is no longer a turn of phrase or a spelling mistake that makes the message special.

Thomas McMahon

Secondly, AI Psychosis is becoming a pervasive disruptor of social relations. AI models are purposely designed for “engagement farming” – a fancy term for hooking people into an ever-increasing reliance on these services. It achieves this through sycophantic responses that feed one’s ego or anxieties, releasing endorphins and creating a craving for more.

We can now access gratifying, yet wholly synthetic, social interactions at our fingertips via chatbots. Consequently, we risk crafting individualised reality bubbles that are unchecked by the social norms we experience in the real world. Will it become easier and more pleasurable to interact with an intelligent machine to fulfill our need to talk, to discuss books, or for emotional engagement without fear of rejection – at any time of day or night?

Thirdly, if we allow machines to shape our thoughts and emotions, we risk destroying diversity of opinion, crushing creativity and resulting in a unified, monolithic narrative that is controlled by the megacorporations providing these AI services.

Pope Leo XIV expressed this concern in his recent encyclical where he warned of “the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance”.

Lastly, it is essential to consider how the mismanagement of AI has the potential to drive a further wedge between rich and poor populations. The Pope cautions us of being misled by “a technology that promises to free us from all weakness, and models of wellbeing that leave behind entire populations”.

Increased focus is being placed on the impact of data centers within local communities, given their inordinate usage of electricity and water and the constant noise pollution these facilities generate. At full capacity, processing a daily 10 billion Gigabytes of data, a 100 MW data center consumes up to 2.4 million KWh of electricity and 2 million litres of water per day – more than a small city.

The human brain can process 74 Gigabytes of data while sipping a tiny 0.3 KWh of electricity (260 calories or 12% of total daily energy intake). Our bodies require a daily ration of 2.5 litres of water to function normally. Contrast this with preparing a 100-word email using ChatGPT, where each prompt-and-response interaction consumes the water in a standard 500 ml bottle. Even from a strictly environmentally-conscious viewpoint, surely it would be better to use our brains for this instead?

However, whatever our concerns, the genie is out of the bottle and there is no going back – we must learn to use AI properly. We need to better understand its limitations and where it delivers greatest impact, given the resources required.

AI should not be seen as a substitute for human expertise but instead complementary to it. Indeed, the more expertise one has in any given field, the more valuable a contribution AI makes. Experts can better formulate more pertinent questions and redirect the conversation should the AI meander off course. Experts also detect errors more easily in what may appear to be perfectly valid responses.

It is essential that we encourage people, particularly our young people, to continue learning and perfecting their chosen crafts, ignoring the wild marketing claims that various professions have been largely solved by AI already. The more knowledge and expertise the younger generation can build, the more judiciously and selectively they can deploy AI in their work and for society’s future benefit.

Daud Khan is a retired UN staff based in Rome. He has degrees in economics from LSE and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar; and a degree in Environmental Management from Imperial College London.

Thomas McMahon is a Data Engineer who specialises in developing bespoke AI systems for UN agencies.

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Rohingya refugees cross the Naf River on a makeshift raft while fleeing violence in Myanmar, on their way to Bangladesh. Credit: UNICEF/Mackenzie Knowles-Coursin

By Mohammad Zaman
VANCOUVER B.C., Canada, Aug 3 2026 (IPS)

The Rohingya crisis remains one of the most enduring humanitarian and political failures in South and Southeast Asia. Since the 2017 mass expulsion from Myanmar’s Rakhine State, Bangladesh has hosted more than one million refugees in Cox’s Bazar and Bhasan Char, while Myanmar has failed to create conditions for safe return. What began as an emergency response has hardened into protracted displacement marked by statelessness, insecurity, aid dependency, and diplomatic fatigue. Repatriation is repeatedly presented as the preferred durable solution, yet every major attempt has failed because the core political question remains unresolved: the Rohingya cannot safely return to a state that denies them citizenship, protection, and equal belonging.

In 2017, only months after the largest influx, Bangladesh and Myanmar signed a bilateral Memorandum of Arrangement. It promised a time-bound repatriation process, but it was non-binding, weakly enforced, and silent on the guarantees most essential to return: citizenship, freedom of movement, property restitution, and independent monitoring inside Rakhine. Bangladesh, facing demographic, environmental, and political pressure, needed a pathway to reduce the burden of hosting refugees. Myanmar, by contrast, had incentives to delay, control, and symbolically manage the process without addressing the legal and security conditions that caused the exodus.

Three major repatriation efforts since 2017 reveal the same pattern. Attempts in 2018 and 2019 collapsed because refugees refused to return without credible guarantees of safety, citizenship, and dignity. A China-facilitated initiative in 2023 proposed a pilot return of several thousand people and arranged verification visits by Rohingya representatives to Rakhine. It also stalled. Cyclone damage, renewed fighting, and widening armed conflict made even limited returns impractical. More importantly, refugees remained unconvinced. Their reluctance was not resistance to return; it was a rational response to risk. Returning to fenced villages, transit camps, or controlled areas without rights would merely convert exile in Bangladesh into containment in Myanmar.

Dr Mohammad Zaman

The political problem is both domestic and regional. Domestically, Myanmar’s state-building project has excluded the Rohingya by portraying them as outsiders rather than citizens. Without recognition of Rohingya identity and legal status, administrative repatriation will remain cosmetic. Regionally, the crisis is shaped by strategic interests. China has mediated because stability in Myanmar affects its investments and influence, but its diplomacy has emphasized state-to-state negotiation more than rights-based accountability. India has balanced humanitarian concern with security and geopolitical interests, while ASEAN has struggled to move beyond cautious consensus and non-interference. Western governments have condemned atrocities and supported accountability efforts, but sanctions and legal cases have not changed conditions on the ground. The result is a fragmented diplomatic landscape in which no actor has combined sufficient leverage, consistency, and political will to compel Myanmar toward a rights-based solution.

Bangladesh’s position is increasingly difficult. Its initial humanitarian generosity has become a long-term national burden. The camps place pressure on land, forests, water, public services, and local labour markets. Security concerns have grown as trafficking, armed activity, and criminal networks exploit a population with limited mobility, education, and livelihood opportunities. Declining humanitarian funding has deepened frustration: reduced food rations, health services, and education increase despair and encourage dangerous onward movement by sea to Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, where conditions are often insecure. Yet Bangladesh’s legitimate burden cannot justify premature repatriation. Any return must be voluntary, safe, rights-based, and dignified.

A critical analysis must also recognize the limits of humanitarianism. Aid keeps people alive, but it cannot resolve statelessness or political exclusion. The international response has often separated relief, justice, and diplomacy into disconnected tracks: humanitarian agencies sustain survival in Bangladesh; lawyers pursue accountability; diplomats negotiate repatriation frameworks; and development actors support host communities. Each track is necessary, but together they have not formed a coherent strategy. The Rohingya have too often been treated as beneficiaries rather than political stakeholders. A durable solution requires their participation in defining return conditions, monitoring mechanisms, citizenship pathways, education policy, and community security arrangements. The newly formed Rohingya Repatriation Committee has to address all of the above in finding a sustainable solution.

The road ahead must be realistic rather than rhetorical. Repatriation should remain the long-term objective, but only when it is safe, voluntary, dignified, and sustainable. This requires verifiable changes inside Rakhine: citizenship or a credible pathway to citizenship, freedom of movement, access to services, restoration or compensation for property, and protection from military, police, and armed-group abuse. Any future framework must include independent international monitoring with meaningful access to return areas. Diplomacy must also adapt to Myanmar’s altered conflict map by engaging relevant actors without legitimizing abuses or abandoning principles. Bangladesh will need pragmatic but principled engagement with the junta, the Arakan Army, regional powers, and international organizations.

Meanwhile, the camps in Bangladesh cannot remain waiting rooms for an indefinitely delayed return. Refugees need education, skills training, legal protection, and limited livelihood opportunities to prevent social deterioration and prepare for eventual reconstruction in Rakhine. These measures should not be framed as local integration against Bangladesh’s wishes, but as human-capital preservation and crisis management. International burden-sharing must become concrete: donors should sustain aid, expand resettlement for vulnerable cases, support host communities, and coordinate pressure on Myanmar. Accountability mechanisms should continue because impunity is one reason repatriation remains unsafe.

Ultimately, the Rohingya repatriation crisis is not a logistical failure but a political one. Buses, refugee lists, reception centres, and pilot projects cannot substitute for rights, security, and recognition. Bangladesh seeks relief, Myanmar seeks control, regional powers seek stability, and donors seek a manageable humanitarian file. The Rohingya seek what repatriation is supposed to mean: return to their homeland as citizens with dignity. Until diplomacy is anchored in that principle, repatriation attempts will continue to produce announcements without arrivals, agreements without trust, and roadmaps without roads. The way forward requires pressure, patience, and a shift from counting potential returnees to building the conditions under which return becomes a restoration of justice rather than an act of desperation.

Dr. Mohammad Zaman is an internationally recognized expert in resettlement and development. He has contributed many op-eds on the Rohingya crisis. Dr. Zaman’s recent edited book (co-editors Robert Anderson and Kawser Ahmed) is titled Rohingya Stories: History and Geopolitics in a Multipolar World (Springer, 2025).

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

An expert panel segment during the Fifty-eighth session of the Economic Commission for Africa Conference of African Ministers of Finance, Planning and Economic Development, held from 28 March to 3 April 2026 in Tangier, Morocco. Credit: UNECA

By United Nations Economic Commission for Africa
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia, Jul 30 2026 (IPS)

Africa’s digital revolution is gathering pace, but the financing needed to sustain it remains uneven, fragmented, and often out of reach.

To bridge this gap, African multilateral financial institutions, policymakers, development partners, and private sector leaders are calling for a more coordinated, innovative, and better-structured financing approach to support Africa’s digital and technological transformation.

That was the central message from policymakers, financiers and development partners who convened on the sidelines of the 58th session of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa Conference of African Ministers of Finance, Planning and Economic Development, held in Morocco in April 2026.

Their conclusion was clear: Africa does not lack capital—it lacks the right kind of capital, deployed in the right way.

From artificial intelligence to digital infrastructure, the continent’s innovation sectors are expanding rapidly. Yet, access to affordable, long-term financing remains a major bottleneck, constraining growth and limiting impact.

Hanan Morsy, UN ECA’s Deputy Executive Secretary and Chief Economist

That gap, experts say, is holding back productivity gains, job creation and broader economic transformation.

Capital vs opportunity

Africa’s financial landscape is not devoid of resources. In fact, speakers at the event repeatedly emphasized a paradox: capital exists, but it is not flowing into innovation-driven sectors at the required scale.

According to Haytham Elmaayergi of the African Export-Import Bank, one of the continent’s leading multilateral lenders, the issue lies in the pipeline of viable investments.

“One of Africa’s key challenges is not a lack of capital, but a shortage of bankable projects and stronger institutional collaboration to scale investment,” he said, pointing to weak project preparation and limited institutional coordination as key constraints.

This disconnect is further compounded by high borrowing costs, currency volatility, and insufficient mechanisms to share risk—factors that deter both public and private investment.

For early-stage innovators, the challenge is even more acute. Venture financing remains thin, and traditional lenders are often reluctant to support projects perceived as high-risk.

“In the technology space, risk is harder to structure,” said Adeniran Aderogba, head of the Regional Maritime Development Bank, “we need more creative financing models and dedicated funds to support early-stage innovation.”

Africa’s innovation challenge is not a shortage of ideas. It is a shortage of long-term, affordable, and well-structured financing.

Rethinking how Africa finances innovation

Participants agreed that solving these challenges will require a shift away from traditional financing approaches toward more flexible, blended models.

Blended finance—combining public and private capital, guarantees and technical support—was highlighted as a critical tool to reduce risk and attract investment into emerging sectors. Co-financing arrangements and tailored instruments that reflect the unique risk-return profile of digital investments are also gaining traction.

But financing alone is not enough.

“Technology and innovation go beyond digital,” noted Robert Lisinge of UNECA. “We are talking about a broader ecosystem—including infrastructure, energy, and emerging technologies.”

This broader lens underscores the need for complementary investments in enabling systems: reliable electricity, robust connectivity, and supportive regulatory frameworks. Without these, even well-financed projects struggle to scale.

The role of African institutions

At the center of the conversation was the growing importance of African-led financial institutions in shaping the continent’s development trajectory.

The Alliance of African Multilateral Financial Institutions—also known as the Africa Club—has emerged as a key platform for coordination. Established in 2024, the alliance brings together major African financial institutions with a combined balance sheet exceeding $70 billion.

Its members—including Afreximbank, the Africa Finance Corporation, and the Trade and Development Bank—are increasingly seen as critical players in mobilizing capital for large-scale development projects.

By strengthening collaboration among these institutions, participants said, Africa can better align financing with its strategic priorities and reduce reliance on external funding models that may not fully reflect local realities.

From dialogue to delivery

The Tangier discussions ended with a strong call for action: move beyond diagnosis and toward implementation.

Key priorities include reducing the cost of capital, expanding risk-sharing mechanisms, improving project preparation, and mobilizing long-term funding at scale. Equally important is strengthening collaboration among governments, financial institutions and development partners.

For Africa’s digital transformation to deliver on its promise, participants agreed, financing must become more coordinated, more innovative—and more responsive to the continent’s realities.

The stakes are high. With one of the world’s youngest populations and a rapidly expanding digital economy, Africa has a unique opportunity to leapfrog traditional development pathways.

But as the Tangier meeting made clear, realizing that potential will depend not just on how much money is available—but on how effectively it is used.

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Time and again, evidence has shown that proactive investments in anticipatory action, preparedness and mitigation can reduce the negative impacts of extreme weather events while minimizing economic losses. Credit: Umar Manzoor Shah/IPS

By Esther Ngumbi
URBANA, Illinois, US, Jul 29 2026 (IPS)

Recently, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations put out an alert, warning countries around the world about an impending new El Niño  phase that is expected to significantly increase the likelihood of drought, heat waves, storms, and flooding and pose major risks to agriculture across multiple regions.

But this is not surprising, as in recent years, including 2026, droughts, storms, tornadoes, heat waves, and flooding have become increasingly frequent and severe.

These erratic and extreme weather events have resulted in the loss of lives, caused billions of dollars in damage to infrastructure, while inflicting devastating consequenses to crop production, food security, and agriculture, a sector that supports millions of livelihoods, provides employment, and contributes significantly to national economies in both the United States and globally.

Countries need to invest in developing anticipatory action plans, strengthen early warning and forecasting systems, and equip citizens and at-risk communities with practical solutions and mitigation strategies they can implement before these catastrophic weather events happen

The question then becomes, how can countries including the United States best prepare for these devastating extreme weather events that have such negative impacts on agriculture and food security?

First and foremost, countries need to invest in developing anticipatory action plans, strengthen early warning and forecasting systems, and equip citizens and at-risk communities with practical solutions and mitigation strategies they can implement before these catastrophic weather events happen.

Doing so is a win–win for everyone. Time and again, evidence has shown that proactive investments in anticipatory action plans, preparedness and mitigation reduce extreme weather events negative impacts while minimizing economic losses.

Complementing these forecasting systems would be the need for countries to develop national preparedness plans with the goal to protect food and agricultural supply chains from production through to consumption, before, during, and after extreme weather events.

Countries should also promote a culture of preparedness by encouraging its citizens, farmers, and other stakeholders in the agriculture sector to take anticipatory action before weather events happen. For example, in 2025, the United States Department of Agriculture encouraged producers to prepare for the hurricane season.

Taking anticipatory actions by farmers and other stakeholders in the agriculture sector can vary depending on resources and expected weather events. For example, if heatwaves and droughts are forecast, farmers can take anticipatory measures including planting drought tolerant crop varieties and using other innovative drought solutions. When flooding is expected, farmers can plant flooding tolerant varieties.

In parallel and beyond preparedness, countries must encourage farmers to adopt regenerative agriculture practices including cover cropping, reduced till and no till farming, crop rotations, pest management conservation system, mixed cropping and other soil health building strategies.

Collectively, these practices enhance soil health, improve water retention and ultimately strengthen agricultural crops’ ability to withstand heatwaves, drought, flooding and other extreme weather events.

Notably, agricultural research continues to reveal other effective approaches including harnessing beneficial soil microbes to improve crop production while strengthening plant resillience to droughts and other biotic and abiotic stressors.

Importantly, there is a continued need to invest in research and development. To stay ahead of the increasing weather events and their devastating impacts on agriculture, countries must continue to invest in science by funding research. Sadly, many countries continue to cut the federal budgets allocated for research and development beginning with the United States. This needs to change.

When scientists are funded and investments are made, researchers can continue to research not only the impacts of these weather events but also potential innovative solutions to address these challenges.

Alongside investing in research there is the need to invest in extension. Extension is the arm that allows for the last mile of research to be effective, since extension people work with communities to transfer research and to share the research discoveries.

Agricultural extension work with farmers to provide advice throughout the growing season suggesting changes and strategies farmers should take to ensure that crops survive the weather brought about challenges.

Finally, continued collaboration across sectors and countries is necessary to confront weather associated challenges impacting agriculture.

This includes forging creative partnerships that engage governments, federal and state funding agencies, research institutions and researchers in both public and private institutions, universities, growers, extension experts and agents, NGO’s and philanthropists.

Coordinated collaborations will go a long way to ensure that extreme weather events have minimal impacts on agriculture and food security.

At a time when unpredictable extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and severe, investing in developing anticipatory plans, early warning and forecasting systems, as well as developing preparedness plans and creative and innovative ways to disseminate available information, solutions and strategies to growers will go a long way in improving agricultural productivity while strengthening our ability to sustainably grow crops and meet our food security needs both today and in the years to come.

Esther Ngumbi, PhD is Assistant Professor, Department of Entomology, African American Studies Department, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Credit: United Nations

By Amitabh Behar
DELHI, India, Jul 29 2026 (IPS)

On 15 September 1953, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit of India was elected the eighth president of the UN General Assembly — the first woman to hold the UN’s second-highest position. Since then, only four women have followed her, most recently the current president, Annalena Baerbock. Since its founding, the UN has had nine Secretaries-General. All men. Now, 81 years after the UN’s founding, we have a historic opportunity to correct that record. It is time to entrust the UN leadership to a woman of the Global South who shapes a more inclusive, effective and forward-looking UN.

The stakes extend far beyond symbolism. In the coming weeks, attention will turn to the Security Council, where the informal straw polls will effectively determine who emerges as the next Secretary-General, before it forwards its recommendations to the General Assembly for appointment.

Of the six candidates currently in the race, four are women, Michelle Bachelet, Rebeca Grynspan, María Fernanda Espinosa and Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett. Their credentials leave no doubt that the UN has highly qualified women ready to lead. The choice facing UN member states, and especially the Permanent Five is therefore not whether a woman can lead the organisation, but which candidate is best placed to pull multilateralism back from the brink, revers trends of conflict and inequality, uphold international law, and restoring confidence in cooperation as a force for justice and human dignity.

That is no small task. The next Secretary-General will need to provide principled leadership to advance the interests of people whose voices are excluded from global decision-making, while defending the UN’s independence from its most powerful members. Trygve Lie, the first Secretary-General, once called the job “the most impossible job in the world.” This quote has rarely been proven righter than today.

The organisation the next Secretary-General inherits is not in good shape. A recent poll found that just 4% of people in the Global South believe the UN has sufficient authority in global governance; 44% blamed the concentration of power among the Permanent Five in the Security Council. Yet the same poll affirmed the need of the UN in this context with its enduring value as the only universal forum where all member states can address shared challenges — and the need for a Secretary-General who listens to people.

That points to four non-negotiable commitments that should anchor the next Secretary-General’s agenda: representation, participation, accountability and the right to self-determination. Among these four commitments accountability matters most urgently to stop impunity. Committing to it means real reform of a Security Council where the Permanent Five too often act as judge and jury: prioritising prevention, curbing the veto, strengthen the equality of all Security Council members in decision-making so advancements to global peace cannot be blocked, limiting the “penholder” system that lets the P5 monopolise drafting, and putting civilian protection at the centre of every peacekeeping effort.

Ultimately, addressing these structural challenges will require a broader conversation about the future of the UN Charter itself, including serious consideration of Article 109 as a pathway for reviewing whether the Organization’s founding framework remains fit for purpose in today’s world.

Translating these commitments into people’s lives means concrete action in a few key areas: Inequality must finally move to the centre of the UN agenda: billionaire wealth has hit a historic $18.3 trillion and only 16% of the Sustainable Development Goals remain on track. Establishing an International Panel on Inequality, modelled on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will be a vital next step in tackling the inequality emergency.

Civilian protection and defending international humanitarian law must be non-negotiable to dismantle systems of impunity, at a moment when dozens of people fall into humanitarian emergency every minute. And with the world badly off track on the Paris Agreement, the next Secretary-General must build on Antonio Guterres’ legacy and continue pushing to make a just transition away from fossil fuels — backed by real climate finance — a defining political priority.

The next Secretary-General must put a feminist vision at the heart of the UN. This means confronting a rigged, sexist, and racist economic order that prizes endless growth over the care of people and the planet, and backing the Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth. And none of this will happen if civil society is sidelined and fundamental rights -including digital ones – are not protected while Artificial Intelligence keeps expanding without control. The UN’s legitimacy depends on hearing from the people it was built to serve — the Charter’s founding principle of “We the Peoples” — especially as civic space shrinks worldwide including in the UN.

In her inaugural address as UNGA president, Pandit said the world “must learn to cooperate effectively in safeguarding peace and in raising standards of living.” Seventy-three years on, as multilateralism strains under the weight of its own contradictions, that sentence has lost none of its urgency.

Leading the UN of tomorrow might be the hardest job in the world. But as Lie also said, the harder the task, the greater the reward. It is time for structural change — and for a woman of the Global South to lead it. We cannot afford to miss this opportunity. The coming weeks, and the opening of the 81st session of the General Assembly, will show whether world leaders are ready to seize it

Amitabh Behar is Oxfam International’s Executive Director

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

PAHO Director calls for expanded access to innovations such as oral and injectable PrEP, rapid testing, and HIV self-testing, while strengthening early diagnosis and timely treatment initiation to advance HIV elimination. Credit: PAHO

By Pan American Health Organization
RIO de JANEIRO, Brazil, Jul 28 2026 (IPS)

The Region of the Americas has more tools than ever before to prevent, diagnose, and treat HIV, yet many of them are still not reaching everyone who needs them, Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) Director Jarbas Barbosa said during the opening session of the International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2026).

Dr. Barbosa emphasized that expanding access to innovations such as oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), long-acting injectable PrEP, rapid testing, and HIV self-testing, together with strengthening early diagnosis and ensuring timely treatment initiation, will be essential to accelerate the elimination of HIV as a public health problem in the Region.

In his remarks, Dr. Barbosa highlighted that the Americas have repeatedly demonstrated that ambitious public health goals can be achieved through cooperation, scientific evidence, and strong health systems. He noted that the Region has eliminated polio and rubella and that several countries have eliminated mother-to-child transmission of HIV, achievements that provide a strong foundation for accelerating progress toward HIV elimination.

Credit: PAHO

He further stressed that achieving this goal will require combining innovations in prevention, diagnosis, and treatment with political leadership, equity, and close collaboration with communities.

Dr. Barbosa also noted that countries in Latin America and the Caribbean now finance 92% of HIV investments through domestic resources, representing one of the highest levels of domestic funding for HIV programs globally and demonstrating the Region’s sustained commitment to HIV response.

“The question before us is no longer whether we have the tools to end HIV as a public health threat. We do. The question is whether we can ensure that those tools reach everyone who needs them, regardless of where they live, who they are, or the circumstances they face,” said Barbosa. “Innovation only changes lives when people can access it.”

According to the latest available data, AIDS-related deaths in Latin America and the Caribbean declined by 46% between 2010 and 2025. In 2024 alone, access to antiretroviral treatment prevented an estimated 117,000 AIDS-related deaths. Access to PrEP also increased substantially, from 35,000 people in 2020 to more than 326,000 in 2025.

Despite this progress, significant gaps in access and coverage remain. Approximately one in three new HIV diagnoses is still made at a late stage of infection, and nearly 900,000 people living with HIV in Latin America and the Caribbean are not receiving treatment.

Reducing HIV-related mortality and addressing advanced HIV disease will be among PAHO’s key priorities at AIDS 2026. Although tools to prevent and treat HIV have improved substantially, late diagnosis, delays in treatment initiation, and challenges in retaining people in care continue to contribute to preventable deaths and to the burden of co-infections such as tuberculosis, which remains the leading cause of death among people with advanced HIV disease.

Against this backdrop, PAHO unveiled new initiatives aimed at accelerating HIV elimination across the Region.

As part of its agenda at AIDS 2026, PAHO launched the Alliance for HIV Elimination in the Americas, a new regional platform designed to advance progress toward HIV elimination by 2030 through stronger collaboration among governments, communities, international organizations, academia, development partners, and the private sector.

The Alliance is part of PAHO’s Disease Elimination Initiative and seeks to strengthen political leadership, expand equitable access to innovation, and promote sustainable investments to accelerate HIV elimination across the Americas.

PAHO is also advancing the Path to HIV Elimination in the Americas, an evidence-based framework that will help countries measure progress, identify remaining gaps, and demonstrate achievements on the path toward HIV elimination.

“If we maintain political commitment, protect the investments already made, and place equity at the center of every decision, ending HIV as a public health threat will be within our reach,” Barbosa said. “No country will achieve this goal alone.”

The PAHO Director warned that financial pressures, shifting political priorities, and persistent inequalities could jeopardize hard-won gains.

He reiterated that achieving HIV elimination will require strengthening people-centered health systems, expanding access to PrEP and other innovations, integrating HIV services with tuberculosis, viral hepatitis, and sexually transmitted infection services, working alongside communities to reduce stigma and discrimination, and sustaining the domestic investments that have enabled steady progress across the Region.

Throughout AIDS 2026, PAHO will advance these priorities through a series of high-level events focused on HIV elimination, advanced HIV disease, and equitable access to innovations for prevention, diagnosis, and treatment.

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Three years of declining hunger have answered one question: Progress is possible. The question now is whether governments will scale what works before conflict, climate shocks and financial retreat erase it. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Máximo Torero
ROME, Jul 27 2026 (IPS)

Here is a fact that should interrupt the world’s drumbeat of bad news: Hunger fell again in 2025.

For the third consecutive year, fewer people faced chronic hunger. The total declined to an estimated 645 million, 14 million fewer than in 2024 and 43 million fewer than at the 2022 peak. Moderate or severe food insecurity fell by 86 million, to 2.1 billion from 2024 to 2025.

The number remains a profound collective failure. But the decline challenges the fatalistic assumption that conflict, climate change and economic instability make rising hunger inevitable. When governments align social protection, agricultural investment and economic policy, they can bend the hunger curve.

Countries making the greatest gains offer no single formula, but they do offer a common lesson. Their histories differ, but their choices share key features: social protection that preserves purchasing power; investment that raises agricultural productivity; rural roads, irrigation and market infrastructure; and policies connecting small scale farmers to expanding food markets. Hunger falls when these policies reinforce one another

Asia’s hunger is now about one quarter below its 2015 level. Latin America and the Caribbean has also moved below the rate recorded a decade ago. In Africa, the rate declined for the first time in nearly a decade, from 20.3 percent in 2024 to 20 percent in 2025.

Africa’s progress is fragile. Rapid population growth kept the number of hungry people at about 309 million. Yet even this small reversal is significant, especially because bilateral development assistance to sub Saharan Africa fell 26.3 percent in 2025 and is projected to fall again this year.

Countries making the greatest gains offer no single formula, but they do offer a common lesson. India cut hunger from 21.1 percent in the mid 2000s to 9.8 percent; Senegal from 15.8 percent to 5.3 percent; Rwanda from 31.8 percent to 22.6 percent; and Peru from 17.9 percent to 5.7 percent. Brazil, Chile, the Dominican Republic and Guyana now report rates below 2.5 percent.

Their histories differ, but their choices share key features: social protection that preserves purchasing power; investment that raises agricultural productivity; rural roads, irrigation and market infrastructure; and policies connecting small scale farmers to expanding food markets. Hunger falls when these policies reinforce one another.

The danger is that governments will read three years of improvement as permission to retreat.

The Middle East conflict and disruption of the Strait of Hormuz are already raising energy, fertilizer and transportation costs. The strait is critical not only for oil and liquefied natural gas but also for sulphur, fertilizers and other farm inputs. Decisions made now could determine whether this shock becomes a much larger food price crisis within six to 12 months.

Climate is the second threat. El Niño is strengthening, with an 81 percent probability of becoming a very strong event late this year. That does not guarantee crop losses, but it raises the odds of damaging heat and rainfall patterns across major producing regions.

The third threat is cutting even more humanitarian and development financing when vulnerable countries most need resilience. Aid cuts do not make costs disappear. They transfer them to food importing governments, humanitarian agencies and households already spending most of their income on food.

But preventing hunger is only the first test. The harder challenge is helping people eat well.

About 2.69 billion people, roughly one third of humanity, still cannot afford a healthy diet. In Africa, the share is 66.6 percent. Calories alone are not enough. A diet that prevents hunger does not necessarily prevent anaemia, child stunting, obesity or diabetes.

The economics explain why. Starchy staples provide about half the calories in a healthy diet but only 13 percent of its cost. Fruits and vegetables provide roughly 5 percent of calories but account for 16 percent of the cost. Animal source foods provide 13 percent of calories but consume 28 percent of the budget. Calories are relatively cheap. Nutrients are expensive.

Much of that expense accumulates after food leaves the farm. New analysis for the 2026 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World indicates that 70 to 75 percent of the cost of a healthy diet arises in storage, processing, transportation, wholesale and retail. Poor roads, inadequate cold storage, unreliable electricity and post harvest losses turn nutritious perishables into luxuries.

That should change how governments spend. They already provide $540 billion to $635 billion a year in agricultural support, much of it concentrated on a few staples. Supporting staples alone can pull land and investment away from fruits, vegetables and other nutrient dense foods. Governments should redirect more support toward horticultural productivity, cold chains, irrigation, rural roads, storage, energy and competitive markets.

They must also get the sequence right. Expanding school meals, food vouchers and other demand programs without increasing supply can raise prices. Investment in farms and supply chains must precede, or accompany, policies that stimulate demand.

Three years of declining hunger have answered one question: Progress is possible. The question now is whether governments will scale what works before conflict, climate shocks and financial retreat erase it.

The next frontier is not just cheaper calories. It is making healthy diets affordable.

Excerpt:

Refugees fleeing violence in Ethiopia's Tigray region cross the Tekeze River into Sudan in November 2020. Credit: UNHCR/Hazim Elhag

By Elizabeth Tan
GENEVA, Jul 27 2026 (IPS)

Seventy-five years after the Refugee Convention was opened for signature on 28 July 1951, it remains the foundation of the international refugee protection system and one of the most consequential international legal instruments ever adopted.

Born in the aftermath of the Second World War, it codified a simple but powerful principle: people forced to flee persecution, conflict or violence must be able to find safety and protection.

No society is immune to war, persecution or sudden upheaval. The Convention was built on that universal truth: that people forced to flee must be protected.

Over the past seven and a half decades, it has been a lifeline for people fleeing conflicts and persecution, from post-war Europe and wars of national liberation across Africa, to the Indochina wars and military dictatorships in Latin America, to more recent crises in Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine and Sudan.

A total of 149 States are parties to the Convention, its 1967 Protocol, or both, making it one of the most widely supported international legal frameworks. Together, the Convention and its Protocol define who is a refugee, set out refugees’ rights, and establish the standards of treatment States have agreed to uphold. The core principle of non-refoulement – prohibiting the return of people to a place where they would face persecution, torture or other serious harm – is recognized under customary international law, which applies to all countries, whether or not they have signed the Convention.

Importantly, the Convention has proven to be a living instrument, retaining its relevance in responding to contemporary challenges. Through evolving State practice, court decisions and guidance from UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, it has supported protection responses to issues such as gender-based persecution, forced recruitment and risks that may be compounded by climate impacts where these intersect with conflict, persecution or other serious harm.

In a world experiencing record levels of crisis and instability – with more than 130 armed conflicts recorded worldwide in 2025, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross – some 41.6 million refugees remained uprooted. Even amid increasingly polarized debate, public support for asylum remains strong, with around two-thirds of people surveyed this year by Ipsos across 29 countries supporting the right of those fleeing war or persecution to seek refuge.

The global asylum system, however, is under strain. Nearly 70 per cent of refugees are hosted by low- and middle-income countries, many of which face their own economic and development challenges. Seven in ten refugees live in exile for five years or more.

Some argue that the Convention is no longer suited to today’s globalized world of mixed movements and overstretched asylum systems. We disagree. The Convention remains the framework that allows States to distinguish those who need international protection from those who do not, while ensuring that no one is returned to persecution, torture or other serious harm. Fair and efficient procedures to determine refugee status, protect refugees, reassure host communities and preserve confidence in asylum. UNHCR is ready to redouble its work with States and partners to ease capacity constraints and ensure decisions are accurate and as swift as possible. Those who do not need refugee protection should not be granted asylum and can be returned, safely and in dignity. That, too, is part of a credible asylum system.

At the same time, border management must remain anchored in protection. We are concerned by practices that restrict access to asylum, including pushbacks, denial of access to territory and forced returns. The Convention provides a framework for States to manage borders while protecting people with a well-defined need for international protection.

These pressures are compounded by severe funding shortfalls. With UNHCR funded at only 31 per cent as of the end of June, essential services for people forced to flee – including extremely vulnerable groups – are being constrained.

Marking the 75th anniversary of the Convention, UNHCR is calling for renewed commitment to the institution of asylum, stronger international cooperation and greater support for refugees and the communities that host them. Through a series of dialogues in 2026 – taking place at local, regional and global levels, and involving governments, civil society, refugees, the private sector and other stakeholders – we are working to identify practical ways to strengthen protection and advance solutions.

Seventy-five years on, the Convention is a test of our collective resolve today to protect those forced to flee and to keep asylum available for those who need it.

Elizabeth Tan is UNHCR’s Director of International Protection and Solutions

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

A man walks past a sign reading 'unjustly persecuted' featuring journalist José Rubén Zamora, former CICIG lawyer Claudia González and Maya leaders Luis Pacheco and Héctor Chaclan in a Guatemala City, 12 May 2026. Credit: Johan Ordóñez/AFP

By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Jul 24 2026 (IPS)

José Rubén Zamora, founder of elPeriódico, Guatemala’s now-defunct leading investigative newspaper, spent 1,295 days in detention before a court granted him house arrest on 12 February. He endured long stretches of solitary confinement in a military jail, held in near-constant darkness and subjected to treatment that six UN experts warned could amount to torture. His offence was simply doing his job. For decades, he exposed the corrupt dealings of Guatemala’s economic and political elites. Prosecutors are still trying to send him back to prison.

Police arrested Zamora in July 2022 on a complaint brought by a former banker who was under investigation for financial crimes, following Zamora’s reporting on corruption under then President Alejandro Giammattei. Within months, elPeriódico had shut down following intimidation of its advertisers and criminalisation of its staff. A court convicted Zamora of money laundering in June 2023, and when an appeals court overturned the conviction, a second case kept him in jail anyway. Courts ordered his release several times, and each time appeals chambers reversed those decisions. The Supreme Court transferred a judge who ruled to free him to a court in another part of Guatemala. At least 10 lawyers who took up his defence were forced to abandon it under pressure. Some were prosecuted and jailed.

In May 2024, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention declared Zamora’s detention arbitrary and retaliatory and recommended his immediate release. It took almost two more years for him to be allowed home. In March, the Supreme Court voided the rulings that had returned him to prison, finding they violated due process. The Constitutional Court heard the prosecution’s latest appeal to send him back to jail in June, but has yet to issue its ruling.

The machinery of impunity

Zamora’s ordeal is no aberration; it’s how captured institutions are designed to work. The Guatemalan state has long been in the hands of what Guatemalans call ‘the pact of the corrupt’, a coalition of business leaders, drug traffickers, military officers and politicians that has captured the justice system to guarantee their own impunity. Anyone who threatens that arrangement risks prosecution on fabricated charges, reinforced by coordinated smear campaign. This includes journalists who investigate corruption, judges and prosecutors who pursue it, and Indigenous, land rights and climate activists who mobilise against its consequences. The aim, as a Guatemalan civil society leader put it, is to instil fear so nobody dares question anything. Over 100 people, including around 50 judges and prosecutors, have fled into exile rather than face trumped-up charges.

Because the justice system serves the corrupt pact rather than the law, any serious attempt to dismantle corruption has required external support. In 2006, the UN and the Guatemalan government agreed to establish the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG). Over 12 years, CICIG and the Public Prosecutor’s Office investigated over 70 complex criminal structures and brought charges against more than 1,540 people, including former presidents, ministers, members of Congress and business figures. This challenged the perception that the powerful were untouchable.

But success sealed its fate. When CICIG investigated sitting president Jimmy Morales in 2017, he moved to destroy it, refusing to renew its mandate and appointing a compliant attorney general, Consuelo Porras. President Giammattei reappointed Porras, who prosecuted or forced out dozens of judges and prosecutors who had worked with CICIG. She turned the Public Prosecutor’s Office into an instrument of persecution while dismissing 74 per cent of the complaints filed with it without investigating them. By the time her term ended in May, over 40 states had sanctioned her and some associates. The institution built to prosecute crime had become the state’s key tool for committing it.

New president, same system

Guatemalans elected Bernardo Arévalo in 2023 with a mandate to dismantle this system, but the system has consistently tried to disable him. His unexpected win – he scraped into the runoff largely because the establishment had not seen him as a serious enough threat to block – triggered what civil society described as an attempted electoral coup, with spurious legal complaints, raids on his party’s headquarters and at least two credible assassination plots. It took 106 days of peaceful resistance led by Indigenous authorities to ensure he was sworn in.

But taking office was not the same as taking power. Arévalo’s party had only 23 of 160 congressional seats, and its legal status was subsequently cancelled by judicial order. Congress blocked the legislative change that would have allowed him to dismiss Porras, and the Supreme Court, 13 of whose judges were selected in 2024 through a process stacked with candidates tied to corruption networks, refused to lift her immunity. Throughout Arévalo’s term, the Public Prosecutor’s Office continued to criminalise dissent and repeatedly tried to strip Arévalo of immunity.

A narrow window

But Porras’s term eventually expired, and his successor, Gabriel García Luna, a career judge with no ties to corruption networks, has moved quickly, dismissing prosecutors linked to Porras and closing the special prosecutor’s office that fabricated cases against Zamora and many others. His arrival offers the first genuine opening in eight years. But it’s a narrow one. Congress remains in opposition hands, and the Constitutional Court, the Comptroller General’s Office and the electoral authority are all due for renewal this year. Corrupt interests are well placed to exploit these processes to entrench their grip.

Much now depends on whether Arévalo throws his political weight behind García Luna’s efforts to rebuild the institution Porras weaponised, and whether the bodies up for renewal can be kept out of the corrupt pact’s hands. The clearest sign of change will come if Zamora and the dozens of others criminalised for exposing corruption and defending rights no longer face prosecution, and instead their persecutors face justice.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She is also a Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Investments in jobs, basic services and community infrastructure can reduce the pressures that drive displacement in Myanmar. Credit: UNDP Myanmar

By Norimasa Shimomura
YANGON, Myanmar, Jul 24 2026 (IPS)

When asked what development looks like today, a community leader in Kalaw township points to these fields. Once destroyed by a typhoon, they are now productive again. What began as emergency food assistance in the first month was followed by UNDP support in the community—seeds, training, debris removal, support to microbusinesses and small infrastructure—backed by the Republic of Korea, Norway and Switzerland. One year on, the fields sustain three annual production cycles—rice and flowers—with more resilient practices and higher yields. “This is what development looks like to us,” he says.

Communities in Myanmar today are not facing a single crisis. They are facing many, and layered on top of one another, recurring over time. Conflict, insecurity, economic uncertainty, market volatility and climate- and disaster-related shocks do not occur in isolation. Global crises are placing added pressure on already-stretched humanitarian and development financing. Together, these dynamics reinforce one another, creating a cycle that is harder to break. These protracted, compounding crises are reshaping the country’s social and economic fabric and putting communities under enormous stress.

Myanmar shows why separating humanitarian action from development no longer fits reality. Relief keeps people alive, but it will not on its own restart livelihoods, steady local services, increase risk preparedness or reduce the pressures that drive displacement. The smarter play is to link emergency support to a continuum of recovery, stabilization and longer-term development, backing community systems and local markets so today’s spending also buys a more durable future.

A crisis that feeds on itself

Myanmar is fragmented: conflict in too many areas, economic freefall in others, and climate shocks across the country—from floods and droughts to rising temperatures and environmental loss. But these pressures are connected. When livelihoods collapse, people move. When insecurity rises, local economies contract. When disasters hit, already-fragile services give way. Families then face hard trade-offs; taking on high-interest debt, moving to precarious urban fringes, attempting risky migration, or turning to illicit markets.

For many, participation in informal, and sometimes criminal economies is less a choice than a last resort. Others flee, often towards cities such as Yangon. But urban areas are already under strain. In peri-urban Yangon, poverty rates are estimated to be around 50 percent, and new arrivals stretch housing, services and jobs further, deepening vulnerability and inequality. Women shoulder this burden most heavily, with women-headed households in peri-urban areas more likely to have lower incomes, depend on precarious and poorly paid employment, and facing heightened safety concerns.

This is how the crisis sustains itself. Conflict and violence breed insecurity; insecurity forces people from their homes and pushes some into illicit economies; displacement fractures livelihoods and the resulting economic hardship reinforces instability. And so the cycle continues.

The limits of a humanitarian-only response

Myanmar has received humanitarian aid for decades. It remains essential. People need immediate support for food, shelter and protection. But the challenges Myanmar faces today are not only humanitarian. They are structural and long-term. When support can only be planned and financed in short cycles, it can help people survive, but without enabling them to rebuild livelihoods, restore services or reduce future risk. This can create dependence on humanitarian aid without a clear exit.

The question is no longer whether humanitarian support is needed—it clearly is—but whether it is sufficient on its own, and how development can help build resilience. To break the cycle, investments must also focus on recovery, livelihoods, risk preparedness, access to finance and local systems. The bridge between humanitarian action and development must be deliberately built. UNDP in Myanmar has designed a new phase of its Community First Programme backing community-led solutions that can absorb shocks now while laying foundations for medium- and longer-term development.

Where the bridge matters most

There are three areas where this bridge is critical.

By combining community-based approaches with more targeted economic interventions, it is possible to offer a more comprehensive response in a protracted crisis. Credit: UNDP Myanmar

First, livelihoods and early recovery. Investments in jobs, basic services and community infrastructure can reduce the pressures that drive displacement. When people have viable ways to earn a living, they are less likely to move out of necessity. This also reduces the burden on humanitarian systems and can be an immediate stabilizing factor.

Second, local systems and community capacity. Even in constrained contexts, support to community-level structures can have a powerful effect. It enables people to manage their own recovery, strengthens local decision-making and builds a sense of ownership. It helps communities to think longer term and create some community wealth. These are the building blocks of future governance.

Third, economic alternatives to illicit activity. When large parts of local economies in some regions operate in grey or black markets, the implications go beyond livelihoods, they affect national and regional security. Creating alternatives—through job creation, support to small businesses and financing—gives people options. It reduces reliance on illicit networks, lowers risks of exploitation and opens pathways for more sustainable economic activity. These directly affect stability within Myanmar and across its borders.

Navigating a complex funding landscape

Despite the clear need to bridge humanitarian and development approaches, funding structures often work against it. In Myanmar, much of the available funding is still categorized as humanitarian. This creates challenges for organizations with strong development expertise, which must adapt their language and delivery models to fit short-term funding criteria.

At the same time, partner expectations are evolving, but not always consistently. Some continue to fund purely humanitarian outputs. Others expect development impact from humanitarian interventions. Still others fund development but want to demonstrate humanitarian impact.

This creates a fragmented landscape: humanitarian funding for humanitarian results, humanitarian funding seeking development impact, development funding framed as humanitarian and, more rarely, development funding investing directly in long-term results.

Navigating this requires flexibility and clarity of purpose. Development actors must be able to articulate the longer-term impact of their work, even when operating in a humanitarian context. The value lies precisely in that distinction: connecting immediate interventions to sustained recovery and future stability.

A window of opportunity

There are signs of change. Some partners are beginning to recognize that continued investment in short-term relief, without parallel investments in recovery and livelihoods, is not sustainable.

This creates an opportunity. By combining community-based approaches with more targeted economic interventions—jobs, enterprise development, access to finance, climate and energy solutions—it is possible to offer a more comprehensive response in a protracted crisis context, one that addresses both immediate needs and underlying drivers of crisis. But this window may not remain open indefinitely. As other actors reposition and global priorities shift, the space for shaping this agenda could narrow.

Looking ahead

Myanmar’s challenges are complex but the direction of response is clear. Humanitarian aid remains indispensable. But on its own, it cannot break cycles of crisis that are structural and self-reinforcing.

Bridging humanitarian action and development is how people regain agency. It is how communities stabilize. And ultimately, it is how countries begin to move beyond crisis—not just survive it.

Norimasa Shimomura is UNDP Resident Representative in Myanmar.
Source: UNDP

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Latin America and the Caribbean has the world’s most expensive healthy diet. Credit: Max Valencia / FAO

By Máximo Torero
ROME, Jul 23 2026 (IPS)

Hunger is falling across most of Latin America and the Caribbean. The region’s next challenge is harder: ensuring that everyone can afford a healthy diet, not merely enough calories to survive.

The regional hunger rate fell for a fifth consecutive year in 2025, reaching a record low of 4.8 percent, down from the pandemic peak of 6.1 percent in 2020. About 32 million people faced hunger, more than 1 million fewer than in 2024 and 7.5 million fewer than in 2020. Moderate or severe food insecurity, which includes people forced to skip meals or eat less, also fell to 22.9 percent, below its 2015 level of 23.4 percent. The region’s share of the world’s hungry has remained at about 5 percent for 15 years.

This progress was not accidental. It reflects sustained investment in agricultural productivity and stronger social protection, including the cash transfer and school feeding programs developed by Brazil and Mexico.

Poor roads, limited rail networks, inadequate cold storage, unreliable energy, inefficient markets and post harvest losses raise costs as nutritious food moves through storage, processing, transportation, wholesale and retail

The countries recording the largest gains differ greatly, but their policies reveal a consistent pattern. Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Guyana and Uruguay have reduced hunger below 2.5 percent, the level below which the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reports the estimate simply as “less than 2.5 percent.” Since the mid 2000s, Peru has cut its rate from 17.9 to 5.7 percent; Bolivia, from 27.6 to 19.5 percent; Colombia, from 11.0 to 4.1 percent; and Panama, from 14.8 to 4.7 percent.

These findings, from the 2026 edition of The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, show that hunger falls when agricultural, economic and social policies reinforce one another. Social protection preserves purchasing power. Agricultural investment raises productivity. Rural infrastructure connects farmers to markets. School meals and cash transfers protect vulnerable families while creating demand for locally produced food.

The gains, however, remain fragile and uneven.

The 2026 Middle East crisis poses a less uniform threat here than in Africa or Asia. Latin America and the Caribbean produces more crude oil than it consumes, and some energy exporters could benefit from higher prices. But this regional average conceals the exposure of many Central American and Caribbean economies that depend heavily on imported fuels and remain vulnerable to rising energy, fertilizer, transportation and food import costs. The crisis will create winners and losers within the region, not leave it untouched.

The sharpest divide is in the Caribbean. Its hunger rate edged up to 16.6 percent in 2025, nearly five times the rate in South America, while moderate or severe food insecurity reached 52 percent, the highest of any subregion.

Haiti is the most extreme case. Its hunger rate rose from 47.7 to 51.4 percent, and more than half the population faces acute food insecurity. Haiti is the only country in the Americas, and one of five globally, where people face catastrophic levels of hunger. Armed violence, institutional breakdown, economic decline and climate shocks are erasing years of development, even without a formally declared war.

But hunger captures only one dimension of deprivation. The cost of a healthy diet reveals a larger structural problem.

Latin America and the Caribbean has the world’s most expensive healthy diet. In 2025, it cost an average of 4.91 purchasing power parity dollars per person per day, compared with 4.35 in Africa, 4.33 in Asia and 3.64 in Northern America and Europe. In the Caribbean, the cost reached 6.04 purchasing power parity dollars, the highest of any subregion, compared with 4.66 in Central America.

Because regional incomes are higher on average, the share of people unable to afford a healthy diet, 25.7 percent, remains far below Africa’s 66.1 percent and has been declining since 2021. But averages again conceal severe deprivation. In Haiti, 88.9 percent of people cannot afford a healthy diet.

Latin America and the Caribbean has therefore made genuine progress against calorie deprivation. But sufficient calories are no longer its only, or even its largest, food challenge. A diet that prevents hunger does not necessarily prevent anaemia, child stunting, obesity, diabetes and other forms of malnutrition. A healthy diet requires adequate fruits, vegetables and animal source foods, yet that diet costs more here than anywhere else.

The region’s high diet costs are driven particularly by vegetables and by what happens after food leaves the farm. Poor roads, limited rail networks, inadequate cold storage, unreliable energy, inefficient markets and post harvest losses raise costs as nutritious food moves through storage, processing, transportation, wholesale and retail. This is not simply a production problem. It is a midstream problem.

The policy response must therefore be more precise than simply spending more on agriculture. Broad farm subsidies will not repair broken supply chains. Governments should invest in horticultural productivity, rural roads, rail connections, cold chains, storage, packhouses, reliable energy, wholesale markets and competitive transportation. These investments would reduce losses, expand supply and lower the price of fruits, vegetables and other nutrient rich foods.

Sequencing also matters. Expanding school meals, cash transfers or food vouchers before supply can respond may raise local prices and exclude the consumers these programs are intended to support. Investment in production and supply chains must precede, or at least accompany, measures that stimulate demand.

A decade ago, Brazil, Peru, the Dominican Republic and Colombia might have appeared to be unrelated success stories. We now know that their gains came from deliberate investments in social protection and agricultural productivity.

Making healthy diets affordable will require the same determination, directed this time toward the infrastructure, logistics and markets that move nutritious food to consumers. The immediate priority is to extend the region’s progress to the Caribbean and, most urgently, to Haiti.

Latin America and the Caribbean has shown that hunger can fall. It must now prove that a healthy diet need not remain a privilege.

Excerpt:

Credit: Mauricio Morales Source UNESCO

By Alon Ben-Meir
NEW YORK, Jul 23 2026 (IPS)

Under a new rule proposed by the Department of Homeland Security, the duration of “I visas” for foreign media will be slashed from renewable multi year periods—often up to five years—to a maximum of 240 days, and just 90 days for Chinese journalists. Renewals would no longer be a routine administrative step tied to continued employment and compliance with the law, but a discretionary privilege the government can grant or withhold at will.

Turning Journalist Visas into a Weapon

The Foreign Press Association and other media organizations have warned that such a regime will make it “impossible” for correspondents to do their jobs: they cannot build sources, understand the country’s complex politics, or maintain anything resembling a family life if their legal status expires every few months and is constantly subject to political whim. The Association of Foreign Press Correspondents in the United States rightly calls this a “flagrant attack on press freedom” designed to chill coverage by making unfavorable reporting a potential visa liability.

An Assault on the Spirit of the First Amendment

Formally, the First Amendment binds Congress, not consular officers or immigration regulators. But in substance, the proposed rule is a direct affront to the First Amendment’s core principle: that a free press must be able to scrutinize those in power without fear of retaliation.

By conditioning a journalist’s ability to live and work in the United States on repeated, discretionary renewals, the administration is creating precisely the climate of self censorship that the First Amendment was meant to prevent. If a reporter knows that a critical story about the president or his allies might translate into a denied extension, the line between immigration policy and political reprisal evaporates.

This is not a hypothetical danger. The rule expressly allows the government to scrutinize the “content” a journalist is covering when deciding whether to grant an extension, opening the door to ideological filtering of who gets to report from the United States. That logic is indistinguishable from the methods long used by authoritarian regimes that the United States has historically condemned.

A Tool for Selective Punishment

The proposal also creates a ready made instrument for selective punishment of journalists from countries with which the Trump administration has tense or adversarial relations. The singling out of Chinese journalists for especially harsh 90 day limits is an explicit signal that Washington is prepared to wield visa policy as a geopolitical stick, not a neutral administrative tool.

Once this precedent is established, nothing prevents the administration from tightening the screw further on reporters from other states whose governments it wishes to pressure—or punish. The result would be a two tiered press landscape in which journalists from favored countries enjoy relative stability, while those from disfavored states face constant uncertainty and the implicit demand to “behave.”

Collateral Damage to US Society and Industry

The damage, however, would not be confined to newsrooms. International coverage of the United States is a critical artery for sectors that depend on global visibility and confidence, including finance, higher education, entertainment, sports, tourism, and cultural institutions. If it becomes prohibitively expensive or logistically impossible for foreign outlets to station correspondents in the US for more than a few months, many will simply relocate their hubs elsewhere.

That relocation carries a cost: fewer nuanced stories about American democracy, markets, universities, and culture, and more reliance on second hand or adversarial narratives. For a country that still claims leadership of a “free world,” deliberately undermining the global visibility of its own society is more than self defeating; it is profoundly hypocritical.

Undermining Treaty Commitments and Global Standing

There is an additional, often overlooked dimension: these restrictions risk clashing with US obligations under the UN Headquarters Agreement and related arrangements governing access for foreign journalists covering the United Nations. New York is not only an American city; it is the seat of an international organization whose work depends on open media access from all member states.

For decades, Washington has rightly insisted that host states of international institutions must guarantee access to the press and avoid politicizing visas. If the United States itself begins to weaponize journalist visas, it hands every authoritarian government a ready made excuse to do the same, eroding what remains of an already fragile global norm.

What Must Be Done

This proposal is not inevitable. It is a regulatory measure that can be challenged, delayed, and ultimately defeated through a combination of legal action, congressional oversight, diplomatic pressure, and public mobilization. Media organizations, civil liberties groups, universities, and US industries that depend on international coverage should submit formal complaints, petition Congress to block implementation, and prepare litigation arguing that the rule is arbitrary, discriminatory, and incompatible with the constitutional protection of a free press.

Foreign governments and international bodies, including the UN, should make it clear that undermining foreign press access in the United States will invite reciprocal restrictions on American journalists abroad—further isolating US audiences from the world. And American citizens, who ultimately bear the cost of an information starved public sphere, must insist that their government not abuse immigration law as a backdoor censorship tool.

It is no accident that Trump, who is openly hostile to independent media, now seeks to transform visas into levers of control over who may report on it. If this rule stands, it will not only harm thousands of foreign journalists and their families; it will further entrench a creeping authoritarianism in America that fears scrutiny above all else, and that is precisely why it must be stopped.

Dr Alon Ben-Meir is President, Institute for Humanitarian Conflict Resolution

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Excerpt:

Sunday’s World Cup final focused world attention on the stench of corruption, past and current, surrounding some of its main protagonists, including Argentina, and the presidents of FIFA, Argentina and the main host nation.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

In the run-up, Argentina committed the most fouls — largely in midfield to disrupt their opponents’ play — but only received a controversial red card in the final. It had the most opponents’ goals disallowed but never conceded a penalty.

Of course, there are always subjective elements in applying football rules, and it is difficult to prove foul play. But it is suspicious when referees refuse to use a video-assisted referee (VAR) to check for fouls.

In Argentina’s first game, Messi stepped on an Algerian opponent’s Achille’s tendon with his studs up. Such an offence would typically get a red card, but in this case, there was no card or VAR check.

As many presume, FIFA would not allow the biggest star of world football, now playing in the US league, to get a match ban at the start of the tournament; it would have been a business disaster.

Many believe the ‘inconsistent’ use of rules and VAR checks helped Argentina reach yet another World Cup final. With VAR, the inconsistent application of rules and procedures, such as awarding cards, can tip games with narrow margins in a team’s favour.

Iggy Rodriguez

While controversial refereeing and VAR decisions were common in this tournament, Argentina has been accused more than any other team. Many believe the level football field was tilted to favour Argentina and its superstar, Messi.

Such advantages only work at the World Cup level if the team is highly competent and competitive, which Argentina certainly is. The latest World Cup has seriously tarnished the reputation of FIFA and football itself.

Billionaire haven
Meanwhile, Argentine President Javier Milei is trying to remove most remaining restrictions on foreign ownership of Argentine land.

A day after the England semi-final, the Argentine Senate began debating Milei’s bill on the “inviolability of private property”. If passed, it would repeal a 2011 law limiting the acquisition and ownership of rural land by foreigners.

As foreign purchases of Argentine land surged after its late 20th century crisis, its Congress limited sales to foreigners. Already, 13.2 million hectares, or 5% of Argentina, are foreign owned. The Milei government now wants to eliminate remaining restrictions on land sales to foreigners.

Foreign ownership of Argentine land is concentrated in specific areas such as Patagonia, rich in energy and mineral resources. Once approved, the bill will allow foreigners to own such strategic areas with water, minerals and foreign borders.

Peter Thiel, famous for arguing ‘competition is for losers’, is promoting the privatisation of public land by creating charter cities such as Prospera Inc in Honduras.

Thiel recently moved to Buenos Aires, where he is believed to be advising the Milei government. Apparently, he envisions Argentina as an economic haven cum ‘laboratory’ for his investments.

Forbes reports Milei is trying to attract billionaires like Thiel to his “new land of freedom” with a full-citizenship-by-investment scheme and by eliminating property ownership restrictions.

Milei scolded Argentina’s footballers and fans for protesting Britain’s ongoing rule of the Falkland Islands at the England semi-final as his government tries to sell off the most valuable rural Argentine land.

As the dispute between Honduras and Prospera Inc. has shown, once sovereign land is transferred into foreign hands protected by international investment treaties, getting that land back is nearly impossible.

From Nazi to Zionist refuge
Milei enjoys Netanyahu’s and Trump’s support, both of whom want him to stay in power.

Asked why he supported Argentina in the World Cup, Netanyahu made clear it had more to do with Milei than Messi. “Milei is a huge friend of Israel”, recently calling himself the “most Zionist president on the planet”.

Patagonia was identified as a possible site for the establishment of a Jewish State by Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, in the late 19th century. After World War Two, the southern cone of South America became a haven for fascist war criminals fleeing Europe.

Milei’s government has cut public spending and welfare benefits for Argentine citizens. During the last Argentine summer from December to February, vast Patagonian forests went up in flames after Milei cut Argentina’s fire-fighting budget by 80%!

Many believe the government has agreed to allow Israeli settlement on the scorched earth after an Israeli was caught setting fire to 17,000 acres in Chilean Patagonia over a decade ago.

Milei has already signed agreements with the Netanyahu government to grant Israeli citizens living in Argentina access to all government benefits, including pensions, maternity leave and disability allowance.

In the final, Argentina went down to Spain, one of a few European countries to oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the US-Israeli war against Iran, despite repeated threats by Trump.

Despite Spain’s conquistador and fascist past, much of the world supported Spain today against the land of Maradona and Messi, two of the most popular icons of the beautiful game.

Iggy Rodriguez is a Filipino artist and football enthusiast. His solo exhibition in Kuala Lumpur, ‘Under a Borrowed Sun’, runs till mid-August.

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Credit: Luke Dray/Stringer via Getty Images. Source IMF

By Martin Schindler, Nikola Spatafora and Andrew Tiffin
WASHINGTON DC, Jul 22 2026 (IPS)

A farmer in Kenya gets weather and planting advice on a basic phone. A teacher in Nigeria uses a chatbot to help students catch up in math. South Africa’s revenue authority uses data analytics to better target tax audits. These are not futuristic examples from Silicon Valley. They are early signs of the broader transformation that artificial intelligence (AI) could bring to sub-Saharan Africa.

AI will reshape the global economy. The question for Africa is whether it rides the wave or gets left behind.

Transformative potential

Our research shows AI’s promise, but it also points to significant risks and challenges. At current levels of preparedness, we estimate that AI will add just 0.2 percent to the region’s GDP over the next decade—little more than a rounding error. However, if countries can put the right foundations in place to accelerate adoption and extend the impact of AI beyond today’s digitally connected firms, the gains could rise to about 4 percent over the decade—nearly half a percentage point of additional growth a year.

That extra growth is critical given Africa’s vast jobs challenge. By 2030, sub-Saharan Africa will account for roughly half of new entrants into the global labor force. But the issue is not only the number of jobs needed—it is also their quality. Most workers are still in informal microenterprises or smallholder agriculture, where productivity is far below that of formal firms.

For the region, AI’s main promise is not about replacing office workers, but boosting productivity across the economy—helping informal firms manage inventory, enabling farmers to increase yields, and supporting mid-sized firms to transition to formality and export readiness.

The risk is that the opposite happens. AI adoption in sub-Saharan Africa currently lags well behind every other region. If richer economies race ahead while African firms and governments lag, the productivity gap between the region and the rest of the world will only widen.

A different reality

Aid flows have always fluctuated. But this episode stands apart.

The recent cuts are large and broadly simultaneous across countries. They are driven by donor decisions rather than changes in recipient economies. And they come at a time when traditional buffers are weaker: multilateral institutions and NGOs, which have often cushioned past declines, are themselves facing funding constraints. While non-traditional donors, such as China and the Gulf States, have grown their aid presence in the region, the magnitudes are not able to cover the reduction in traditional donors.

The cuts are also difficult to manage because they follow six years of successive shocks—including the pandemic, tighter global financial conditions, and food and energy crises—that have already eroded fiscal space.

Delivering on AI’s promise

Two priorities for AI adoption stand out.

First, countries must build the foundations for broad adoption.

AI depends on reliable electricity, affordable broadband and data infrastructure, and workers with digital skills. That means investing in power and connectivity, supporting regional data infrastructure where viable, and strengthening digital and AI literacy through education and training. Countries in Africa do not need to develop the world’s most powerful AI models. But they do need the capacity to adopt, adapt, and scale AI quickly.

Second, build trust—and scale.

AI can widen inequality if its benefits are concentrated among large firms, skilled workers, and urban hubs. It also creates risks around privacy, cybersecurity, misinformation, and dependence on foreign providers. Governments need clear and practical rules on data, competition, consumer protection, cybersecurity, and the public sector’s use of AI. Regional cooperation will also be essential. Many African economies are too small to build AI ecosystems alone. But together they can create the scale needed for infrastructure, data standards, regulation, and markets.

AI in Africa is not just a technology policy issue—it is central to the region’s growth strategy. Africa does not need to win the race to build cutting-edge AI models, but it must find ways to use AI widely, cheaply, and safely. The window is narrow. Over the next debate, Africa’s young and growing workforce will either find more productive jobs, or watch the global productivity gap widen further. The outcome will not be shaped in Silicon Valley, but in the choices made across governments, schools, farms, and firms from Dakar to Dar es Salaam.

Martin Schindler is an advisor, Nikola Spatafora is a senior economist, and Andrew Tiffin is a deputy division chief, all in the IMF’s African Department.

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau