Informal traders at Malanga market on the outskirts of Maputo, Mozambique. Most of the products on offer are purchased in Zimbabwe or South Africa. Credit: Nastasya Tay/IPS

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Apr 18 2014 (IPS)

As the World Bank wrapped up its semi-annual joint meetings with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) here last weekend, it reaffirmed its commitment to bringing extreme poverty below three percent of the global population by 2030 while increasing the income of the poorest 40 percent of the population of each country.

However, some suggest that in sub-Saharan Africa, this may be impossible.It’s not easy to fix a country, rebuild institutions and get growth going while making sure it’s consistent, shared and inclusive. Poverty pockets exist in the large, vital countries.

“Even under our ‘best case’ scenario of accelerated consumption growth and income redistribution from the 10 percent richest to the 40 percent poorest segment of population, the 2030 poverty rate would be around 10 percent,” says a new report from the African Development Bank (AfDB). “A more realistic goal for the region seems to be reducing poverty by a range from half to two thirds.”

Although extreme poverty will likely remain high in Africa by 2030, AfDB’s chief economist, Mthuli Ncube, the new report’s chief author, painted a cautiously optimistic picture as to the prospects for poverty reduction in Africa during an interview with IPS.

Q: Even though the World Bank goal is to reduce extreme poverty by less than three percent globally by 2030, Africa won’t be able to meet that goal. Can you give us more background as to why that is?

A: Our view is that it’s a good goal to have … but it differs from region to region. The region that is likely to achieve this ambitious goal is Asia, not Africa. Although Africa has made tremendous progress, there’s still a lot of work to do. Under our baseline scenario, Africa will achieve something like 25 to 27 percent poverty levels in the year 2030. Currently it’s about 48 percent. So in this case we’re talking about something like a 50 percent reduction, maybe.

It’s a monumental task. Why? We’ve some challenges in Africa. One is fragility. If you look at some of the large countries with a lot of poverty – like the [Democratic Republic of Congo], it is a fragile country. It’s not easy to fix a country, rebuild institutions and get growth going while making sure it’s consistent, shared and inclusive. Poverty pockets exist in the large, vital countries.

Even if you have growth, growth is just simply not shared. If you use a more inclusive definition of growth and poverty reduction … service delivery around health care and education is very difficult. These are large countries where governments are decentralised.

Q: Nigeria is one of the more populous countries, and it’s now surpassed South Africa as Africa’s largest economy. Yet it still seems like there’s a large degree of extreme poverty there. How does income inequality play into extreme poverty?

A: In Nigeria, the new figure says that the size of the economy is 510 billion dollars, larger than South Africa. Income per capita has gone up to about 2,400 dollars, so it looks much better than before. But after this announcement, it doesn’t change people’s lives. They’re still poor. So it becomes an overall aggregate figure and that speaks to inequality.

Inequality is high and it also has a way of slowing a country down in its poverty-reduction drive. The more poverty you have, the less productive you become, which impacts your ability to grow.

Our analysts show that the long-term [obstacle] in dealing with extreme poverty is to get the children of the poor into school, to have them stay in school and finish school. That is the only way. Education is the biggest driver of getting people out of extreme poverty … and into the middle class. And then, because they all have decent incomes and jobs, they will keep their children out of poverty.

Let’s not forget, in the interim, the role of short-term social protection programmes. Brazil had an incredible track record under [President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva], with a programme called Bolsa Familia that got 30 to 40 million people out of poverty through social protection programmes.

There are countries in Africa trying to do that – Rwanda, South Africa and Ethiopia. Ethiopia is the one country that I think is going to rotate out of extreme poverty by 2030, so it’s going to be the most successful in dealing with poverty out of the large-population countries.

Ultimately there need to be some short-term measures, but the long-term measure is education.

Q: Which sub-Saharan African countries are doing particularly well at reducing extreme poverty?

A: Ethiopia is the one that we can really highlight because it’s a large population, nearly 85 million, and they’re dealing with the reduction of extreme poverty as a problem. First, the big story about poverty reduction is sustaining growth, and Ethiopia’s had a wonderful growth rate for the past 10 years.

Second is making sure that it’s inclusive, shared and creates opportunity. It should create jobs and finance services for access to education, health, housing and so forth. All those are strategies for sharing wealth.

It’s also about social protection programmes that keep the people out of poverty and then allow them to make progress. Let me tell you this story about the Grinka Programme in Rwanda. You leave one pregnant cow to a poor household, and that cow will have a calf and another one and so forth. And if it’s a female calf, you pass that calf on to the next poor family and then the next poor family.

In the next few years, that programme is going to take about 300,000 families in Rwanda out of poverty. Why? These families can harvest the milk and consume it. Secondly, they can sell the milk and the manure, but also use [the manure] to grow vegetables, which they can then sell and make money. So you create a whole economic ecosystem around the cow.

I even suggested this for Somalia. Maybe there’s an asset-replacement programme that could cause similar results elsewhere. This is a case of what I would call productive social protection, because you’re giving someone an asset that produces something and it actually works.

Excerpt:

Young Bangladeshi women raise their fists at a protest in Shahbagh. Credit: Kajal Hazra/IPS

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Apr 3 2014 (IPS)

Although half the world’s population is under 25 years old, young people in more than two dozen countries feel that their opportunities for educational, economic and societal advancement are limited, according to new research released here Thursday.

Researchers say the results should help to drive and prioritise both public and private investment in services.“The youth bulge can become a security, economic and humanitarian worry, and even maybe a disaster, or it can become a resource for development and change.” -- William Reese

In order to assess the many factors that contribute to healthy lifestyles for youth, the International Youth Foundation (IYF) and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the latter a think tank here, put together the Global Youth Wellbeing Index.

The index aggregates data from 30 countries, representing around 70 percent of the world’s youth population, and rates the wellbeing of youths in each country on a scale from zero to one.

“This is certainly … one of the biggest issues we’re dealing with in the world today,” Christopher Nassetta, the CEO of Hilton Worldwide, the index’s principle funder, said at the index’s launch.

“It hasn’t been an issue that really has been discussed around the world the way that, in my mind, it should be, in the sense of really getting governments, civil society and business … to really think about the issues.”

Nassetta says each of these sectors now needs to figure out not only how to attack the problems that can be associated with youth wellbeing, but also the “opportunity”.

Approximately 85 percent of youths under the age of 25 live in developing countries, in some countries comprising almost 40 percent of the total population.

Development advocates and economists suggest such numbers highlight the importance of providing such a large segment of the population with the resources necessary to drive economic growth while maintaining adequate health, security and stability.

“The youth bulge can become a security, economic and humanitarian worry, and even maybe a disaster, or it can become a resource for development and change,” said William Reese, IYF’s president.

Palestinian youth in the Old City of Jerusalem. Credit: Pierre Klochendler/IPS

The index collects data on youths between the ages of 15 and 24. Nearly all of this data, drawn from public, independent sources, is from 2008 or later.

The index then establishes 40 indicators to assess six major fields, or “domains”, of relevance to youthful wellbeing: safety and security, information and communication technology, citizen participation, economic opportunity, education, and health. It then determines each country’s overall ranking from the scores in each field.

In the 30 countries assessed, the average score for youths’ overall wellbeing is .576, with two-thirds of countries falling below the average. As for the averages for each specific domain, youths across the world fared best in health and worst in economic opportunity.

Australia has the highest rate of youth wellbeing with a score of .752, while Nigeria comes in last with .375.

Although the index only covers 30 countries at present, its creators hope that its publication will now encourage other countries to run their own wellbeing analyses, potentially encouraging data-driven investment in youth programming.

“A number of these data points are available in many of the countries not included in the index … but we did make some choices to be strategic and to have regional diversity, as well as income diversity, in this first index,” Nicole Goldin, the director of the CSIS department that spearheaded the index, told IPS.

“But to those countries that are not included, we hope that this index can be seen as a framework and a tool so that governments, young people, implementing organisations, corporations and any other stakeholders can take it, run their own wellbeing analysis, and see how they may compare and drive their own policies, programmes and investments to better serve the interests of youth.”

In July 2012, under the leadership of 23-year-old Patrick Arathe, a group of youth without parents started their own farming enterprise in Munda, Solomon Islands. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

Data-driven investment

IYF and CSIS hope that governments, civil society and businesses will use the index’s findings to better evaluate and calibrate programmes designed to build youth capacity.

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” said Nassetta. “There’s been a massive lack of transparency and data with which to make good investments, whether that’s human capital or financial capital, so the wellbeing index is the start of that.”

For instance, IYF’s Reese noted that developing countries’ heavy investment in certain sectors, like education, have yet to yield desirable results.

“[The] domains can tell us where to invest intelligently,” Reese said. “That can be the host government, but even in some of the poorest countries in the world, their largest expenditure is in education, it’s just not being well spent.”

Reese emphasised that the index is not adversarial in nature, but rather designed for countries to compare and contrast their relative strengths and weakness, and to learn from each other.

“The index will help us compare and frame some needs and look at countries as to where they’re doing better and where they have some gaps,” he said. “Then we can compare across countries – not to name and shame at all, but to look further so we invest better.”

In addition to emphasising the need for more data-driven policies, programmes and investments, many at Thursday’s unveiling of the index highlighted a key component necessary to drive those changes: youths themselves.

“If you’re talking about a post-2015 development agenda, one thing missing from that, based on a youth perspective, is the idea of what the ‘youth problem’ is,” said Angga Dwi Martha, the 23-year-old Youth Advocate at the United Nations Population Fund.

“I think this index can give a very general identification of the problem. And then, as young people, we can [relay] this to our government, the private sector and civil society.”

Others argued that the best way to figure out “what works” to improve youth wellbeing is by actively including and engaging youths in the development process.

According to Emmanuel Jimenez, the World Bank’s director of public-sector evaluations, “We, as older people who design policy, often forget, or don’t do enough, to consult with the ultimate beneficiaries, which are young people.”

Demanding a right to health at the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan in 2011. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Apr 1 2014 (IPS)

Major foreign assistance donors have once again delayed the release of a report meant to measure transparency, accountability and cooperation of aid effectiveness.

The repeated delay of the voluntary U.N.-guided report, which was originally slated for release in January but was bumped for at least a second time last week, has prompted some aid groups to question donor countries’ commitment to aid transparency. The report would be the first of its kind."If your donors aren’t going to disclose where they’re going to build, how does a farmer know to grow a crop for export or for domestic consumption?” -- Gregory Adams

“If you don’t let state business leaders know where you’re going to build a new road then business owners can’t plan their investment,” Gregory Adams, the director of aid effectiveness at Oxfam America, an anti-poverty group, told IPS.

“We see this play out in the development sphere. If your donors aren’t going to disclose where they’re going to build, how does a farmer know to grow a crop for export or for domestic consumption?”

The push for this novel report emerged in 2011, when government officials, industry representatives and civil society members met in Busan, South Korea, at a conference hosted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a grouping of wealthy countries.

The conference spurred donor governments, along with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), to the create a new body, the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (GPEDC), which emphasises the “ownership” of aid recipients over development strategies alongside strengthened transparency and accountability for aid programming.

The global monitoring framework on aid effectiveness would assess and track progress on the agreements made in Busan, and was slated for release in early 2014, but it has been postponed several times.

The Busan principles call for the ownership of development projects by developing countries themselves, a results-oriented approach, inclusive partnerships with aid beneficiaries, and mutual accountability and transparency. They emphasise collaboration and partnerships with aid beneficiaries to give them a greater input into the design of development strategies while allowing them to ensure that aid money is used on actual, effective development projects.

“It’s a fundamental question of who drives development. At Oxfam, we believe that … aid doesn’t cause development, people cause development,” Adams said.

“Aid no more cures poverty than a shovel digs a ditch or a hammer builds a house. You actually need people who drive that, and if you deny people who drive your development basic information about what you’re doing, you’re not only missing opportunities but also frustrating the people you’re trying to help lead their own development.”

The report was originally slated for release before an upcoming GPEDC meeting on Apr. 15 in Mexico City, so that donors could assess progress made on the Busan agreement while developing new strategies for their implementation.

While it is unclear why the report’s public release has been repeatedly delayed, some analysts see a political motive. It appears the report’s findings will highlight the lack of progress made in implementing the Busan reforms.

Little progress

Oxfam and other watchdog groups have raised concerns regarding the report’s delay and, more generally, the implementation of the Busan principles from both developed and developing countries.

“The early findings of the GDEPC monitoring evidence show that overall little progress has been made, though they are being sold as ‘glass half full’,” Oxfam America wrote last week in a blog post. “For a number of indicators, it is too early to tell.”

“But of particular concern are the indicators that measure aspects of country ownership … Unlike previous reporting on aid effectiveness, data on how individual governments have performed will not be made available in the full monitoring report, with the exception of the transparency indicator.”

Hannah Ryder, a team leader at the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID), also notes that while the report measures 10 indicators, the individual success of each country is only ranked on one indicator – transparency. She says this is purely for political reasons, suggesting that some donors are unwilling to publicly disclose their performance on most indicators.

“UNDP and OECD are organisations that are not independent of the countries and organisations submitting the data,” Ryder wrote last week in a DFID blog entry. “And this is why ranking is too political for them.”

Ryder continued: “The key reason why transparency is able to be ranked in the report is that there is already an independently published report on transparency that has become well-known and well-respected … But for the other nine indicators and issues raised in [the] forthcoming report, no such credible, independent rankings exist yet.”

She refers to the Aid Transparency Index, published by the global watchdog group Publish What You Fund. The index also relies on a reporting framework that stems from the commitments donors made during the Busan conference.

While Oxfam’s Adams said that transparency and aid disclosure is a relatively new concept for development organisations, he stressed its importance.

“When that data is out there, it permits people to do two things,” he said. “One, they can think in a more sophisticated way about how they themselves can invest to best take advantage of these development investments. And secondly, it allows them to demand accountability for what’s being promised.”

Adams pointed to Malawi, where donor transparency in recent years has yielded tangible medical benefits for local communities.

“Additional information on where pharmaceuticals were being distributed allowed communities to better understand where those pharmaceuticals were stocked,” he said. “So it meant service delivery was able to improve.”

The increased emphasis on funding transparency and an inclusive, results-driven approach to aid comes at a time when all donor countries, including the United States, are undergoing tightened fiscal constraints.

“I think [monitoring and evaluation] has been bubbling around for a while now, but over the last two years it’s really coalesced into this specific focus as we’ve seen downward pressures on the budget,” Casey Dunning, a senior policy analyst at the Centre for Global Development, a think tank here, told IPS.

“I think it can be directly tied to budget austerity and the shift away from new programming. The emphasis has shifted to how we are using our resources and how we are making the most of what we actually have.”

Activist shareholders hope that publicly assessing and disclosing the financial risk associated with certain carbon-intensive operations will dissuade Exxon and other energy companies from extracting oil and natural gas in high-risk, environmentally sensitive areas like deep water and tar sands. Credit: Bigstock

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Mar 25 2014 (IPS)

As the international community and the U.S. government place a heightened emphasis on reducing carbon emissions as a way to combat global climate change, shareholders have convinced the oil-and gas giant ExxonMobil to publicly disclose the risk that strengthened regulation could pose to its profits.

The Texas-based company announced its intentions last week and agreed to publish a carbon asset risk report on its website by the end of the month.“If Big Oil can’t redirect capital to low-carbon energy alternatives, investors will.” -- Natasha Lamb

“Investors … are looking at the energy market and starting to see shifts that they’re concerned about,” Danielle Fugere, president of As You Sow, an advocacy group that spearheaded shareholder pressure on the issue, told IPS.

“Those range from the potential for carbon regulations to what happens if the world actually gets smart and works to limit carbon in order to prevent global warming. The investors are looking at increasing cost curves for non-conventional fuels.”

Activist shareholders hope that publicly assessing and disclosing the financial risk associated with certain carbon-intensive operations will dissuade Exxon and other energy companies from extracting oil and natural gas in high-risk, environmentally sensitive areas like deep water and tar sands.

Exxon’s decision was largely due to pressure from As You Sow and a key shareholder, Arjuna Capital. In return, Arjuna Capital and As You Sow dropped a shareholder resolution that would have put the issue to a vote at Exxon’s annual shareholder meeting.

“If we are going to avoid catastrophic climate change, we can only burn one third of [known] carbon reserves,” Natasha Lamb, the director of equity research and shareholder engagement at Arjuna Capital, told IPS. “So the big question is, if regulation market forces prevent oil companies from burning that other two-thirds, why are they spending so much in shareholder value exploiting more?

“As investors, we want to understand what kind of scenario analyses they’re running taking these huge risks into account, and if they’re profitably allocating shareholder capital.”

Investors ultimately hope that a combination of increased regulations on carbon emissions and subsequent shareholder concerns will prompt large energy firms to diversify their assets and invest in more sustainable forms of energy.

“Forward-thinking companies need to re-assess how they allocate shareholder capital and act strategically to shift their business models,” said Lamb. “If Big Oil can’t redirect capital to low-carbon energy alternatives, investors will.”

Lamb also believes that Exxon’s decision will set a precedent and encourage other companies to similarly disclose their carbon asset risks, lest they alienate their investors.

“There are 10 other shareholder proposals this year asking companies to report on carbon emissions risks,” Lamb said. “I would expect that, after Exxon’s announcement, you’ll see increasing disclosures from fossil fuel companies.”

The move also signifies that Exxon, which has a history of lobbying against climate change legislation, may start to take the issue more seriously in public – particularly as shareholders become concerned about the effects of carbon emissions regulations on the energy giant.

“I think it’s important that Exxon has questioned whether climate change is occurring, and I think the company’s finally saying, ‘Yes, climate change is real,’” said As You Sow’s Fugere.

While Exxon initially challenged the resolution with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the country’s main corporate regulator, the SEC overruled the challenge. Although the SEC had instituted a requirement compelling companies to publicly report on the impacts of climate change on their businesses, Congress passed legislation that blocked that mandate in 2010.

Stranded assets

Along with the rest of the international community, the United States and European Union have agreed to limit the average increase in global temperatures to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Yet climate scientists calculate that if humans burn more than a third of the world’s current proven carbon reserves between 2000 and 2050, there is a 20 percent risk that the global temperature will rise beyond this level. Non-profit advocacy groups like the Carbon Tracker Initiative have thus coined the term “unburnable carbon” to describe the excess reserves that would raise the global temperature by more than two degrees above pre-industrial levels.

Nonetheless, in 2012, the 200 largest publicly traded fossil fuel companies invested approximately 674 billion dollars to discover and develop new carbon reserves. Because companies cannot utilise new reserves without breaking the international community’s agreed-upon standards, some shareholders consider the exploration and development of additional carbon reserves to be a “stranded asset”, an asset that is obsolete and must therefore be recorded as a loss on a company’s balance sheets.

The Carbon Tracker Initiative’s 2013 report on unburnable carbon and the large amount of shareholder money invested in new carbon reserves prompted Ceres, a group of 70 international investors with more than three trillion dollars in assets, to pressure the top 45 energy companies to assess and report on the risks that a global decrease in carbon demand could pose.

Such initiatives are already starting to have a public impact. Last January, for instance, Ceres’s shareholders successfully pressured FirstEnergy, an Ohio-based utility company, into studying and reporting on what it could do to reduce carbon emissions in line with President Barack Obama’s goal of reducing total U.S. carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050.

Additionally, last year As You Sow filed a vote with shareholders at CONSOL Energy, a natural gas and coal firm, requesting that the company report on the risk of stranded assets derived from carbon emissions. While CONSOL was resistant to the request on the grounds that it already produces a corporate social responsibility report, nearly 20 percent of CONSOL shareholders voted in favour of the proposal, a figure that Fugere deems significant.

“Over a billion dollars in investor assets voted in favour of that,” said Fugere. “That was about a 20 to 22 percent ruling, depending on who you ask. When you have over 20 percent of your shareholders indicating it’s a concern, companies are going to take note.”

U.S. Native American leader Tom Goldtooth. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Mar 20 2014 (IPS)

Civil society and advocacy groups are warning that a prominent carbon-reduction initiative, aimed at curbing global emissions, is undermining land tenure rights for indigenous communities, putting their livelihoods at risk.

On Wednesday, an international dialogue here focused on the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation Plus (REDD+) programme, overseen primarily by the United Nations and World Bank.“As the carbon in living trees becomes another marketable commodity, the deck is loaded against forest peoples." -- Arvind Khare

The Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), a coalition of organisations focused on land tenure and policy reforms, presented new research highlighting the lack of legal protection and safeguards for indigenous communities living in forests.

“As the carbon in living trees becomes another marketable commodity, the deck is loaded against forest peoples and presents an opening for an unprecedented carbon grab by governments and investors,” said Arvind Khare, RRI’s executive director.

“Every other natural-resource investment on the international stage has disenfranchised indigenous peoples and local communities, but we were hoping REDD would deliver a different outcome. Their rights to their forests may be few and far between, but their rights to the carbon in the forests are non-existent.”

REDD+ provides a series of financial incentives and rewards for developing countries to reduce their carbon emissions resulting from deforestation.

The World Bank plays an active role in REDD+ through its Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) and the Forest Investment Programme (FIP), both of which are designed to encourage better forest conservation and stewardship.

However, watchdog groups say Latin American, African and Asian indigenous communities living in forests have yet to receive any REDD+ revenue streams from their respective governments.

“There has been no transfer of funds to the [indigenous] communities through the governmental REDD processes,” Khare told IPS. “And therefore, in most of these countries … no money has been transferred to the communities through these two major bodies [REDD+ and FCPF], which are actually piloting REDD in the world.”

RRI’s new research, which examines 23 countries, finds that only Mexico and Guatemala have laws meant to clarify tenure rights over carbon. Meanwhile, none of the countries have a legal framework or institutions in place to determine who receives REDD+ benefits for carbon emission reductions.

One-eighth the deforestation

In order to ensure that indigenous communities receive an appropriate share of the financial benefits from REDD+, many of the participants at Wednesday’s dialogue called on the programme’s overseers to explicitly link carbon rights with land tenure rights.

“Tenure must be a centrepiece of REDD …That recognition of local rights is essential to the viability of carbon markets,” said Alexandre Corriveau-Bourque, a tenure analyst at RRI.

“These observations are based not only on moral or legal grounds but on a growing body of academic literature demonstrating that communities with secure tenure have proven that they promote the permanence of forest carbon” – essentially, preventing deforestation – “often achieving better outcomes than state-protected areas.”

For instance, in areas of the Amazon where the land ownership rights of indigenous communities are respected and legally protected, the rate of deforestation is only one-eighth of the level in areas not under indigenous control.

When land tenure rights are not clearly recognised or legally protected, however, the potential for violent conflict, state repression and heightened deforestation increases.

“It’s also clear that insecure, unclear and unrecognised community tenure rights can lead to conflict and deforesting activities,” Corriveau-Bourque continued. “If governments decide that carbon is a public good and claim exclusive state ownership, as many have with mineral resources … it will add another layer of contestation and conflict in an already crowded field.”

In 2002, New Zealand declared state ownership of its carbon supplies, which actually resulted in an increase in deforestation. As a result, the government has since reformed the law to adapt a policy that gives communities and individuals more freedom to engage in the carbon trade.

According to RRI, 15 of the 21 countries with national planning documents for REDD+ noted that a major cause of deforestation and forest degradation was the absence of clear tenure policies.

Misattributed blame

In addition to the lack of clear land tenure rights, some analysts believe that the implementation of REDD+ will be detrimental to indigenous people as governments seek to misattribute and direct blame for deforestation towards local communities, rather than on the corporate interests operating in fragile forest ecosystems.

“The message coming from forest peoples is that they are being pressed from both sides,” Tom Griffiths, a coordinator with the Forest Peoples Programme, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“On the one hand, their forests are being given out without their knowledge and agreement to foreign companies for agricultural development and oil extraction. And on the other, they’re being pressed by these same climate initiatives, which are actually limiting their access to the forest.”

Griffiths suggested that the industrial sector is largely responsible for driving deforestation in many countries, but that subsistence farmers and poor people often get the blame.

He also notes that some analysts have characterised traditional rotational farming as “slash and burn” agriculture.

“There’s a deep prejudice in forest policymaking, and indeed the forest profession, against so-called slash and burn agriculture,” said Griffiths. “In fact, there’s a large amount of science to show that, with the right conditions, it is a fully sustainable form of land use and in fact can even enrich forest ecosystems.

“We’re very concerned that some of these REDD policies, forest climate policies, are not paying adequate attention to these obligations to protect customary rights to land and crucial customary systems or ways of using the land.”

Earlier this month, indigenous groups from around the world held an international conference on deforestation and local rights in Palangka Raya, Indonesia.

In addition to singling out agribusiness, infrastructure as well as mineral and energy extraction, they called for a halt to “green economy” projects, which they argued prohibit forest peoples’ “fundamental rights”.

In a declaration, the conference organisers directly criticized REDD+ both for its lack of progress on emissions reduction and for the restrictions it imposes on the rights of indigenous forest peoples to use their land.

“Global efforts promoted by agencies like the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), [REDD+] and the World Bank to address deforestation through market mechanisms are failing,” states the communiqué.

“Not just because viable markets have not emerged, but because these efforts fail to take account of the multiple values of forests and, despite standards to the contrary, in practice are failing to respect our internationally recognised human rights.”

Furthermore, the declaration indicated that organisations collaborating on initiatives like REDD+ have implemented development programmes that have themselves contributed to deforestation:

“Contradictorily, many of these same agencies are promoting the take-over of our peoples’ land and territories through their support for imposed development schemes, thereby further undermining national and global initiatives aimed at protecting forests.”

Advocacy groups like the Western Sahara Resource Watch (WSRW) contest the legality of foreign businesses, like Kosmos, working with the Moroccan government to exploit Western Saharan resources. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Mar 11 2014 (IPS)

Even as U.S. and Moroccan executives meet to discuss strengthening private sector ties between the two countries, advocacy groups are raising concerns about plans by a U.S. energy firm to explore for oil in the contested territory known as Western Sahara. 

Government and business leaders from the United States and Morocco are gathering in Rabat this week for the second annual Morocco-U.S. Business Development Conference. The Moroccan government hopes to capitalise on its 2006 free trade agreement with the United States and encourage U.S. investment in the country by presenting it as a gateway to European, Middle Eastern and African markets. “Morocco is not willing to allow the people the right to self-determination today, and the oil industry is becoming an obstacle in terms of putting pressure in Morocco to accept that right.” -- Erik Hagen

“There’s a lot going on in Morocco, and the question is how can it leverage what it has to attract American investments to Morocco that can then be directed to a European market or south to the African markets,” Jean AbiNader, the executive director of the Moroccan American Trade and Investment Centre, a non-profit established by Morocco’s King Mohammed VI, told IPS.

Morocco has placed a high emphasis on oil and gas exploration in its energy policy. At this week’s conference, participating energy companies, such as Dow Chemical, were given the option to attend sessions on Morocco’s energy sector, highlighting the potential for both renewable and carbon-based investment in the kingdom.

While international investors in renewable energy have long favoured Morocco, enabling the construction of solar plants and wind farms, U.S. and European corporations are also rushing to take advantage of concessions for possible oil reserves, some of which are potentially located in the Western Sahara, which many people view as under Moroccan occupation.

One such firm is the Texas-based Kosmos Energy, which has already begun offshore hydrocarbon exploration in three blocks of Morocco’s AgadirBasin. More controversially, Kosmos now intends to start oil exploration in an area off the Western Saharan coast, known as Cap Boujdour, in October.

Advocacy groups like the Western Sahara Resource Watch (WSRW) contest the legality of foreign businesses, like Kosmos, working with the Moroccan government to exploit Western Saharan resources.

“Morocco is not willing to allow the people the right to self-determination today, and the oil industry is becoming an obstacle in terms of putting pressure in Morocco to accept that right,” Erik Hagen, WSRW’s chair, told IPS.

“Sahrawis [indigenous Western Saharans] are standing on the sidelines of this project, waving their arms and telling companies to stop doing this on behalf of the Moroccan government. [These companies] are working with an occupying government.”

Corell opinion

After calling for Western Saharan independence from Spain, Morocco took control of the territory, which it calls the Southern Provinces, in 1976 after the Spanish withdrew. Following years of armed conflict between Morocco and the Algerian-backed Polisario Front, the international community established the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) in 1991.

MINURSO intended the referendum to determine whether the Western Sahara would become an independent state or part of Morocco, but the vote was never able to be implemented due to disagreements over who was eligible to take part. Unlike Morocco, the Polisario Front did not want to allow Moroccan settlers in the Western Sahara to participate in the referendum.

To date, no other state recognises Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara, which is on the United Nations list of Non Self-Governing Territories.

In 2002, Morocco awarded contracts for oil exploration in the Western Sahara to a U.S.-based company, Kerr McGee, and the French-based Total S.A. In response, the United Nations issued what is known as the Corell Opinion regarding the legality of resource extraction in Western Sahara.

Since then, however, both multinational energy firms and Western Saharan advocacy groups have construed the U.N. opinion to favour their respective stances.

The Corell Opinion recognises Morocco as the de facto administrative power of Western Sahara. But it also states that “while the specific contracts … are not in themselves illegal, if further exploration and exploitation activities were to proceed in disregard of the interests and wishes of the people of Western Sahara, they would be in violation of the principles of international law applicable to mineral resource activities in Non-Self-Governing Territories.”

AbiNader, with the Moroccan American Trade and Investment Centre, believes that Morocco’s resource-extraction activities are creating net economic benefits for the local Sahrawi population, as stipulated in the Corell Opinion.

OCP, Morocco’s state-owned phosphates company, “has done a really strenuous job,” he said. “They brought PricewaterhouseCoopers [an American consulting firm] in and did a two-year study of who’s accruing benefits from the Bou Craa mine in Western Sahara. Very clearly it’s not really contributing to their bottom line but it is creating jobs – it’s creating value added to the people in the community.”

Also citing the Corell Opinion, Kosmos Energy maintains that because Morocco purports to equitably and fairly distribute resources extracted from the Western Sahara with the native Sahrawi population, oil exploration and potential extraction in the territory will meet the international community’s standards for legality.

In a position statement, Kosmos highlights a 2013 report from King Mohammed VI’s Economic, Social, and Environmental Council (SCEC). The report declares that “the aim of the Council is to contribute to the collective effort required to rise to the challenge of achieving social cohesion, prosperity and equitable benefit from the resources” of Western Sahara.

However, WSRW’s Hagen said he doubts the intentions of the Moroccan government to adequately share the wealth with Sahrawis. Instead, he argues that the Sahrawis do not want the Moroccan government and multinational corporations exploiting their resources – which, he says, renders Kosmos’ activities illegal under the Corell Opinion.

Hagen also points to routine human rights abuses in both the Western Sahara and Morocco proper.

“The [U.N.] Special Rapporteur on Torture’s report from 2013 is very illustrative of how people are abused or tortured while in police custody, and that is frequent,” Hagen said. “Every week we hear reports of Sahrawis taken in by the police for a couple of days or a couple of hours and then released again.”

WSRW is not only calling on Kosmos to abandon its plans to explore in Western Sahara, but is also urging a U.S.-based drilling firm, Atwood Oceanics, not to provide Kosmos with the rig it has ordered for use in Cap Boujdour.

Neither Kosmos nor Atwood responded to IPS’s inquiries by deadline.

Advocacy and accountability groups are urging the U.S. Congress to enact new mechanisms that would allow it to hold multinational corporations accountable for rights infringements abroad.

At a congressional briefing on Thursday, legal experts and advocates from Amnesty International, the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable (ICAR) and Earthrights International proposed measures Congress could take to ameliorate corporate abuses abroad.“We understand that corporate lobbying is necessary, but at the same time there should be more transparency in that process in order to ensure justice.” -- Seema Joshi

“International law itself requires a country to provide a remedy to individuals who are harmed by citizens,” ICAR’s Gwynne Skinner, an associate professor of law at Willamette University College of Law, told IPS.

“So we’re failing if we’re not providing any remedies to victims who are hurt by our citizens and of course corporations are citizens now, right?” (Skinner was referring to a 2010 Supreme Court decision that allowed corporations to make unlimited political donations on the grounds that they are eligible for the same constitutional rights as individuals.)

Earthrights International and other legal advocacy groups have partnered to create a report card indexing the track record of each U.S. lawmaker on corporate accountability. Marco Simons, Earthrights International’s legal director, noted Congress’s lacklustre record on the issue.

“Unfortunately, so far the results have not been very pretty,” Simons said. “The average score in the Senate was 26.6 percent and 44.2 percent in the House. Twelve representatives and 45 senators received a score of zero.”

Representatives from Amnesty International called for increased transparency in corporate lobbying efforts.

“We are looking at a proposal to deftly deal with the corporate-government relationship,” said Seema Joshi, Amnesty International’s head of business and human rights. “We understand that corporate lobbying is necessary, but at the same time there should be more transparency in that process in order to ensure justice.”

Post-Kiobel

In particular, advocates are calling for reforms to the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), a unique law that allows foreign nationals to sue human rights abusers in U.S. courts. Last year, the Supreme Court significantly limited the scope of the statute against multinational corporations in a case known as Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum.

“Shell [a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Petroleum] and other multinational corporations are free to do business in the United States, and free to commit human rights abuses in other countries around the world, and not have any fear that the victims of those abuses would be able to gain access to a U.S. federal court to obtain justice for those abuses,” Simons said.

“This essentially contravenes the fundamental purpose of the Alien Tort Statute – to not provide protection in the United States for those who violate international law.”

In light of the Kiobel ruling, Earthrights and ICAR are calling on Congress to implement legislation that would explicitly allow victims to sue multinational corporations that operate in the United States for human rights abuses abroad, regardless of where in the world they’re based.

On Thursday, the panellists noted the difficulty in pursuing ATS cases against corporations irrespective of the Kiobel ruling, which often prompts plaintiffs to sue in state courts.

In Doe v. Unocal, another ATS case involving corporate complicity in the abuses of a military regime, Earthrights represented a client from Myanmar in the California court system after the case was thrown out of federal courts.

“Unocal and its partners contracted with the Burmese military regime to provide security and other services for their pipeline project,” Simons told IPS. “In the course of providing these services and, unfortunately very predictably, the Burmese soldiers conducted a series of human rights abuses, including widespread forced labour, torture, and killings.”

Another case, Al Shimari v. CACI, dealt with a private military contractor’s alleged use of torture in the interrogation of an Iraqi prisoner. While the federal courts dismissed that case, an appeal is pending and a court in Virginia will hear oral arguments on Mar. 18.

Limited liability

In addition to ATS reform, ICAR’s Skinner proposed altering limited liability rules so parent corporations could be held liable for human rights abuses of smaller companies that they own.

“A parent company can have a wholly owned subsidiary – as shareholders, they own shares of that corporation – and then, of course, have no liability whatsoever except for the investment that they’ve made in that corporation,” Skinner said.

“Today what we see is this becoming a tool for large, transnational businesses to outsource the risk yet get all of the profit. So many very complex corporate organisations exist so that corporations have minimal risk but get these benefits.”

While some have argued that victims of human rights abuses should simply litigate in their own country, the Kiobel and Unocal cases indicate that many of the countries in question directly perpetrate the documented abuses themselves and have a weaker, more corrupt judicial system.

Skinner points to the relative strength of the U.S. judicial system as a reason why corporations are better off litigating in the United States rather than in developing countries.

She cites the lawsuit brought by Ecuadorians against Chevron, the U.S. oil company, for polluting the Lago Agrio region. This week, the judge ruled in favour of Chevron because of allegedly fraudulent evidence used by the prosecution.

“This kind of proves the point that corporations should actually want to be in front of United States courts,” Skinner told IPS.

“If you’re in front of a court in a country that’s not a developed country, you don’t know what you’re going to get. At least in the United States you’re going to get … a pretty fair trial. So isn’t it in a business’s interest to be in front of a U.S. court?”

In 2010, 17.2 million households, 14.5 percent (approximately one in seven), were food insecure, the highest number ever recorded in the United States. Credit: Bigstock

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Mar 5 2014 (IPS)

U.S. President Barack Obama released a 3.9-trillion-dollar budget proposal for the coming fiscal year, shaping an ideological battle over the role of government in reducing poverty that will likely define the coming election year.

In addition to conventional support for the economically vulnerable, such as extending unemployment insurance, Obama’s proposal, released Tuesday, seeks to expand tax credits for moderate- and low-income earners while replacing any revenue losses by closing tax loopholes on high-income earners.

“At a time when our deficits are falling at the fastest rate in 60 years,” Obama said, “we’ve got to decide if we’re going to keep squeezing the middle class, or if we’re going to continue to reduce the deficits responsibly, while taking steps to grow and strengthen the middle class.”

With a very conservative, Republican-dominated House of Representatives, it is unlikely that Congress will cooperate with the White House’s proposal. Indeed, Obama’s proposal is all the more striking in just how diametrically opposed it is to a recent Republican report on U.S. anti-poverty efforts, itself released on Monday.

As the 2014 election approaches, conservatives seem determined to reemphasise their opposition to welfare programmes. On Monday, Paul Ryan, a member of the House of Representatives and the Republicans’ lead budget expert, released a report criticising social safety net programmes stemming from the “War on Poverty,” a 1960s-era initiative designed to combat the effects of poverty.

Ryan suggests that key War on Poverty programmes have had the perverse impact of keeping poor people poor.

“The president’s budget is yet another disappointment, because it reinforces the status quo,” Ryan, the party’s vice-presidential candidate in 2012, said Tuesday. “It would demand that families pay more so Washington can spend more.”

Ryan also accused Obama of proposing a 1.8-trillion-dollar tax increase.

The White House says the budget calls for ending “inefficient and unfair tax breaks that benefit the wealthiest”. During his speech Tuesday, Obama supported “closing tax loopholes that right now only benefit the well-off and the well-connected.”

Obama’s budget does seek to expand certain tax credits, such as the Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), both of which give low-income workers a greater return on their tax refunds.

Under the proposal, the EITC’s maximum refund for childless workers would double to 1,000 dollars. The credit would also become available to young workers between the ages of 21 and 24 as well as older workers up to the full retirement age.

The proposal seeks to balance this expansion of the EITC by closing “tax loopholes” for high-income earners. As in previous years, the proposal also stipulates that millionaires must not pay less than 30 percent of their income, in order to prevent them from taking advantage of tax preferences that have allowed some high-income earners to pay less in taxes than middle-class workers.

While Ryan and fiscal conservatives have voiced their support for the EITC in the past, some conservative analysts are arguing against Obama’s proposal to make the EITC more accessible to younger workers and workers without children.

“[The EITC] is an effective measure that has encouraged work,” Rachel Sheffield, a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, told IPS.

“What the president is proposing is expanding the EITC to individuals who don’t have children, so single adults, and that’s problematic because it’s likely … to have marriage penalties. It would potentially reward fathers who don’t marry or support their children. When the person marries the subsidy would be eliminated.”

Sheffield considers an expansion of the EITC equivalent to expanding welfare programmes, long a target of conservative ire.

“It’s simply adding to our massive welfare programme that federally funds 80 means-tested welfare programmes at a cost that’s nearing one trillion [dollars] a year,” she said.

How to measure poverty

The proposals from both President Obama and Paul Ryan state that they have the best interests of the poor at heart. But on Tuesday, Democrats struck back at Ryan’s budget, suggesting that years’ worth of proposals from the Republicans would have negatively impacted poor communities.

“For several years now, Chairman Ryan has proposed annual budgets that would deeply cut programmes for the poor,” Sharon Parrott, a vice-president at the Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank, wrote Tuesday. “The Ryan budgets have consistently secured between 60 and 67 percent of their budget cuts from programmes for low- or moderate-income people.”

Ryan’s report argues that under the War on Poverty, the poverty rate in the United States has only decreased by 2.3 percent. But Parrot argues that Ryan misrepresents important statistics regarding poverty reduction.

Parrot contends that because the report relies on the official measure of poverty, rather than a calculation known as the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), it ignores the role of certain social safety net programmes in fighting poverty, including the EITC, the Child Tax Credit and various low-income housing assistance programmes.

Under the SPM, the rate of poverty has fallen by 10 percent since 1967, rather than 2.3 percent.

“Ryan buries this fact, failing to note the deep reductions in poverty under the SPM since the 1960s until page 201 of his report,” Parrot wrote.

Nonetheless, conservative analysts warn that the SPM has its own set of problems.

“The traditional poverty measure gauges how much people can buy, whereas the SPM turns the poverty measure into a relative poverty measure – how much a person can buy compared to their neighbour,” Sheffield told IPS.

“By making it a relative poverty measure, even if the incomes of all Americans tripled over night, you’d still have poverty with this measure. The official poverty measure is a good measure of self-sufficiency, such as how many individuals are relying on government assistance.”

Meanwhile, economists cited by Ryan’s report have been claiming that their findings have been misconstrued.

For instance, the Columbia Population Resource Center’s Jane Waldfogel notes that Ryan only used the group’s data starting from 1969. In ignoring data between 1967 and 1969, she says, Ryan ignored 36 percent of the decline in poverty.

Likewise, Barbara Wolfe, an economist at the University of Wisconsin, says the report outright misstated her research on housing assistance and labour outcomes, while ignoring another of her studies that found that “the housing programme has more benefits than costs”.

A scene from the award-winning documentary "Call Me Kuchu", which follows the fight of courageous LGBT rights activist David Kato and his friends against the rampant homophobia in Uganda. Credit: Katherine Fairfax Wright

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Feb 26 2014 (IPS)

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s authorisation of the Parliament’s so-called “kill the gays” bill has led Washington officials to announce a review of U.S. aid to the African country.

While the new law no longer provides the death penalty for LGBT people, as it did when parliament first introduced it, it escalates existing penalties on homosexuality, allowing the state to imprison people for life if they engage in “aggravated homosexuality,” defined as repeated instances of gay sex between consenting adults or acts involving minors, disabled, or HIV-positive people.Lively claimed that gays were responsible for the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, and asserted that they were now targeting Uganda by trying to “convert” Ugandan children.

The European Union, the United Nations and the Catholic Church have all strongly condemned the new law, which escalates existing penalties for homosexuality.

“Now that this law has been enacted, we are beginning an internal review of our relationship with the Government of Uganda to ensure that all dimensions of our engagement, including assistance programmes, uphold our anti-discrimination policies and principles and reflect our values,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced Monday.

Some European countries, including Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands, have already halted financial aid to Uganda in protest, while others, like Austria and Sweden, are similarly reviewing their aid commitments. Prominent U.S. policymakers are calling on the United States to temporarily cut off the 456.3 million dollars in aid to Uganda that Congress has appropriated for the coming fiscal year.

“We need to closely review all U.S. assistance to Uganda, including through the World Bank and other multilateral organisations,” U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy said Tuesday. “I cannot support providing further funding to the Government of Uganda until the United States has undergone a review of our relationship.”

Ugandan health and sanitation programmes in particular rely on foreign aid support, especially when it comes to combating HIV/AIDS. Uganda has an HIV prevalence rate of 7.2 percent, a rate that is roughly doubled for men who have sex with men.

“We are also deeply concerned about the law’s potential to set back public health efforts in Uganda,” Kerry said, “including those to address HIV/AIDS, which must be conducted in a non-discriminatory manner in order to be effective.”

As the new Ugandan law prosecutes organisations aiding LGBT individuals, a high-risk group for HIV transmission, Uganda’s actions could have an adverse affect on Ugandan organisations that partner with and receive funding from PEPFAR, the United States’ flagship anti-AIDS programme.

“From a purely operation standpoint … we know that the law itself has specific ramifications for PEPFAR assistance,” Timi Gerson, the director of advocacy for American Jewish World Service (AJWS), a development organisation with operations in Uganda, told IPS. “They’re going to have to look at how this law is going to impact its ability to run those programmes.”

Gerson is hesitant about freezing all aid to Uganda, however.

“AJWS doesn’t support the cutting of fundamental aid to those countries. We don’t support stopping aid to ordinary Ugandans,” she said.

“I wouldn’t talk about cutting aid, I would talk about shifting aid. I think the real question is how you would do that on the ground in light of the situation, so that has to be first and foremost in the [U.S.] review.”

U.S. evangelical influence

Some pro-LGBT advocates are more ambivalent about U.S. aid funding in Uganda, however. They point to an unacceptable trend of U.S. funding being administered by socially conservative Christian groups that have long espoused an anti-LGBT agenda, creating an environment where anti-LGBT legislation enjoys widespread support.

U.S. funding often ends up in the hands of conservative religious groups via a complex system of grants, sub-grants and further sub-grants awarded by sub-grantees.

“[The conservatives] are doing a lot of excellent work when it comes to services like orphanages and very good, well-funded schools,” Rev. Kapya Kaoma of Political Research Associates, a social justice advocacy group, told IPS.

“The conservative schools have very good libraries, unlike other schools, but have books that present a conservative angle regarding Ugandan politics. That is an advantage for them.”

Kaoma noted that organisations headed by people like Martin Ssempa, a vehemently anti-LGBT Ugandan pastor, have received 60,000 dollars in sub-grants from organisations receiving U.S. PEPFAR funds. (Ssempa also opposes the use of condoms.)

“I hear these calls to suspend aid and I am conflicted about that,” said Kaoma. “I don’t think that’s the best way to go, as suspending aid only hurts the poor and not the rich. Museveni won’t lose a single thing.”

Instead, he advocates sanctions on Ugandan individuals responsible for the law – and on U.S. evangelicals who he says have fuelled Uganda’s anti-LGBT movement.

“The alternative is selective sanctioning targeting the people who are responsible, all the anti-gay speakers,” he said.

“If they can be sanctioned, there can be a law that says no money can move from any U.S. organisation to an [anti-LGBT] group in Uganda – then they will start feeling the pinch. If they cut aid, it could just increase hatred against LGBT people as retaliation.”

Kaoma said that he is particularly eager to prevent certain individuals from entering Uganda. He lists prominent U.S. evangelicals such as Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundidge, Don Schmierer and Lou Engle as having directly influenced Uganda’s anti-LGBT law.

In March 2009, Lively held a conference for Ugandan political, clerical and civic elites, where he spoke to them about the “gay agenda”. Lively claimed that gays were responsible for the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, and asserted that they were now targeting Uganda by trying to “convert” Ugandan children.

Kaoma attended and filmed the 2009 conference, featuring Lively, Brundidge and Schmierer. A week later, Ugandan parliamentarians circulated the first draft of recently enacted law.

“The original bill reads like Scott Lively speaking again,” Kaoma said.

The Centre for Constitutional Rights, a U.S.-based watchdog, is currently representing Sexual Minorities Uganda, a Ugandan LGBT advocacy group, as it sues Lively in a U.S. court for his alleged influence on the legislation.

Lively has conducted similar anti-LGBT activism throughout Africa as well as in Ukraine and Russia.

The data from GFW will provide details about the operations of large corporate suppliers, some of whom engage in illegal timber harvesting. Credit: Crustmania/ CC by 2.0

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Feb 21 2014 (IPS)

A new website launched Thursday will allow governments, businesses, civil society and private citizens to monitor near real-time loss and gain in forest cover in every country around the world.

On Thursday, the World Resources Institute (WRI), a think tank here, together with Google and more than 40 other partners launched an early version of a project they’re calling Global Forest Watch.“You can’t solve problems that you can’t see." -- Rajiv Shah

U.S., Norwegian and Mexican government officials also attended the launch, alongside academics, businesspeople, civil society representatives and indigenous rights advocates.

“To be able to point to this tool, to look at data, is really, really important,” Kerri-Ann Jones, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs, told IPS.

“President [Barack] Obama’s administration is committed to science-based policy, and when you can have real-time data and you can talk about changes on the ground … it’s going to have a very profound effect on our policy dialogue with partners around the world.”

Global Forest Watch (GFW) uses satellite technology from the U.S. government as well as “cloud computing” power donated by Google to provide close-range satellite imagery on tree-cover gain and loss. Currently, GFW provides monthly updates at a resolution of up to 500 metres, as well as yearly updates at a resolution as close as 30 metres.

Because GFW is free and publicly accessible, its partnering organisations hope it will enable private individuals to act as “citizen scientists”, able to exert public pressure on governments and businesses to implement eco-friendly policies and sustainable timber harvesting.

GFW can provide users with alerts via e-mail and text in multiple languages. It is also designed to allow users to upload and share its images over social networks, which organisers hope will help concerned citizens form advocacy groups.

Multiple governments and NGOs funded the project. Norway contributed 10 million dollars in funding while USAID, the U.S. bureau charged with administering foreign aid, donated 5.5 million. Additionally, the United Kingdom and the Global Environment Facility, an international conservation group, each put forth five million dollars.

Changing business

The data from GFW will provide details about the operations of large corporate suppliers, some of whom engage in illegal timber harvesting.

On Thursday, USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah noted that the data will shed light on these suppliers and allow his agency to work with foreign businesses to lessen the effects of deforestation in highly susceptible areas.

“You can’t solve problems that you can’t see,” Shah told IPS. “And now that we can see where deforestation is happening as it links into these specific supply chains, we will also target our programming and our funding to those communities to reduce the level of deforestation that’s taking place in the areas where it’s most acute.”

In addition to lumber, foreign suppliers often rely on rainforests to procure goods like palm oil, a popular additive in processed snack food.

A report from the Rainforest Action Network, an advocacy group, found that the Kellogg Company, a U.S. food manufacturer, relies on palm oil suppliers whose activities contribute to widespread destruction of Indonesian and Malaysian rainforests, severely threatening their indigenous inhabitants and endangered species like orang-utans.

In the face of public criticism, Kellogg announced on Feb. 14 that it would strengthen its standards for its palm oil suppliers to ensure more sustainable harvesting practices.

Palm oil also happens to be one of the industries that the U.S. government is targeting in its fight against deforestation.

“We have a goal that is precise and focused: ending tropical deforestation in palm oil, beef, soy, and pulp and paper,” said USAID Administrator Shah.

Indonesia is particularly susceptible to deforestation, both for its palm oil and other natural resources. On Wednesday, an Indonesian court sentenced a police officer to two years in prison and a 4,000-dollar fine for illegal logging.

However, the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a watchdog group, argued that the sentence was too light as the court acquitted the officer of laundering 127 million dollars, some of which is thought to be connected to the illegal timber shipments. The EIA believes this serves as evidence of Indonesia’s reluctance to take on corruption and illicit activity in the forestry sector.

On Thursday, a demonstration of the GFW website revealed illegal encroachment on protected rainforest land in Indonesia in addition to a national park in Cote d’Ivoire.

“[Indigenous communities] can see exactly what’s happening when and where, and perhaps even take a guess at who might be doing it,” said the WRI’s Nigel Sizer during the presentation. “So this supports dramatic improvements in enforcement and awareness across the world.”

Some companies, such as Unilever and Nestle, have already committed to deforestation-free supply chains, and say they plan to use GFW to help identify suppliers who do not comply with their policies.

“Global Forest Watch is a major step forward and to have data in near real-time is absolutely new,” said Duncan Pollard, a Nestle official. “It is going to change the way we do business.”

Two hectares per person

As demand for goods such as palm oil has expanded, their procurement has contributed to the drastic increase in the rate of global deforestation over the past century.

Although the rate has slowed considerably over the past 10 years due to local and international preservation efforts, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reports that the world still lost an estimated 2.3 million square kilometres of forest between 2000 and 2012. That is the equivalent of losing 50 football fields a day, or an area roughly the size of Costa Rica every year.

“The first forest assessment done globally was done in 1923,” the FAO’s Ken MacDicken said Thursday. “At that time, there were 10 hectares per person of forest in the world. As of 2010, there are about two hectares per person.”

Scientists have shown that rapid rates of deforestation have profound impacts on the accessibility of food, medicine and water, as well as on biodiversity and global climate change.

“Trees and forests have brought joy, have brought food, have brought water and have brought life throughout the world,” Andrew Steer, WRI’s president, said at Thursday’s unveiling.

“Forests are home to more than half of all species in the world. Forests provide employment and water for over a billion people. Forests sequester 45 percent of all of the carbon in the world, so [they] play a central role in our challenge against climate change.”

The new directives follow a previous mandate to set tougher emissions standards for cars and smaller vehicles. Credit: Bigstock

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Feb 19 2014 (IPS)

In an effort to reduce oil consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, President Barack Obama on Tuesday directed his administration to develop new fuel efficiency and emissions standards for trucks within the year.

The new directives follow a previous mandate to set tightened emissions standards for cars and smaller vehicles and encompass the president’s next step in trying to address U.S. emissions without needing to go through the U.S. Congress.

Speaking Tuesday, he made a point of touting the successes of his administration’s previous fuel-efficiency standards.

“Our levels of dangerous carbon pollution that contributes to climate change has actually gone down even as our production has gone up,” the president stated. “And one of the reasons why is because we dedicated ourselves to manufacturing new cars and new trucks that go farther on a gallon of gas — and that saves families money, it cuts down harmful pollution, and it creates new advances in American technology.”

Credit: UCS

The president did not stipulate any specific fuel efficiency standards that his administration wants to establish. Instead he noted that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Transportation would have until March 2015 to develop a proposal for the newest round of fuel efficiency standards.

The new announcement constitutes the third round of Obama administration fuel efficiency standards, the second of which came into effect only last month.

The EPA and Department of Transportation have already implemented standards for model year 2012 to 2025 passenger vehicles and model year 2014 through 2018 heavy-duty trucks and buses. The latest regulations will be applicable to model years from 2018 and onwards.

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), an advocacy group, anticipates that previously established fuel efficiency standards for trucks made between 2014 and 2018 will reduce oil consumption by 390,000 barrels per day in 2030. They will also cut carbon-dioxide emissions by 270 million metric tonnes.

“Oil is the biggest contributor to climate change emissions in the U.S.,” Don Anair, the research and deputy director of UCS’s Clean Vehicles Programme, told IPS. “The administration already finalised fuel-efficiency standards for cars, which are the biggest consumers of oil, and trucks are second only to those.”

Although trucks, busses and long-haul tractor trailers only comprise seven percent of traffic on U.S. roads, they account for more than 25 percent of oil used on the roads and contribute to about 20 percent of carbon pollution in the transportation sector. In total, motor vehicles emit a third of carbon pollution in the U.S.

“In terms of tackling the climate impacts of transportation, trucks are the next biggest thing, and we’ll have significant oil emission reductions,” Anair said.

UCS also foresees the new standards creating over 40,000 jobs by 2020 and over 70,000 a decade later.

In response to the president’s declaration, the Truck and Engine Manufacturers Association (EMA), a trade association, indicated that it would continue to design more fuel efficient engines and vehicles.

“EMA and its members have a long and successful record of working cooperatively with … regulatory agencies,” said EMA President Jed Mandel. “Our past efforts have resulted in … lower greenhouse gas emissions and improved fuel efficiency from medium and heavy-duty diesel vehicles.”

Some advocates of greater efficiency have suggested that research and development funding could potentially be raised by ending tax breaks on oil companies.

“There is potential for investing those funds in technologies that we know we need for addressing our oil consumption, climate change impacts, and air pollution,” UCS’s Anair said. “Making those investments in the technology of the future rather than continuing to provide tax incentives for established industries makes a lot of sense.”

Indeed, Obama himself has repeatedly called on Congress to end these subsidies.

“We need to get rid of, I think, the 4 billion dollars in subsidies we provide to oil and gas companies every year at a time when they’re earning near-record profits,” the president noted in 2011, “and put that money toward clean energy research, which would really make a big difference.”

Global challenge

As the United States seeks to ameliorate carbon emissions through fuel efficiency standards, the Obama administration is also trying to encourage developing countries to lower their greenhouse gas emissions to ward off climate change.

On a visit to Indonesia on Sunday, Secretary of State John Kerry urged the country to take a more active role in combating greenhouse gas emissions, going so far as to name it as big a security risk as terrorism.

“In a sense, climate change can now be considered another weapon of mass destruction, perhaps even the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction,” Kerry said in Jakarta.

Climate change poses a particularly acute risk to Indonesia, an archipelago composed of more than 17,000 islands, as higher temperatures melt glaciers and ice, causing the sea level to dramatically rise and putting many Pacific islands at risk.

“This city, this country, this region is really on the front lines of climate change,” Kerry said. “It’s not an exaggeration to say to you that your entire way of life that you live and love is at risk.”

Students at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Feb 13 2014 (IPS)

Even as most international military forces are slated to leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014, USAID, the foreign aid arm of the U.S. government, is emphasising its sustained commitment to developing Afghanistan’s economy after the withdrawal.

This week, USAID unveiled three new development initiatives for Afghanistan, which the agency will be focusing on for the next five years.“There are real questions around the data – it’s hard to do in any country, especially in a country like [Afghanistan].” -- Justin Sandefur

The United States has cut civilian assistance to Afghanistan by 50 percent for the current fiscal year, due to frustrations over Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s continued refusal to sign a security pact ensuring a post-2014 presence of U.S. troops in the country. Nonetheless, this disagreement will not have an impact on USAID’s new initiatives, as they are financed entirely with funds from the 2012 and 2013 fiscal years.

The three new USAID initiatives will focus on trade, agriculture, upper-level education and workforce development.

Afghans engaged in development work hope that the new initiatives will compliment their efforts on the ground. Aziz R. Qarghah, the president of Afghan Health & Development Services, a non-profit organisation that provides health care to local Afghans and relies partially on USAID funding, hopes that the University Support and Workforce Development Programme will train more high-level, Afghan health-care professionals.

“A shortage with the low-level health providers it is okay, we can manage,” Qarghah told IPS. “But the high-level providers, like medical doctors, especially female doctors, are really a problem for us. I hope that a result of [the Workforce Development Programme], among other things, is that they are training health providers.”

Another Trade and Revenue Project seeks to generate revenue for Afghanistan and reduce its dependency on foreign aid by bolstering international trade through customs reforms, regional trade agreements and facilitating the country’s entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

Woman and her children who live amid bomb rubble on Kabul’s outskirts. Credit: Anand Gopal/IPS

“Studies have shown that countries like Afghanistan that make the hard decisions and the regulatory changes required for WTO accession see a four to five percent annual bump in [gross domestic product] over four to five years,” Donald Sampler, Jr, a USAID official working on Afghanistan and Pakistan, said Monday at a discussion at the New America Foundation, a think tank here.

Next, in order to boost agricultural capability, a Regional Agriculture Development Project will attempt to increase agricultural output and move Afghanistan beyond subsistence farming. USAID anticipates the programme will reach some 400,000 farmers, creating 10,000 new jobs and a 20 percent increase in yields from wheat and other crops.

Finally, a University Support and Workforce Development Programme partners three U.S. universities with Afghan universities and businesses to develop seven new undergraduate degrees in fields necessary to Afghanistan’s long-term viability.

Sampler indicated that USAID has more programmes in development aside from the three initiatives, but noted that he “can’t talk about with any specificity that also reflects the shift from a wartime focus to a post-war transitional period.”

Improving health-care accessibility for Afghans has been a focus of other USAID programmes.

Credit: The Asia Foundation

“At the time [of the Taliban] less than nine percent of Afghans had access to health care within an hour of their home,” USAID’s Sampler said Monday. “Today that number is over 60 percent. USAID has worked with the Afghans to train over 22,000 health workers. A cumulative result of all this investment in health is that in Afghanistan over the past 12 years life expectancy has increased 20 years.”

While some have questioned the reliability of this data and USAID’s role in the results, Justin Sandefur, a fellow at the Centre for Global Development, a Washington-based think tank, believes a solid argument can be made that USAID has helped increase Afghan life expectancy.

“There are real questions around the data – it’s hard to do in any country, especially in a country like [Afghanistan],” Sandefur told IPS. “So we’ve taken the best numbers we can find.”

He continued: “There’s also the question of distribution. Child mortality has fallen in a lot of countries, but I think there’s a strong case to be made that the improvements have resulted from USAID funding.”

Aid efficiency

Other longstanding concerns over USAID’s ability to function with efficiency and impact also remain.

“The reality is, according to a Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) auditor, that 70-80 percent of the money is siphoned off by contractors as overhead,” Peter Van Buren, a former Foreign Service Officer with the State Department, wrote this week.

Indeed, some of the most recent reporting by SIGAR, an oversight agency created by the U.S. Congress to monitor Afghanistan relief and reconstruction funding, has found potential financial risks in USAID’s partnership with the Afghan government.

In order to implement its health programmes, USAID has collaborated extensively with the Afghan Ministry of Public Health (MOPH), a ministry that SIGAR indicates could put U.S. taxpayer dollars at risk for fraud.

“Due to the pervasive nature of the internal control weaknesses, MOPH is unable to adequately manage and safeguard donor funds against loss or misappropriations,” SIGAR wrote last month.

SIGAR called into question the efficacy of USAID’s partnership with MOPH, arguing that it puts taxpayer dollars at risk.

For his part, USAID’s Sampler points out that the SIGAR report relied largely on data collected by USAID risk assessments, and that his agency is taking steps to ameliorate the challenges that each ministry faces.

Another report released this week, by the humanitarian agency Oxfam, finds that USAID projects have at times engendered resentment from local Afghan communities. Erin Blankenship, the briefing’s author, highlights how physical distances and poor communication between aid organisations and local communities can make aid coordination extremely difficult.

For instance, Blankenship writes, a man in Nangarhar mistakenly believed that a USAID subcontractor had awarded him a grant to build flood-protection walls in his province.

Although he and his workers had already completed the first phase of the work, the presumed subcontractor had not actually awarded him a contract, prompting the man to appeal to the agency for 420,000 dollars, a request it denied.

“The result was widespread conflict in all of the communities where there had been work, as the man was unable to pay his employees,” Blankenship notes. “According to community elders, this led to several months of violent attacks, until the man was forced to sell all of his properties to make the payments.”

Mandatory minimum sentencing has contributed to the acute spike in the prison population in recent decades. Credit: Bigstock

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Feb 12 2014 (IPS)

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and several key Republican and Democrat senators agree on the need for criminal justice reform, and some are now even seeking to restore voting rights to former felons.

“There is no rational reason to take away someone’s voting rights for life just because they committed a crime, especially after they completed their sentencing,” Holder said Tuesday at a symposium here. “There’s evidence to suggest that former prisoners whose voting rights are restored are significantly less likely to return to the criminal justice system.”“In my state, one in three young black men are unable to vote because of a felony conviction – and they never get it back.” -- Kentucky Senator Rand Paul

The attorney general referenced statistics indicating that a third of former criminals who regained their right to vote did not commit repeat offences. Holder also traced the existence of laws barring felons from voting back to the period following the U.S. Civil War, when southern states aggressively sought to keep African Americans from voting.

“Many southern states enacted disenfranchisement schemes to specifically target African Americans,” Holder said. “In 1890, 90 percent of the prison population was black and those swept up in the system could not vote.”

Holder and others say the effects of these policies persist today, as the U.S. system continues to disproportionately affect African Americans.

“In the criminal justice system, minorities, particularly African Americans, are very much overrepresented,” Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based criminal justice advocacy group, told IPS. “So incarceration translates to high rates of disenfranchisement.”

Mauer argues that the implication goes well beyond those in prison. Disenfranchisement, he says, dilutes the electoral power of minority communities, who remain disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system.

Also on Tuesday, Senator Rand Paul, a Republican, agreed with Holder’s assessments on criminal disenfranchisement. He said he is seeking to restore the right to vote for former felons in his home state of Kentucky.

“In my state, one in three young black men are unable to vote because of a felony conviction – and they never get it back,” Paul said. “I’m also in favour of giving back people the right to vote in my state.”

In 1974, a case before the U.S. Supreme Court challenged the constitutionality of disenfranchising former felons. But while many legal scholars disagreed with the ruling, the justices upheld the right of states to enact criminal disenfranchisement laws.

“There have been a number of state-level challenges in recent years to various aspects of the law,” the Sentencing Project’s Mauer said. “But at the moment, most of the reform will have to take place on a state-by-state basis.”

For-profit probation

While many highlight the importance of restoring voting rights to former felons, the main thrust of a fast-growing bipartisan push for criminal justice reform is geared at reducing the overcrowded U.S. federal prison population, which has undergone an 800-percent increase since 1980, exacting a huge toll on taxpayers.

On Tuesday, Republican Senators Paul and Mike Lee, alongside Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, voiced their support for the Smarter Sentencing Act of 2013. The bill, which recently passed the Senate Judiciary Committee and is currently awaiting a vote, would lower “mandatory minimum” sentences for drug offences.

Mandatory minimum sentencing stipulates an obligatory period of jail time for which an offender must serve, but the bill would give judges more flexibility when sentencing drug offenders, who make up the vast majority of federal cases. Current mandatory minimums stand at five, 10 and 20 years for first, second and third offences, while the bill would reduce these to two, five and 10 years, respectively.

As mandatory minimums have contributed to the acute spike in the prison population in recent decades, the prison system has been forced to try to mitigate the mounting costs. In part, the situation has led to the growth of the for-profit prison industry, which has been criticised for externalising the cost onto offenders themselves.

Last week, Human Rights Watch, a watchdog group here, released a report entitled Profiting from Probation, detailing how for-profit companies have put detainees on probation back into jail for their inability to pay their probation fines.

In one instance in the report, Sentinel Offender Services, a private company hired by the federal government to administer probations, charged a Georgia man, Thomas Barrett, 360 dollars a month in monitoring fees on top of his 200-dollar fine for stealing a two-dollar can of beer. As Barrett was unemployed, he was unable to pay the fees that Sentinel Offender Services imposed, prompting the company to revoke his probation – and landing him in jail.

In 1983, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that courts could not revoke an offender’s probation for failure to pay fines, unless the failure was wilful. Nonetheless, the Human Rights Watch report notes that probation companies and some courts simply assume that any outstanding payment was wilfully ignored.

Senator Paul, a fiscal conservative, referenced the Barrett case at Tuesday’s symposium and condemned for-profit probation monitoring.

“The prison is not the free market, where you have to have everything done privately,” Paul told IPS. “If you can do some stuff to save money, I’m for that, but you have to recognise a lot of people that are arrested are very poor.”

Paul indicated that while for-profit probation monitoring occurs largely at the state level, he is open to addressing the issue in the federal prison system, as well.

Because many people released on probation are also unemployed as a result of non-violent drug-related felonies, critics worry that for-profit probation can put people back into the prison system.

Paul described how his neighbour’s brother was unable to find a job where he could utilise his business degree due to a conviction in college for selling marijuana. Instead, today he works as a painter.

While the senator praised states that have opted to expunge the records of released felons, he instead favours demoting certain non-violent drug-related felonies to misdemeanours.

In addition to the economic issues of the coal leases, environmentalists aee equally concerned about the environmental issues that arise from coal mining. Credit: Bigstock

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Feb 5 2014 (IPS)

The U.S. government is violating federal leasing policies when it sells land to certain coal-mining companies, according to a new audit from an official watchdog agency.

The practice could be costing taxpayers millions of dollars even as mining operations degrade the environmental integrity of the Powder River Basin in the western U.S. states of Wyoming and Montana and lead to the production of large-scale carbon emissions. Although federal regulations stipulate that the Bureau of Land Management, a federal agency, must auction off coal tracts in a competitive bidding process, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released Tuesday found that this process wasn’t being followed.“There are about five billion tonnes of federal coal somewhere in the leasing pipeline right now.” -- Kelly Mitchell

Instead, for about 90 percent of the 107 leased tracts of land looked at by the GAO, only one company had bid on the land – typically the same company that submitted the application.

“[The GAO] offers a convincing argument that the programme lacks integrity,” Tom Sanzillo, the director of finance for the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), a think tank, told IPS. “Because of a lack of independent oversight of 30 years of federal leases, they haven’t reviewed any of them.”

Sanzillo identifies two companies, Arch Coal and Peabody Energy, as the principle recipients of BLM leases. Critics worry that the lack of competitive bidding for coal mining firms undervalues the leases for publicly owned land, ultimately decreasing government revenues by effectively selling the land at discounted prices.

While an inspector-general for the U.S. Department of the Interior (BLM’s parent agency) indicated in a report last June that the U.S. had lost 60 million dollars as a result of undervalued leases, Sanzillo believes that the total revenue loss is far greater. In an analysis responding to those findings, Sanzillo noted that the inspector-general did not take into account the BLM’s methodological flaws in establishing the value of public coal.

The inspector-general “identifies at least three weaknesses in the BLM program,” he wrote, “no independent verification of engineering and geological data, no revenue estimates for projected export sales and a failure to use comparable sales data when setting bid prices.”

Furthermore, both the GAO and inspector-general reports note that the BLM has not included Arch and Peabody’s revenues from coal exports when determining the value of the publicly leased coal, further undervaluing its true worth. (The BLM did not respond to IPS’s inquiry by deadline.)

“They’re giving away federal access at a price that is far below what they should be giving it away for,” said Sanzillo. “Therefore the federal government, and particularly the states of Wyoming and Montana, are being short changed.”

The GAO did a similar review of coal leases in the Powder River Basin in 1983. At that time, the agency found that the government was losing some 100 million dollars as a result of undervalued coal leases, but the GAO’s recommendations to rectify the problem were never implemented.

The GAO’s more recent report recommends that the BLM use more than one method to determine the true value of its coal while taking export profits into account. It also suggests that the agency develop a reporting mechanism and post information about its lease sales on its website.

While the Department of the Interior has agreed with these recommendations, Sanzillo’s analysis indicates that BLM has been highly resistant to transparency.

Environmental degradation

In addition to the loss of revenue, coal-mining operations in the Powder River Basin have profoundly impacted the region and raised some serious concerns among local and national environmental advocacy groups.

“The Powder River Basin is one of the most significant contributors to carbon emissions in the U.S.,” Kelly Mitchell, a climate and energy campaigner with Greenpeace, an environmental advocacy group, told IPS. “Thirteen percent of U.S. carbon emissions are sourced from the Powder River Basin.”

The region’s total carbon emissions are expected to increase even further once the BLM grants leases for more coal mining.

“There are about five billion tonnes of federal coal somewhere in the leasing pipeline right now,” said Mitchell. “If all that coal is leased, it would unlock more than 8.3 billion metric tonnes of carbon-dioxide, or the annual emissions of more than 1.7 billion cars.”

The Powder River Basin Resource Council has asked the BLM to suspend coal-mining operations until it rectifies the flaws in its leasing programme. In addition to the economic issues of the coal leases, the organisation is equally concerned about the environmental issues that arise from coal mining.

“We believe coal leasing should be suspended until some of the environmental impacts get addressed,” Shannon Anderson, an organiser with the Powder River Basin Resource Council, a Wyoming-based environmental protection group, told IPS.

“There are impacts from reduced air quality, loss of water and major draw-downs of our aquifers, which are primary drinking-water sources. We’ve seen a dramatic loss of acreage available to the public for recreational purposes, like hunting, hiking and [livestock] grazing.”

Wyoming produces 40 percent of all coal mined in the U.S. and the federal government owns 85 percent of the state’s coal. This makes Wyoming one of the most popular states for the energy industry to lease public land.

Opposition to the practice of leasing public lands to the energy industry has grown in recent years. The administration of George W. Bush auctioned off of 103,000 acres of land in Utah, another western state, for coal and gas leases, a move that was met with widespread public protest.

According to the GAO, 74 percent of public land leases issued to energy companies between 2007 and 2009 were protested by the public in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico.

In early 2009, the administration of President Barack Obama instructed the BLM that “there is no presumed preference for oil and gas development over other uses”. It also began telling the energy industry which pieces of land are most suitable for mining, drilling or “fracking” with minimal environmental impact.

However, the energy industry may still nominate parcels of public land to lease, and the reforms have not addressed the issue of undervalued leases or the public’s environmental concerns in the Powder River Basin and elsewhere.

A 16-year-old Guatemalan migrant heading to the U.S. Credit: Wilfredo Díaz/IPS

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Feb 4 2014 (IPS)

Pro-immigration reform advocates here are seeking to capitalise on new federal momentum on the issue after conservative lawmakers ended months of dithering late last week and released an initial set of principles that they would be interested in pursuing in broader negotiations.

FWD.us, an immigration reform advocacy group funded by the technology industry, declared Monday a “day of action”, in which it encouraged the U.S. public to contact key Republican representatives and ask them to support immigration reform proposals. “Until we create a functioning immigration system with a pathway to citizenship, ruthless employers will continue to exploit low wage workers, pulling down wages for all." -- Richard Trumka

With 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., exploitation of undocumented workers runs rampant, and families have been torn apart with two million deportations by the Barack Obama administration within the past five years.

Faith-based advocacy groups, one of the conservative cornerstones pushing for immigration reform, have likewise stepped up their efforts. Evangelical Christians emphasise the damaging effect that current immigration laws have on undocumented families.

“More than security and economic reasons, I think [reform] needed for the health of families,” Alex Cosio, a pastor from North Carolina, said during a press call Monday. “Families suffer a lot when they fear someone from their family being caught and deported. [Deportation] tears families apart.”

Cosio also points to the adverse effects that the current immigration system has on undocumented youths who were brought to the United States at a very young age.

“It’s very hard for a parent to tell a kid that they can’t have a driver’s license because they’re not here legally,” he said.

The new Republican guidelines call for increased border security and a “zero tolerance” policy for migrants who have illegally crossed into the United States.

While the guidelines rule out a path to citizenship, a means by which undocumented workers could become fully naturalised U.S. citizens, they permit legalisation for law-abiding undocumented workers provided that they “pay significant fines and back taxes, develop proficiency in English and American civics, and be able to support themselves and their families (without access to public benefits).”

Cautious optimism

Last year, the U.S. Senate passed a massive bill to overhaul all aspects of the country’s immigration system. That proposal would have provided a path to citizenship for many of the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants, yet House Republicans oppose it on the grounds that a path to citizenship amounted to “amnesty” for wrongdoing – an option they have long opposed.

This proposal has since languished as conservatives in the House of Representatives have been unable to decide how – or whether – they wanted to progress on the issue.

Unlike their counterparts in the Senate, Republican leaders in the House of Representatives have now indicated that they do not wish to address the issue of immigration in a single, comprehensive bill. Instead they prefer to address various issues related to the broad topic through piecemeal legislation, potentially setting up conflict later on.

Still, the fact that House Republicans are now actively discussing the issue has given many proponents of immigration reform a renewed sense of optimism. Indeed, on some issues, the new Republican principles offer clear-cut ideological about-faces.

The new principles support, for instance, a path to legal residence and citizenship for undocumented youth who receive a college degree or serve in the military. This would closely align with provisions laid out in the earlier Democratic-proposed legislation – known as the DREAM Act – that some Republican legislators opposed.

Congress’s failed attempts to pass the DREAM Act multiple times since 2001 prompted President Obama to issue an executive order that halted the deportation of undocumented youths who met certain requirements.

“I do think that for those who qualify under laws and rules laid out for DREAM students, we can be assured that they’ll become a great asset to our nation,” Noel Castellanos, the head of the Christian Community Development Association, a faith-based community development group, told IPS. “Not every one of these young people will end up going to school, but some will serve in our military and contribute great works to serve our country.”

In addition to the Christian right, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the country’s largest business lobby group, welcomed the Republican reform principles.

“Immigration reform is an essential element of economic growth and it will create American jobs,” Thomas J. Donahue, the head of the Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement. “The time is now, and the Chamber is determined to make 2014 the year that immigration reform is finally enacted.”

Liberal ambivalence

While conservative advocacy groups warmly embraced the Republican guidelines, some liberal advocates have been less thrilled.

America’s Voice, a Washington-based immigrant advocacy group, is pointing out that Republicans are insisting on strengthening security along the U.S.-Mexico border before allowing any legalisation for undocumented migrants to go forward.

Such a stance, the group warns, obscures the fact that spending on border security is already incredibly high.

“The U.S. government spends 18 billion dollars a year on immigration enforcement, more than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined,” the group states in analysis sent to IPS. “The Border Patrol has doubled in recent years to a record high of 21,000 agents, and net unauthorised immigration into the U.S. is zero.”

“Nevertheless, Republicans are dusting off the old ‘enforcement-first’ talking points, pretending that immigration enforcement is currently lacking,” the groups says.

Labour rights advocates have also condemned House Republicans’ refusal to create a valid path to citizenship on the grounds that it will depress wages for everyone residing in the United States.

“Until we create a functioning immigration system with a pathway to citizenship, ruthless employers will continue to exploit low wage workers, pulling down wages for all,” Richard Trumka, the head of the AFL-CIO, a lobbying group representing multiple labour unions, noted Monday.

“All workers, immigrant or not, will see workplaces become safer and wages grow higher when we create a real roadmap to citizenship. And yet Republicans not only reject citizenship but embrace a broken guest worker model that will bring down wages and increase income inequality.”

It is unclear exactly how, or even if, the congressional discussion will now progress, with Republicans still unsure as to whether they will unite behind the new principles.

On Sunday, Representative Paul Ryan, a leading intellectual in the Republican party, told the media it was “clearly in doubt” whether Congress would pass any immigration reform legislation this year. National elections, after all, are scheduled for late this year, and immigration remains a hot-button issue for many in the Republican base.

Still, others see a possible window for action after Republican candidates have been chosen for the election in primary campaigns.

Students of communication at the University of Havana. Coursera was recently forced to suspend service in Iran, Sudan and Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Jan 29 2014 (IPS)

Even as the United States and European Union begin to lift some sanctions on Iran, U.S. law continues to prohibit some businesses that provide non-controversial services, such as online education, from operating in Iran and other countries.

Coursera, a California-based company that works with top-tier universities around the world to provide free online university-level classes to millions of students, has recently suspended service in Iran, Sudan and Cuba. "When you have something like an embargo, which is so large and overreaching, you can’t really fine tune it to include certain things and not include other things." -- Lisa Ndecky Llanos

“The interpretation of the export control regulations in the context of [massive open online courses] has been ambiguous up until now and we had been operating under one interpretation of the law,” Coursera wrote in a statement to its participating faculty on Tuesday.

“Last week, Coursera received definitive guidance indicating that access to the course experience is considered a service, and all services are highly restricted by export controls.”

Because the U.S. government’s strict interpretation of services includes functions as far-reaching as the grading of assignments and the operation of discussion forums, Coursera has had to cease operations in certain countries or face legal repercussions.

While the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the body of the Treasury Department responsible for implementing sanctions, does not comment on specific licences, it points to licensing exemptions for educational purposes.

“OFAC has a favourable licensing policy to authorise U.S. persons to engage in certain targeted educational, cultural and sports exchange programmes,” a Treasury spokesperson told IPS. “Of course, under a favourable licensing policy, U.S. persons need to come in and seek a license – without that, we cannot act.”

Coursera has stated that it remains committed to taking action to operate in Iran, Sudan, and Cuba once more.

“Coursera is working very closely with the U.S. Department of State and Office of Foreign Assets Control to secure permissions to reinstate site access for students in sanctioned countries,” Coursera wrote on Tuesday in a blog update concerning the issue. “The Department of State and Coursera are aligned in our goals and we are working tirelessly to ensure that blockage is not permanent.”

While Coursera initially interrupted its service in Syria as well, the State Department later informed the company that OFAC had a general license in place in Syria for institutions working to increase access to education. Since then, Coursera has restored access to its classes for Syrian students.

However, unlike in Syria, OFAC sanctions programmes on Iran, Sudan and Cuba, do not have a general educational license exemption. Nonetheless, Coursera remains committed to operating in those countries again.

Disenfranchising Iranians

Coursera is not the first education programme that has been adversely affected by U.S. sanctions. Educational Testing Service (ETS) was prohibited from administering the TOEFL test, an English proficiency exam that non-native English speakers have to pass in order to enter most American universities, in Iran in 2010.

Because TOEFL qualifies as an education programme, ETS was eligible to apply for an exemption with OFAC. But it could only do so after considerable difficulty, including finding a bank able to legally facilitate financial transactions with Iran.

“So-called exemptions on sanctions are extremely cumbersome,” Jamal Abdi, the policy director of the National Iranian American Council, a non-profit advocacy group, told IPS. “Iranian students have really been hit by these sanctions, particularly Iranian students who want to study abroad.”

Rather than navigate OFAC’s bureaucratic maze to apply for exemptions and risk potential criminal persecution, businesses often opt instead for blanket discrimination against Iranians. Recently, TCF Bank terminated the accounts of Iranian students studying at the University of Minnesota over fear of violating sanctions.

“The cost of violating sanctions is well known to these companies, so they tend to be extremely cautious,” Abdi said. “But the cost of violating civil rights is not known to them and they cast a wide net in disenfranchising Iranians.”

In 2012, Apple refused to sell products to people speaking Persian in their stores, citing the U.S. embargo on doing business in Iran.

But Abdi said Apple experienced public backlash for this decision. “The company has changed its policies as a result,” he noted, “even if they deny that was the reason.”

U.S. interests

In addition to hindering access to education, some analysts and legal experts argue that the sanctions actively undermine U.S. interests around the world.

Ebrahim Afsah, an associate professor in international law at the University of Copenhagen, teaches a Coursera class called Constitutional Struggles in the Muslim World, which has thousands of participants worldwide, especially in the Middle East and North Africa.

Afsah says he was particularly upset when he learned about the effect of U.S. sanctions on access to his course.

“I don’t think there’s a conceivable scenario where this could harm U.S. interests, so I don’t think it’s a very wise way of forming legislation – and it’s certainly counterproductive,” Afsah told IPS.

Afsah believes that courses such as his serve as valuable tools for students living in Middle Eastern countries, particularly those with rigid state control over educational systems. He says the course allow students to openly engage in debate and to learn about their peers in other countries in a less polemical atmosphere.

“My course in particular has done a good job bringing these people together and making these people aware of some of the problems they encounter, not least the sectarian divide between Sunnis and Shias, which we’ve had some very good discussion on,” Afsah said.

As the U.S. seeks to contain a rapidly spiralling conflict between Sunnis and Shias in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, fostering increased intellectual understanding between people in the region is essential to combating the very sectarian agendas the U.S. government seeks to contain.

Lisa Ndecky Llanos, of the Centre for Democracy in the Americas, a Washington-based think tank, attributes Coursera’s closure in these countries to the far-reaching nature of overzealous embargos.

“This situation with Coursera is a way of showing that when you have something like an embargo, which is so large and overreaching, you can’t really fine tune it to include certain things and not include other things,” Ndecky Llanos told IPS.

Although sanctions on Cuba are ostensibly intended to force President Raul Castro to implement government reforms, the side effects of the sanctions run counter to stated U.S. interests, she said.

“The stated U.S. policy is that they want to enable Cubans to access information and be a part of a global community, but in this instance the policy is doing the exact opposite of that,” Ndecky Llanos said.

“U.S. sanctions have really isolated Cuba and the Cuban people. That’s not the intention of the sanctions but it’s the result, and it’s harming Cubans not to have access to sites like this and, in the grander scheme, quick Internet access and telephone services.”

Child labourers rescued in Delhi waiting to be sent back to their villages. Credit: Bachpan Bachao Andolan/IPS

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Jan 28 2014 (IPS)

Advocacy groups and some legislators are calling on the U.S. government to mandate an increase in corporate supply chain transparency, with the aim of cutting down on the estimated 14,000 to 17,000 people trafficked into the United States each year and the tens of millions enslaved globally.

“Human trafficking is a 32-billion-dollar industry, second only to drug trafficking as an organised crime,” Melysa Sperber, director of the Alliance to End Slavery and Trafficking (ATEST), a coalition of human rights groups, told a briefing on Capitol Hill on Monday. “Between 21 and 30 million people are enslaved worldwide.” “We’ve seen kids work for 20 cents a day to buy a couple of potatoes when they go home after a full day of heavy manual labour." -- Karen Stauss

ATEST and its member organisations are working to address one of the underlying mechanisms in forced labour: global corporate supply chains. The coalition is urging lawmakers to adopt legislation that would require companies earning over 100 million dollars per year to file reports on their supply chain and labour management practices, both with U.S. regulators and on their websites.

Because of the complexity of global supply chains, companies are often unaware of coercive labour practices carried out by suppliers and subsidiaries.

“We’ve found that vulnerability to forced labour is pretty pervasive in a number of industries,” Quinn Kepes, the research programme manager for Verite, an NGO focused on labour issues in global supply chains, told IPS. “A large number of companies are at a high risk of having trafficking in their supply chains.”

Businesses often turn to labour brokers at all levels of the supply chain. These brokers, who face very little regulation, can charge workers exorbitant recruitment fees and have received widespread criticism for misrepresenting the work that the people they recruit will be doing.

“Labour recruitment has been a huge issue if you look at the construction of U.S. Army installations in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Karen Stauss, the director of programmes for Free the Slaves, a Washington-based advocacy group, told IPS. “There’s been a lot of documentation of trafficking of workers from South Asia to the Middle East for low-cost construction.”

The U.S. mainland is also not immune to unethical labour recruiters.

In 2012, Omelyan Botsvynyuk, a Ukrainian, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for smuggling Ukrainian citizens to the United States under false pretences. Although Botsvynyuk and his brothers had promised the men that they would be paid 500 dollars a month, they were forced to clean major retail store chains, such as Target and Walmart, without pay.

Botsvynyuk reportedly told the men that they could not leave until they had worked off their debts, ranging to as high as 50,000 dollars.

Such debt bondage is a common tactic used by exploitative recruiters and businesses. Employers can directly levy debts on employees for the use of living facilities and tools needed for the job, such as mining equipment.

“In some cases, debt bondage is happening to people who are not literate and don’t understand how debt and interest accumulates,” said Stauss. “They’re not even aware themselves of how debt is illegally exploited.”

Stauss says that the extraction of so-called conflict minerals from the Democratic Republic of Congo has also been found to rely heavily on child labour. Such materials are key components in modern consumer goods.

“We’ve seen kids work there for 20 cents a day to buy a couple of potatoes when they go home after a full day of heavy manual labour,” Stauss said. “Those minerals connect to many different things like laptops, cell phones and electronics.”

Child labour is equally present in the manufacturing sector. A new report from Harvard University found 1,406 specific cases of child labour in the Indian carpet-making industry, which exports extensively to the United States and other industrialised countries.

The Harvard researchers estimate that forced labour makes up 45 percent of the industry’s work force, with child labour specifically accounting for around a fifth.

Encouraging transparency

Earlier this month, President Barack Obama named January the National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month. “As we work to dismantle trafficking networks and help survivors rebuild their lives, we must also address the underlying forces that push so many into bondage,” the president stated.

Although currently proposed legislation would not compel companies to take any actual action on questionable supply chain practices, the groups say public pressure is building.

“Right now we don’t have a piece of legislation introduced,” ATEST’s Sperber told IPS. “But [two representatives] in the House of Representatives are supportive of an introduction of legislation that has already been introduced in past Congresses.”

A House of Representatives bill that would require greater transparency for third parties bringing foreign workers to the U.S. is currently sitting in committee.

This proposal “would combat human trafficking, forced labour and exploitation by requiring that workers coming to the United States receive accurate information about the job, visa and working conditions,” Shandra Woworuntu, an anti-trafficking lobbyist, told Monday’s briefing. “The bill also ensures that no recruitment fee is charged to the workers and requires the recruitment agency to register with the Department of Labour.”

Woworuntu herself was flown to the U.S. by a third party agency promising her a job at a hotel in Chicago. After paying a recruitment fee and arriving in the United States, she says the man who picked her up confiscated her passport and forced her into sexual slavery until she was able to escape.

While Congress has not taken action on transparency legislation at the federal level, the state of California has already introduced similar legislation. Yet while that law, known as SB-657, was slated to take effect starting at the beginning of 2012, advocates note that the state has yet to fully implement the law.

“Two years later, [SB-657] hasn’t been implemented,” Ima Matul, a coordinator for the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (CAST), told IPS. “We’ve been asking the California attorney-general for those corporations and businesses to release any trafficking or slavery involved in their supply chains.”

In the meantime, CAST has endorsed a website called Know the Chain, which catalogues corporations and their supply chains, allowing consumers to better ascertain whether or not forced labour is involved in the products they buy.

“While some companies have not yet posted disclosure statements, others have taken an important first step by posting a statement addressing the majority of SB-657 requirements,” Know the Chain states on its website.

Thus, while California’s state law lacks enforcement, some companies are voluntarily disclosing information on their supply chains and labour practices.

“Kmart, for example, just joined the movement and promised not to have slavery involved in their supply chain,” says Matul.

Since the Seleka coalition of rebels took power last March, over 200 000 people have been uprooted from their homes due to conflict. Credit: EU/ECHO/M.Morzaria/cc by 2.0

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Jan 22 2014 (IPS)

The appointment of a new transitional president, Catherine Samba-Panza, in the Central African Republic (CAR) is generating optimism in some quarters that the country’s first female leader will manage to quell mounting ethnic strife.

President Samba-Panza was appointed on Monday, in the midst of inter-communal violence between Muslim Seleka and Christian militias.“Right now the country’s on the brink of total anarchy.” -- Philippe Bolopion

“As CAR’s first woman head of state since the country’s independence, and with her special background in human rights work and mediation, [Samba-Panza] has a unique opportunity to advance the political transition process, bring all the parties together to end the violence, and move her country toward elections not later than February 2015,” John Kerry, the U.S. secretary of state, said Tuesday.

Yet some analysts here have quickly pushed back on the idea that the appointment of the new president offers a renewed chance for peace.

“There’s a predatory elite that has more or less sucked the country dry,” J. Peter Pham, the director of the Africa Centre at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank, told IPS. “Unfortunately they’ve just elected a member of that elite to be the interim head of state.”

While Samba-Panza is a Christian, she enjoyed close ties to the previous president, Michel Djotodia.

“She’s one of the Christian politicians who had thrown in their lot with the Seleka,” Pham says. “She has never been elected so much as a dogcatcher.”

Djotodia appointed Samba-Panza mayor of Bangui, the capital, in April, shortly after seizing the presidency. Although Samba-Panza was technically elected transitional president, the election took place within the National Transition Council, which is comprised of members appointed exclusively by Djotodia.

Pham believes that a Samba-Panza presidency raises questions about the international community’s long-term commitment to CAR.

“There’s no appetite in the international community, so there’s no long-term plan for the mission,” he says. “So I’m afraid what we’re actually facing is this so-called election spun in as positive a light as possible and used to cover an ignominious withdrawal.”

For the time being, the United States is still sending financial aid to help alleviate the crisis. On Monday, the government announced an additional 30 million dollars in relief funding for CAR, bringing the total U.S. contribution to humanitarian efforts in the country to approximately 45 million dollars.

That’s in addition to 101 million dollars designated for restoring security and 7.5 million dollars to support reconciliation efforts.

“One fifth of Bangui is now living in a vast, miserable encampment as terrified citizens seek safety from violence and looting,” Nancy Lindborg, an official with USAID, Washington’s main foreign aid arm, said Monday after a two-day trip to CAR.

“The U.S. government has urgently ramped up our assistance to help deliver lifesaving food, water, and medical help to the more than 2.6 million women, children and men in urgent need throughout the country.”

Inter-communal violence

CAR’s current crisis erupted when the Seleka seized control of Bangui, ousting former president Francois Bozize and installing Djotodia in April.

“Since the Seleka took over power in March they have unleashed a wave of killings, burning entire villages, looting and viciously attacking civilians on a pretty large scale,” Philippe Bolopion, the United Nations director for Human Rights Watch (HRW), a watchdog group, tells IPS. “They descend on a village, kill a few people, chase everyone out of their houses, loot everything they can, burn the houses and move on.”

President Djotodia attempted to dissolve the Seleka because of the extremity of their war crimes and attacks on civilians.

“In late September, Djotodia decided he would dismiss [the Seleka] because they were getting out of control, and that’s when things went downhill,” the Atlantic Council’s Pham says. “He dismissed them but they had no place to go, and he never had the loyalty of the people on whom he hoisted himself.”

The Seleka continue to operate outside of government control and target civilians, which has led to clashes with the predominantly Christian militias. While former president Bozize initially created these militias – known as anti-balaka – to combat banditry, they began responding to Seleka abuses on Christians with similar attacks on Muslims, rapidly escalating the violence.

“They have targeted Muslim civilians only because they are Muslim. Their attacks are just as brutal and as vicious as the Seleka attacks were,” says HRW’s Bolopion. “When I was in CAR in November I talked to a Muslim villager who described how anti-balaka came to his house in the morning to take his grandkids, kids, and two wives out and slit every one of their throats.”

Although the conflict in CAR appears to be purely sectarian on the surface, the appointment of a Christian to the presidency by other Djotodia appointees indicates that the conflict is more nuanced. Pham posits that the violence is ethnic, rather than religious.

“The political elite have never had religion as a divisive issue, so religion isn’t really a source of conflict,” he says. “It’s not a religious conflict but religion marks people’s ethnic groups.”

The Seleka themselves have even killed Muslims living in majority Christian areas.

Tensions between the Seleka and anti-balaka reached a boiling point in December, as clashes between the two groups and their attacks on civilians drastically increased. Even though President Djotodia resigned on 10 January in an attempt to alleviate the chaos, the violence continues to raise fears of genocide.

“The situation has not stabilised at all on the ground, and we are very worried about mass retaliations against the Muslim population now that the Seleka are on the run,” says Bolopion. “Right now the country’s on the brink of total anarchy.”

Two-track solution

As the violence continues, analysts have made proposals to help end the conflict.

“We think you need a two-track approach,” explains Bolopion. “One track is to bolster the capacity of civilian power on the ground. But we must also work on many tasks to reconstruct the country such as the longer-term solution of rebuilding the army, justice system and basic function of administration.”

France currently has 1,600 troops on the ground in CAR, while the European Union is expected to offer 500 soldiers to supplement French forces.

“They need all the help they can get because it’s very difficult,” Bolopion says.

Pham notes that the United Nations has authorised a force of up to 10,000, but states that nowhere near that number has materialised. “What we’re seeing in CAR is simply the evaporation of what few institutions there were,” he says.

A New York City rally to raise the minimum wage at Herald Square, Manhattan, Oct. 24, 2013. Credit: The All-Nite Images/cc by 2.0

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Jan 15 2014 (IPS)

Seventy-five economists, including seven Nobel Prize laureates, sent an open letter to President Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress on Tuesday, urging them to raise the federal minimum wage.

The same day, the president formally endorsed legislation that would incrementally raise the minimum wage to 10.10 dollars by 2016."When you’re cutting the pay for people at the bottom by one third, you shouldn’t be that surprised that you’re not making progress on poverty.” -- Jason Furman

“I think the fact that you see such a broad based list of economists there means that the economic case for raising the minimum wage is really mainstream and increasingly the consensus view of the economics profession,” Jason Furman, chair of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, told a panel at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a Washington-based think tank.

Labour rights advocates are also backing the proposal. “We call on Congress to enact a jobs bill, invest in our future, raise the minimum wage to $10.10, and devote its full attention to restoring full employment and raising wages,” writes Richard Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO, a federation of unions.

The proposed legislation would raise the minimum wage by 95 cents per year over the next three years. This would increase the earnings of full-time minimum-wage workers from 15,000 dollars to 21,000 dollars per year.

Additionally, the bill would also seek to raise the minimum wage for tipped workers by 70 percent. Sen. Tom Harkin, one of the proposal’s co-sponsors, says the tipped minimum wage has not increased in 20 years.

Harkin argues that the fall in minimum wage is related to public policy that no longer guarantees an equal opportunity for low-income citizens.

“We used to agree that if you worked hard and played by the rules you could have a good economic stake in our society,” he said at Tuesday’s panel discussion. “But in recent years it’s been alarming to see how these fundamental principles and values are being degraded in our public policies.”

The bill’s other sponsor, Rep. George Miller, partially attributed the relative fall in wages to corporate labour practices.

“Those in the corporate world, some of the largest corporations in the world, decided that they’re just going to take more,” he said Tuesday. “They’ve assembled enough poor workers to make themselves rich.”

Senate Democrats intend to introduce the bill later this month.

The White House’s Furman contends that the proposed legislation would lift 1.6 million people out of poverty, while 8.6 million would witness a wage hike. Lawrence Mishel, the EPI’s president, estimates that as many as 27 million people will benefit from the proposal.

Depoliticising the minimum wage?

By many analyses, the United States is vastly overdue for an increase in its minimum wage. Furman and other economists note that when inflation is taken into account, today’s minimum wage is below where it was in 1950.

“The minimum wage was on an upward trend and reached its peak in 1968 and has fallen by one-third since,” Furman says.

“If you look at the poverty rate and don’t take into account public policy, it’s actually gone up since 1967. When you’re cutting the pay for people at the bottom by one third, you shouldn’t be that surprised that you’re not making progress on poverty.”

Part of the reason for this tardiness clearly comes down to political wrangling. The Harkin-Miller bill would thus also link and “index” future wage increases to inflation, taking the decision-making process out of the polarised confines of the U.S. Congress.

“When our bill is fully implemented, the minimum wage will no longer be at poverty wage,” Harkin explained. “The other thing is indexing, so it can’t fall down below that [poverty level] again.”

Yet business interests have long rallied against this idea.

“Indexing the minimum wage to inflation means that employers will likely be faced with automatically increasing labour costs without an automatic increase in revenues or profits,” Randy Johnson, a senior vice-president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the country’s largest business lobby group, told IPS.

Conservatives also contend that increasing the minimum wage would lead to an increase in unemployment. As businesses incur higher labour costs, they say, they will inevitably be less likely to hire.

Labour groups argue that employers will be able to compensate for higher wages because of increases in worker productivity. “If it [the minimum wage] had kept up with productivity growth [since 1969] it would be $18.72,” writes Trumka in an analysis sent to IPS.

The Chamber of Commerce also raises concerns about a spike in unemployment. “While raising the minimum wage may help some low wage workers who retain their jobs,” Johnson says, “it will lead to less job creation and higher unemployment that falls disproportionately on the weakest segments of society, those with few skills and lower training.”

Furman, however, asserts that “the vast bulk of studies find that minimum wage has zero effect on unemployment.” In fact, he suggests that a higher wage would have an opposite effect, helping to “attract, motivate, and retain workers.”

Pressure building

Despite this, most Congressional Republicans will likely oppose the proposal, particularly in the heavily conservative House of Representatives. Miller admits to heavy Republican opposition, but notes that some Republicans have indicated that they may be able to find a way to commit to the bill.

While Democrats are willing to negotiate with Republicans on the bill, they remain adamant about a commitment to 10.10 dollars an hour. Harkin says this is a “bottom line”.

“If we had kept up the minimum wage from 1968, it’d be about 10.75 dollars an hour,” he says. “So to somehow bring it below that and lock in a sub-par minimum wage for the future is just not acceptable.”

Harkin also believes that an election year is the most appropriate time to fight for minimum wage legislation. He notes that public pressure leading up to the 1996 elections prompted Republicans to vote in favour of increasing the minimum wage.

“The American people are calling on us to do this clearly and unequivocally, and pressure will build,” he says.

Churches in Diabaly, central Mali, were looted and destroyed during the Islamist occupation. Credit: Marc-André Boisvert/IPS

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Jan 15 2014 (IPS)

A year after Mali’s civil war came to an end, experts here are increasingly concerned that the country risks an eventual return to violence, particularly as Malian authorities continue to marginalise the restive north while neglecting to pursue meaningful political and economic reforms. 

Indeed, a lack of equitable opportunity across Mali has caused northern Tuareg separatists to cite political and economic marginalisation as their reason for rebelling in the first place. The Tuaregs have contested Mali’s north since the 1990s, launching four separate rebellions, finally succeeding due to arms obtained from the Libyan Civil War against Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.“There have been promises made for increased development and local autonomy, but the Malian government strategy is simply to buy off the leader of the rebellion." -- J. Peter Pham

In 2012, Al Qaeda-linked groups took advantage of the insurgency and a military coup to establish control over the area, though Malian authorities were eventually able to expel the Islamist militants with the aid of French intervention. This led to a June 2013 ceasefire accord known as the Ouagadougou agreement, which allowed the government to station soldiers in the north and paved the way for democratic elections last summer.

Yet today, analysts suggest the Tauregs feel that the Malian government has not lived up to its past promises.

“The Tuaregs as a whole regret their temporary alliance with extremists who pushed them out right away but are by no means fully reconciled with the government in Bamako,” J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank, told IPS.

“There have been promises made for increased development and local autonomy, but the Malian government strategy is simply to buy off the leader of the rebellion – but not address the underlying causes. People have to see some sort of benefit for being part of the state and that has not been the case.”

On Sunday, Malian President Ibrahim Boubacer Keita concluded a three-day trip to Mauritania, where he signed a joint statement increasing cooperation between Malian and Mauritanian security forces as France reduces its presence in Mali. Yet analysts from the International Crisis Group (ICG), a watchdog group, are warning that the country’s internal security remains fragile.

Further, a new ICG report cautions that “the urgent need to stabilise the [security] situation should not detract from implementing meaningful governance reforms and a truly inclusive dialogue on the future of the country.”

Similar sentiments recently came during an official mission to Mali by the International Monetary Fund.

“[G]rowth in Mali must be more equitable and more inclusive,” Christine Lagarde, the head of the Washington-based IMF, wrote in a blog entry last week. “This means that all sectors in Mali’s economy should have access to opportunity, including in the education sector and participate in the benefits of growth.”

Limited reconciliation

The Malian government’s inability to adequately include the north in the economic growth that Lagarde recently praised has hindered reconciliation attempts.

After the conflict, civil service workers staffing these institutions have been slow to return to the north, even as northern infrastructure is in need of rehabilitation.

The lack of public services and economic relief in northern Mali has reportedly made the Malian government even more unpopular, resulting in several protests. In late November, for instance, the Malian army opened fire at civilians attending a protest.

The ICG suggests that Malian authorities should focus on the reestablishment and improvement of judicial, health-care and education systems. The report also calls on the government to end its reliance on community-based armed groups to establish order and launch investigations into the army’s abuse and harassment of civilians.

The unrest has also hindered the shipment of humanitarian aid, while the country continues to lack the resources to restore services in the north. In October, the secretary-general reported that some 65 percent of health centres in conflict-affected areas are either partially functional or completely destroyed, while half of schools are closed.

Despite the government’s unpopularity in the north, a United Nations mission, known as MINUSMA, has worked to support Mali’s National Commission for Dialogue and National Reconciliation, established in March 2013 to foster improved relationships between the Malian government and northern separatists. But in an October report, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon described the “dialogue and reconciliation activities” as “limited”.

Mali has also established a series of conferences focusing on northern decentralisation to soothe unrest by giving Tuareg separatists more autonomy. However, the ICG’s new analysis warns that “the meetings should be more inclusive … and result in prompt, tangible actions,” such as the delayed transference of some state resources to local authorities.

Critics of the reconciliation talks note that they are top-down initiatives from Bamako, Mali’s southern capital, rather than community-led. As a result, armed groups in the north have refused to participate in the meetings on the grounds that the government is uninterested in actual dialogue.

Volatile security

As southern Mali attempts to reconcile with the north, the security situation overall remains tenuous, with significant transitions underway.

“Because of limited resources, budget complaints, and demand elsewhere, you’ll soon be left with barely 1,000 French troops,” the Atlantic Council’s Pham says.” Most of these will be engaged in the southern part [of Mali] and not the northern two-thirds, leaving an undersized and under-equipped, predominantly African, force roughly trying to hold a very large territory.”

Rinaldo Depagne, the ICG’s West Africa director, tells IPS that while the Malian government has not violated the terms of the June 2013 ceasefire, “there’s a kind of will from the government to opt out of the frame of the agreement.”

However, Depagne believes that there is cause to be hopeful. “While certain parts of the agreement are not yet respected, that doesn’t mean they won’t be in the near future. We don’t know if they are ready to fully accept the arrangement but it’s predictable that they could.”

The U.N. secretary-general, meanwhile, found that both parties had violated the ceasefire through the “uncoordinated movement of troops”. Consequently, Malian forces and northern militias continue to clash amidst “armed banditry, new jihadi attacks, and inter-communal violence,” the report notes.

Pham also questions how successful the French intervention was in removing jihadist militants from northern Mali.

“If one believes the numbers put out by French spokesmen or African spokesmen, about 600 militants have been killed in the last year and roughly a little over 400 have been taken prisoner,” he says. “This leaves you with more than 1,000 militants who are unaccounted for and are either biding their time hiding in communities they’re well-integrated into or up in the mountains.”

In the face of northern unrest, MINUSMA has played an active peacekeeping role since France’s offensive in the north. Depagne says that while there are 6,000 MINUSMA troops in Mali right now, “there should be more than 10,000.”

Depagne suggests U.N. forces could be at “full scale” in the coming months.

Rosemie Durandisse stands with one of her children in front of her temporary home. Credit: Fritznelson Fortuné/IPS

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Jan 10 2014 (IPS)

As the fourth anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Haiti approaches on Jan. 12, development analysts are decrying an ongoing lack of transparency in U.S. foreign aid to the country, even as those assistance streams are drying up.

From what is known of U.S. post-earthquake funding to Haiti, it appears that a notably small proportion of money from USAID, the county’s main foreign aid arm, is going directly to local Haitian businesses, institutions and organisations.“Sixty percent [of USAID funds] goes to firms operating inside the beltway, disappearing in a black box.” -- Jake Johnson

“Sixty percent [of USAID funds] goes to firms operating inside the beltway, disappearing in a black box,” Jake Johnson of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a Washington think tank, told IPS. “That makes it very hard to determine how and when the funds reach the ground.”

Even though the United States offered three billion dollars in aid for Haiti after the earthquake, less than one percent of the 1.3 billion dollars in obligated USAID funds – money designated specifically for Haitian recovery efforts – has gone directly to local Haitian groups.

“When so little of the funding reaches Haitians themselves, it takes them out of the decision-making process and ensures that aid programmes are not actually responsive to the needs of people on the ground,” Johnson says.

He believes that aid money can often be better utilised in post-emergency situations if donor governments ensure a high level of transparency around those assistance flows, and if they direct as much of these funds as possible towards developing new industries.

A USAID official accounts for these apparent discrepancies by noting that “part of the challenge of making more awards directly to Haitian entities – public and private – has been that few of them have the internal financial controls in place to ensure compliance with U.S. government terms and conditions.”

The official told IPS the agency is trying to address this impediment by working directly with Haitian organisations to build their “financial control capabilities”, as well as to educate them about USAID procurement procedures and provide them with financial services.

“Many USAID-funded partners already work with numerous Haitian NGOs – more than 400 – through contractor and grantee sub-awards as well as arrangements with local vendors.”

Half of the data is missing

So if less than one percent of USAID funding has gone to Haitian groups, where has the rest of this money been directed? The lack of funding transparency makes it impossible to know for sure.

“Reports on contractors are not actually done according to the Office of Inspector General for USAID,” says Johnson.

USAID’s primary contractors are required to report on their subcontractors’ activities, and this data in turn is supposed to be made public. “But this information is nowhere to be found,” Vijaya Ramachandran, a senior fellow with the Centre for Global Development (CGD), a Washington think tank, wrote this week.

The USAID official told IPS that “all reported subcontract and sub-award information is published publicly” through a government website. But Ramachandran asserts that “almost half of the transactions data” are missing important data that identify individual vendors.

Lawmakers have noticed similar problems. Legislation passed the U.S. House of Representatives in mid-December that would require a government audit of U.S. assistance in Haiti. (That bill is currently awaiting a vote in the Senate.)

USAID gave seven of the 10 largest contracts for operations in Haiti to Chemonics International, a for-profit provider that Johnson says is the largest USAID contractor in the world. Chemonics’s two largest projects in Haiti include the WINNER Project and the Office of Transitions Initiative, which Johnson describes as “the more political arm of USAID”.

The project was designed to provide aid to countries afflicted by natural disasters or political turmoil, and following the earthquake it immediately provided disaster relief for displaced Haitians.

Nonetheless, the public is unable to ascertain how Chemonics spent the vast majority of its multi-million-dollar contracts in Haiti due to USAID’s lack of oversight reports.

“The [USAID] inspector-general found that Chemonics regularly runs short of its goals and over its budget,” CEPR’s Johnson says. “This is typical, but it’s become particularly evident in Haiti because of the earthquake.”

Trade burden

In addition to development and reconstruction aid, Washington is also seeking to assist Haitian recovery efforts by strengthening the country’s garments industry. Doing so, however, has presented a different set of challenges.

Following the earthquake, USAID partnered with the Clinton Foundation, the Inter-American Bank and Sae-A Trading, a Korean textile manufacturer, to construct the Caracol Industrial Park. Although the agency predicted that the complex would create up to 65,000 jobs, media reports suggest that as of last September the park had created fewer than 1,500 jobs.

Furthermore, although the project’s financers gave hundreds of small-scale farmers 3,200 dollars each to vacate their land for the complex, 95 percent of that land today reportedly remains inactive. Meanwhile, Haitian garment factories, including Caracol Park, are said to be openly flaunting minimum wage laws by paying their employees a mere 4.56 dollars a day, rather than the 6.85 dollars per day stipulated by the government.

Other U.S. attempts to bolster the textiles sector have started out more strongly, but been beset by pre-existing measures.

In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, the U.S. Congress passed the Haiti Economic Lift Programme (HELP) Act in the hopes of stimulating the country’s economy by boosting apparels exports, long a cornerstone of Haitian industry. Haiti’s clothing exports to the U.S. have indeed risen by 25 percent since 2009, creating 30,000 jobs, a number that is expected to double by 2016.

Because Haitian apparel imports into the United States are restricted based on a rule of origin, however, certain types of clothing imports over a certain quota must be produced using U.S. materials. These measures are designed to benefit the U.S. textile industry.

Although the HELP Act partially ameliorated these complex trade restrictions, the quotas and tariffs that the United States places on the Haitian apparel industry continue to inhibit trade-based economic growth.

The CGD’s Kimberly Elliot told IPS that U.S. red tape on Haitian imports today consists of a “complex maze of caps and rules of origins. That’s unlike the European Union, Canada and Japan, all of which have simplified restrictions on rules of origins for states that the U.N. designates as least-developed countries.”

She calls the rule of origin a “burden” for Haiti and argues that if U.S. trade restrictions were less complex, post-earthquake Haitian trade would have a greater potential for growth.