Stories written by Baher Kamal
Baher Kamal is Senior Advisor to IPS Director General on Africa & the Middle East. He is an Egyptian-born, Spanish-national, secular journalist, with over 43 years of experience. Since the late 70s, he specialised in all development related issues, as well as international politics. He also worked as Senior Information Expert for the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership at the European Commission in Brussels, and as the first-ever Information Officer and Spokesperson at UNEP’s Mediterranean Action Plan in Athens. Kamal speaks Spanish, Arabic, English and Italian.
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European politicians continue to run in all directions to find a way out of their energy crisis. One of them – Simonetta Sommaruga, the Swiss Environment Minister, asked people to ‘shower together’. Others are competing to grant the business of transporting energy from the North of Africa to the continent. All this is not new.
Make no mistake. Violence against women has been perpetuated, specially when it comes to those who have already been deprived of their basic human rights, as it is the case of rural women in over two-thirds of the world.
A common feature to religions – including the monotheistic ones – is that groups of males have self-proclaimed themselves as the source for interpreting the “Word of God,” shaping them, and spreading them among the peoples of good faith.
Africa. The birthplace of “Homo Sapiens.” The land of plenty. The origin of farming. The richest region in terms of natural resources. And human capital. Home to over 1.3 billion humans, continues to be looted.
While cities are seen as a symbol of glamour and comfort for a number of their residents, over one billion people continue to live in overcrowded settlements with inadequate housing. And their number is rising every single day.
These are facts, not guesses: about 1.3 billion tons of food is wasted and lost… every single year, the equivalent of one ton per each of the one billion hungry people, many of them are those who produced the food.
Have you eaten today – or are sure you will? The answer depends on where you were born and where you live now. If you are Spanish or live here, you likely did or will, provided that you are not one of this European country’s 900.000 inhabitants who face some sort of hunger, malnutrition or undernourishment.
Day after day, the world's scientific community, based on solid investigations, elaborates dozens of studies identifying the causes of the existing emergencies facing humanity. They also prepare understandable summaries and conclusions and propose feasible solutions to the current crises and ways to prevent major future risks.
While women in rich societies are paid around 25% less than men for equal jobs, those living in impoverished countries receive by far much lower salaries, if any at all.
More than two-thirds of 10-year-olds are unable to read and understand a simple text. This shocking finding should be enough to be alarmed about the horrifying fate of an entire generation. But there is much more.
Both mainstream media, international bodies and human rights defenders continue to rightly denounce the Taliban's inhuman abuses against the Afghan people’s basic rights, in particular those of women and girls.
Shortly before the 25 August approval by the Spanish Parliament of the government’s plan to save energy, the country’s right and far-right opposition parties revived their debate about an earlier suggestion of not wearing neckties in the Spanish Congress and Senate and other official institutions.
‘There is a prevailing doctrine among the right and far-right political parties who are still in the opposition and are most likely to jump to power in those countries where they are not already ruling. It is the doctrine of “the worse things go, the better for us.”
A couple of decades ago in Athens, a conversation over a ‘souvlaki’ and wine dinner with a young Greek economist led to talking about democracy. Asked for his opinion, he said “By then, when philosophers like Aristotle formulated their theories about democracy, the society was dominated by the rich.”
While often too quickly attributing -quasi exclusively- the world unprecedented hunger tragedy to the current proxy war in Ukraine, other major causes remain hidden in plain sight.
The benchmark for world food commodity prices declined “significantly” in July, with major cereal and vegetable oil prices recording double-digit percentage declines.
Nothing --or too little-- has changed since Hollywood started producing its spectacular western movies. Rough men, ranchers, mercenary killers, saloons, cowboys, guns, gold fever, the ‘good sheriff’… and the ‘bad indians”. Those movies were anything but fiction–they were real history.
Human beings have proved to be capable of producing innumerable practical inventions while much too often making the worst use of them. Take the case, per example, of how criminal groups heavily rely on digital platforms to trap and enslave their victims also for extracting and selling their organs.
Strangely enough, two major scientific findings, both announced in July, did not attribute the current dangerous world’s disasters to the proxy war unfolding in Ukraine.