Fifteen million babies, or more than one in 10 infants, are born prematurely each year. Over one million die soon after birth, or survive to face a lifetime of health complications, says a new report by the World Health Organisation and co- sponsors.

Preterm births are rising in almost all countries and are now the single most important cause of neonatal deaths. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

Preterm births, defined by 37 weeks of completed gestation or less, are rising in almost all countries and are now the single most important cause of neonatal deaths of babies under 28 days.

“Being born too soon is an unrecognized killer. Preterm births account for almost half of all newborn deaths worldwide and are now the second leading cause of death in children under five, after pneumonia,” Joy Lawn, co-editor of the report “Born Too Soon: The Global Action Report on Preterm Birth,” and director of Global Evidence and Policy for Save the Children, said in a press release.

“The numbers of preterm births are increasing. In all but three countries, preterm birth rates increased in the last 20 years. Worldwide, 50 million births still happen at home and many babies die without birth or death certificates.”

Fifteen countries account for two-thirds of the world’s preterm births, with India and China in the lead. Out of all live births, preterm births account for 11.1 percent, 60 percent of which occur in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. On average, 12 percent of preterm births occur in low-income countries compared to nine percent in high-income countries.

“What I found shocking is (the difference) geographically and within countries when we look at the rates of preterm birth in Asia and sub- Sahara Africa… What really struck me is the equity gap of preterm birth,” Christopher Howson, co-editor of the report and head of Global Programs for March of Dimes, told IPS.

“You take a baby that is less than 28 weeks, if the baby is born in a rich country, it has a 90 percent chance to live. If born in a poor country, it only has a 10 percent chance to live.”

However, the problem is not confined to the developing world. The United States and Brazil both rank among the top countries with the highest number of preterm births. In the U.S., at sixth place, more than one in nine births, about 12 percent, are preterm.

There are disparities within groups in the U.S. too. In 2009, the preterm birth rate for white citizens was 10.9 percent, while it was as high as 17.5 percent for black citizens. The age of the mother also mattered, with the birth rate between 11 and 12 percent for women aged 20 to 35 and over 15 percent for women under 17 and over 40.

The report links a number of factors to the increase in preterm births, which in general remain unexplained though a number of risk factors have been identified such as a prior history of preterm birth, underweight, obesity, diabetes, hypertension, smoking, genetics and pregnancies spaced too closely together.

In high-income countries, causes include older women having babies, increased use of fertility drugs resulting in multi-fetal pregnancies, and medically unnecessary inductions and Cesarean deliveries before full-term.

Main causes identified in low-income countries include infections, malaria, HIV, and high adolescent pregnancy rates.

Preterm births have been a largely overlooked and neglected problem, health experts admit. This report is the first ever to provide comparable country-level estimates for preterm births.

“Ten years ago, I was working as a pediatrician in Ghana and it was very obvious every day…I was in charge of the baby nursery with about 11,000 births a year and there were babies dying every day of things that they did not need to die of. I started looking around and at the time there were no U.N. estimates of death or clinical guidelines of what to do or donors interested in it,” Lawn told IPS.

According to the report, two-thirds of premature births could be prevented with “feasible, cost-effective care.” Prevention is the key to reduce preterm numbers, and an estimated three-quarters of babies born too soon could survive if only a few proven and inexpensive treatments were more widely available.

Empowering and educating girls, family planning, screening women for known medical conditions, assuring good nutrition before and during pregnancy, and better access to healthcare are effective measures in reducing premature births.

Essential and extra newborn care, including feeding support, neonatal resuscitation, and Kangaroo mother care, a method involving infants being carried with skin-to-skin contact, could help in reducing the number of premature deaths.

The report also recommends that healthcare providers collaborate with businesses and civil societies to advocate, invest and provide funding to reduce preterm births. Even adding a dollar for each woman in prenatal care can make a difference, Lawn told IPS. “There are a couple of things that people can do to make the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) reachable. Even if the countries just picked two methods, like Kangaroo care and prenatal steroid shots, that can be a major game changer.”

MDG 5 aims to reduce by three-quarters the maternal mortality ratio, as well as achieve universal access to reproductive health care.

There’s an action gap in what is being done, Howson said. Civil society groups, for example, are an untapped resource that can be powerful in the community.

“We all have a role to play. I think in particular that groups like parent groups are so incredibly important in really creating noise. They are able to advocate from the ground up and that can be much more effective than trying to change from the top down,” he said.

*Stephanie Parker reported from United Nations headquarters in New York.

By Charundi Panagoda
WASHINGTON, May 1 2012 (IPS)

Thirty percent of food is wasted globally, while one billion people go hungry and another billion are obese.

The current food system is broken and is failing to meet the world’s nutritional needs, says Danielle Nierenberg, “Nourishing the Planet” project director at Worldwatch Institute.

Worldwatch and the Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition recently released “Eating Planet 2012” to highlight the challenges faced by today’s food and agricultural system and the benefits of making the system more sustainable, accessible and fair.

“While we talk a lot about the bad news (in the report), the focus is on how agriculture can be the solution for some of the world’s most pressing problems, whether it’s hunger and obesity or youth unemployment. We really think that food and how we produce it and how we eat it is a significant solution,” Nierenberg said.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Farmers don’t make much. Can they afford to be sustainable? Will they be able to mass-produce without the usual fertiliser? A: I think what we are seeing as fuel prices continue to rise, it’s becoming harder and harder for farmers all over the world to afford agriculture inputs that are highly fossil fuel intensive like fertiliser, pesticide and other chemicals. And there really are no signs of fuel prices going down soon.

So I think the whole issue of whether organic or sustainable agriculture can feed the world is not really the question, it’s whether we can continue the food system based on fossil fuel intensive resources. I don’t think it can.

We have one billion hungry people in the world and we have an industrialised agricultural system that’s supposed to be feeding these people, but it’s not. (Various studies) comparing the two show that the industrial system is not making that much more in yield and, in some cases, yields are lower.

We are not feeding with the current system, anyway. So we have to figure out less fossil fuel intensive methods to make sure everyone is fed.

Q: What are some of the solutions you propose? A: In “Eating Planet”, the focus is on nutrition. There is a lot of talk in agricultural development on how to improve yields and what kind of agricultural system is best but there are only a few people who bridge the gap between agriculture and nutrition.

It’s not just about how much food we are producing, but what kind of food we are producing. Are we trying to introduce more varieties of highly nutritious beans, vegetables and fruit? There’s so much focus on the amount of calories we are producing, but no focus on nutrients that are present in those calories. This is why we are seeing things like obesity and diabetes as a global epidemic, not just happening in rich countries but also in poor countries. How can we make the agricultural system more nutritious?

At the World Bank, the nutrition people are not talking to the agricultural people. That sort of thing needs to change. We need to make sure that public health professionals and nutritionists are talking to farmers, food processors and food businesses to make sure the food is as nutritious as it can be.

Q: Let’s consider the U.S. for example. Here nutritious organic food can be expensive and people might not want to pay that much or are able to. How can that be changed? A: A lot of subsidies that have existed in American agriculture in the last 50 years have been focused on industrial agriculture and producing commodity crops like corn and soybeans. Organic food is expensive because farmers are growing it on a smaller scale.

One reason for this is because it’s still not receiving the subsidies the big farmers have. To help small- and medium-scale farmers, we can funnel more of the agricultural funding for farmers who are more sustainable, using less fertiliser and more organic compounds. It’ll help struggling farmers and make it more affordable for consumers.

Q: Fast-food restaurants like McDonalds are now exporting to other countries, changing the eating habits of those people. How would you address that? A: Factory farming or concentrated operations, this agricultural system really started here in the U.S. and in Europe, (and) is now spreading to the Philippines, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia. The environmental, public health and animal welfare impact of this is really extreme. You have huge amounts of waste that can’t be utilised by farmlands, surface fertiliser is becoming toxic waste, there’s tropical water pollution, surface water pollution.

The impact of this fast-food diet in developing countries they weren’t exposed to 30 or 40 years ago is leading to the same types of problems – diabetes, obesity, heart disease and sometimes types of cancer.

The thing about this system is, whether it’s industry farming or the fast-food culture, is that it’s very dependent on cheap sources of grain…Agriculture can’t be seen as sort of an industry, it’s part of the landscape. More than any other industry it relies on clean energy and water.

What we are calling for is a restructuring of the entire food system. One that is more regional and local and relies on resources already available.

Q: How realistic is that? What would you suggest as the basic foundation for a system like that? A: This transition isn’t going to happen overnight. It requires actions from all levels – businesses so that they make their production systems more sustainable, and action from consumers, knowing where food comes from and demanding safe, fairly produced food. We want food that is more animal-welfare friendly.

Finally, policymakers need to push a lot of these changes, without that we won’t see huge investments in agriculture. Really, for the last 30 years agriculture has been ignored by the international donor communities. Now, because of the food crisis, we are seeing a shift to ‘oh gosh, we need to invest in agriculture or we are going to be in a lot of trouble.’

We can’t ignore agriculture any longer whether we are policymakers or soccer moms. We really need to make sure that agriculture is something that sustains and not just some extractive industry.

Excerpt:

By Charundi Panagoda
WASHINGTON, Apr 24 2012 (IPS)

About 140 million Africans are now on the internet. With half of the population under age 15 and 70 percent of the population under 30, social media is becoming an important feature in the continent’s development path.

Teddy Ruge Credit: Courtesy of Teddy Ruge

Teddy Ruge, lead social media strategist for the World Bank’s Connect4Climate campaign and co-founder of Project Diaspora, an online platform for mobilising members of the African diaspora, calls this Africa’s “renaissance of access to information”.

“In 2012, there are about 600 million connected mobile devices in Africa,” he said. “Demographically, we have 300 million on the continent now moving to the middle class who can afford smart phones, laptops, connectivity.

“I look at that in terms of local voices beginning to have a conversation in development. I see this as an opportunity to look at issues of climate change, self- government, economic development and youth employment.”

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: What does it mean that Africans are using social media and that they are connected more than ever before? A: There are frank discussions in development. What I like about social media is that Africans are connected, that they are able to read information about good governance and issues from a global perspective. They are also able to see how their country fares and compare themselves to other groups.

There is still a huge divide between participatory government – we have this connected youth, then we have these older people in governing ranks, some of them are remnants of colonial rule who’ve stayed in their positions for decades who really don’t have a connection to these youth voters yet. Hopefully, we can use social media to bridge that divide and say these are the voices of the youth of your country, this is what they need to move forward.

Q: You have called this the “legitimacy of social media for global engagement”. With the Rio+20 sustainable development conference coming up, what are African youth most concerned about? A: The conversation is still the same – are policymakers going to make policies to help us Africans who didn’t contribute a lot to climate change but are going to pay the most? Green energy is expensive, solar isn’t that cheap yet. Those coming out of university and high school are wondering where the jobs are going to be.

You see African youth beginning to ask the tough questions. If you want green job creation, who is going to pay for that? If you want us to stop cutting down trees, how are the villagers going to have energy access? Those are the critical questions. We anticipate a lot of commentary over social media from those who are not able to attend Rio. We expect the same questions for COP 18 Qatar as well.

Q: What could these social media savvy youth show that the policymakers can’t? A: We saw the actual people behind the numbers. We wanted to make it real for those sceptical about climate change. We wanted to provide this information to see if they can drive the local changes, that it simply isn’t about policy.

(For contributions for Connect4Climate) we asked to share with us what climate change means in your community. People sent us pictures of dead cows because of droughts. It wasn’t just the picture, it was the story that came with the picture. We saw energy, water and forestry were the biggest concerns.

We saw stories about women. In Africa, women do most of the domestic work, when there’s no water or firewood they have to walk miles to get some. We got pictures of women lining up to dig for water, walking into the woods.

Q: Do you see a disconnect between people who funnel money into Africa and the real Africans concerned? A: If we are looking at it from a policy and finance perspective, it’s very different. The World Bank is not necessarily communicating with the villager in Africa, they are connecting with the government and asking ‘what is it that you are working on and how can we connect you to funders?’ That’s the type of high-level conversation.

I think Connect4Climate falls somewhere between low- level and high- level conversation. Connect4Climate is able to say this is what the conversation is about in relation to climate change, how this goes through to the decision making depends on the veracity of these voices and how sustainable they are in calling for better solutions.

We do have people who pay attention to these voices and say perhaps we can aggregate these voices and craft a policy. I can say the voices are rising up and saying ‘we need solutions from an economic development perspective.’

For example, in Kenya youth are going into junkyards and retrofitting little engines and mechanical contraptions and building faster and more efficient windmills to recharge their electronics rather than rely on the grid. They were able to actually build working prototypes to generate electricity.

Solutions are already happening on the ground with youth. Can we find a way to fund these kids and their ingenuity and replicate that kind of spirit across the board?

Q: In the past you have spoken about the “White man’s burden”, about paternalistic attitudes toward Africa. Is this something the online Africans also talk about? A: I think they talk about it from a corruption standpoint. Aid isn’t really going to create jobs. Aid should be about creating infrastructure to help job creation. That’s what the entrepreneurs I talked to think, how to get financing so they can expand their operation and hire more people and move to the middle class.

We are becoming a lot more vocal because of the connectivity; we are a lot louder and so is our role in our solutions. We have issues but it’s not necessarily your job to fix them. It is our job to say ‘this is what we are working on, we can work together to solve this problem.’ The full-scale hijacking of African agency is going to be a thing of the past.

Excerpt:

Forty-seven years after the Equal Pay Act was signed into law, women in the United States are still struggling against wage discrimination in the workplace.

Women even earn less than men in traditionally female professions like nursing and teaching. Credit: UN Photo/Martine Perret

Women full-time workers earn only 77 percent for each dollar earned annually by men, a 23 percent wage gap. It is even greater for minority women, with African American women earning 64 cents and Hispanic women earning 56 cents for every dollar earned by a white man.

According to the U.S. Department of Labour, the gender wage gap costs a woman about 380,000 dollars over her career.

According to a recent report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), women not only earn less than men in almost all of the most common occupations for men, such as cooks and carpenters, they earn less in almost all of the most common occupations for women as well, such as registered nurses and teachers.

Women are more than twice as likely as men to work in occupations with median earnings for full-time work below the federal poverty level for a family of four.

“These gender wage gaps are not about women choosing to work less than men – the analysis is comparing apples to apples, men and women who all work full time – and we see that across these 40 common occupations, men nearly always earn more than women,” Ariane Hegewisch, IWPR study director, said at a press event on Equal Pay Day, a symbolic date in the current year through which women must work to match what men earned in the previous year.

“Discrimination law cases provide us with some insights on the reasons that the wage gap persists: women are less likely to be hired into the most lucrative jobs, and – when they work side by side with men – they may get hired at a lower rate, and receive lower pay increases over the years,” she said. “Discrimination in who gets hired for the best jobs hits all women but particularly black and Hispanic women.”

The gender wage gap affects women as soon as they enter the job market out of college and only increases over time.

“American Association of University Women’s 2007 report, ‘Behind the Pay Gap‘, showed, however, that the pay gap among college graduates specifically was not all about men’s and women’s choices. Overall, women one year after college graduation earned 80 percent of what their male peers earned and ten years after college graduation, just 69 percent of what their male peers earned,” Christianne Corbett, senior researcher at AAUW, told IPS in an email.

Critics of the gender wage disparity continue to say the wage gap is about choice, and argue that women lose money when they take time out of the labour market to raise children. Some say the problem will resolve naturally.

“There might be an element of choice but there are constraints that limit the choices. If you have a low-wage job, then you might not be able to afford childcare and rather do it yourself. If you are in a couple, if the father makes more money, then it makes sense for the mother to take time out. And, basically, later the mother gets penalised for taking time out and compounds to low wages,” Hegewisch told IPS.

In recent years, progress in narrowing the gender wage gap has stalled. In the 1960s and ’70s, when legislation was just starting to take effect, the gap narrowed slowly, and in the 1980s and ’90s, it narrowed quite a lot, particularly due to the rise in women’s educational achievements. But since the late 1990s, it has significantly slowed down, Hegewisch said.

Earlier this year, Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, repealed the state’s Equal Pay Enforcement Act, much to the outrage of feminists. Supporters have been pushing harder to protect equal pay in the wake of the “War on Women”, a term used by most liberal feminists following Republican-led attacks on reproductive rights and economic security.

Advocates have been supporting legislation such as the Paycheck Fairness Act to combat wage secrecy in companies and to expand on previous wage discrimination laws. In 2009, Barack Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the first bill he signed as president, to “empower women to recover wages lost to discrimination by extending the time period in which an employee can file a claim.”

“The Paycheck Fairness Act is important because under that employers will not be able to retaliate against their employees for sharing their wage information. We know that wage secrecy really tends to make wage discrimination really hard to fight,” Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women, which has been fighting wage discrimination since the 1960s, told IPS.

Other than legislation, companies could become more transparent to fight wage discrimination, Hegewisch recommends.

“If you have a system of some monetary appraisal, you can make sure somebody, apart from the person who has prices, double check. If you translate that into pay, you check whether there’s a gender bias in it and whether that’s justified. You might have a lot of men performing better one year and you can document it, but you might not. So, I think monitoring what you do and being transparent makes a big difference. “

The open wounds of the Amazon. Credit: Rolly Valdivia/IPS

By Charundi Panagoda
WASHINGTON, Apr 10 2012 (IPS)

Since 2008, over 20 U.S. companies have imported illegally logged timber worth millions from the Peruvian Amazon, charged a multi-year investigative report released Tuesday by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA).

“Exporters in Peru and importers in the United States and around the world are currently integral parts of a systematic flow of illegal timber from the Peruvian Amazon. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes through sheer negligence, each of the actors and agencies involved in this system are working as gears in a well-oiled machine that is ransacking Peru’s forests and undermining the livelihoods and rights of the people that depend on them,” the report stated.

The investigation discovered at least 112 shipments of protected cedar and mahogany were illegally laundered with fabricated papers and imported by U.S. companies between 2008 and 2010. Tracing timber routes from the Amazon to the U.S. warehouses isn’t easy, according to the report, as “links in this chain are willfully obscured to perpetuate confusion about the origins of almost all timber traded in Peru.”

The shipments accounted for more than 35 percent of all trade in these protected species between U.S. and Peru. During this period, Peru’s primary exporter, Maderera Bozovich (whose shipments are received by Alabama-based affiliate Bozovich Timber Products, Inc), exported cargo under 152 protected permits, at least 45 percent of which is believed to include illegally logged wood.

EIA claims the percentage would be actually higher if more on-site supervisions were carried out.

Illegal logging in Peru is facilitated by a widely corrupt system. The timber, often extracted from protected areas including national parks and indigenous territories, are laundered with false information.

Typically, forest owners include “fictitious trees”, trees that don’t actually exist in their logging concessions, in their annual harvest plans to get official permits (called GTS), which are then sold on the black market to be used to launder illegally logged wood. Complicit authorities approve these practices, sometimes financed by “timber barons” connected to organised crime.

In the U.S., the 2008 Lacey Act addresses illegal logging and expects the buyer to practice “due care” and ensure their products are legal. U.S. importers of Peruvian wood continue to show the GTS permit as sufficient proof of legality, despite pervasive corruption being an “open secret” in Peru for years, Andrea Johnson, EIA director of forest campaigns, said.

Bozovich USA told IPS that they are concerned and reject EIA’s accusation. “Bozovich’s exports to USA comply with the terms and condition of Lacey Act and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora,” the company said.

Since majority of the trade the report documented occurred after Lacey Act was passed, Johnson believes companies had ample evidence of the risks involving trading timber from Peru.

“It’s been increasingly clear that the standard permit in Peru is insufficient to actually tell you anything about the true origin of your wood in majority of the cases…We believe that in 2012, if companies continue import wood without asking additional questions than ‘Can you give me a document with an official stamp’, this is inadequate due care… a possible Lacey Act violation.”

EIA, which is based in Washington and London, sent out surveys to exporters and importers asking about their due care practices, and none of the U.S. importers wanted to participate, Johnson said. Those who did said they had GTS certificates or claimed to have Forest Stewardship Council certification.

“It’s very important that buyers need to be aware FSC chain of custody certification does not guarantee the company is only selling legally obtained wood,” she said.

“The only thing an FSC certificate will tell you is that the company has the capability to differentiate between FSC certified wood and other types of wood…It appears that some companies use their FSC certificate to suggest that all their wood is coming from a known origin when that is not in fact the case.”

Illegal logging comes with massive human, environmental and economic costs. The loggers often work under abysmal and exploitative conditions.

“EIA recorded testimonies from men and women who experienced forced labor and sexual abuse in logging camps, and teenagers with horrific injuries sent away without wages to find their own way to a clinic… Illegal logging is also ransacking the rainforest, harming endangered wildlife, and contributing to climate change. It creates unfair competition, resulting in job cuts and economic losses for law- abiding forest products businesses in Peru, the United States, and other countries around the world,” EIA said in a press release.

In 2011, the government and industry of Loreto, Peru’s largest region, estimated that illegal logging was causing the country annual losses greater than 250 million dollars. Worldwide, total receipts from illegal logging run between 10 and 15 billion dollars a year.

Days before the annual White House Easter Egg Roll, anti- poverty advocates staged their own egg hunt in Lafayette Park to urge President Obama to “find political will to end global hunger” during the upcoming G8 Summit at Camp David.

Hunger advocates call on President Obama to pledge a commitment to global hunger at the G8 summit. Credit: ActionAid USA

Sponsored by ActionAid USA, the activists held banners that read “Obama: Find the Will to be a Hunger Hero at the G8,” next to a cutout of the president in a superhero suit.

“This year, Americans are expected to spend over two billion dollars on Easter candy, according to CNN. We estimate that if the U.S contributed less than half that amount to a G8 food security initiative, we could empower 50 million smallholder farmers to boost themselves out of poverty through sustainable agriculture,” Katie Campbell, senior policy analyst at ActionAid USA, said in a press release.

“President Obama must do everything possible to find the political will and financial resources to combat hunger when international leaders meet at Camp David in May.”

The number of hungry people worldwide increased to historic levels due to the global food price and economic crises of 2007-2008. In 2010, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated 925 million hungry people in the world, with a vast majority of the undernourished living in developing countries, mostly in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

In 2009, soon after new poverty figures showed one-sixth of the world was now hungry, the G8 declared the “L’Aquila hunger pledge” in Italy prioritising food security issues and committing 22 billion dollars over three years in support of country-led plans for agriculture.

The L’Aquila financial commitments are set to expire this May. In its place, anti-poverty advocates are calling out for a new financial pledge for a new food security initiative upholding the five “Rome Principles” set during the 2009 World Summit on Food Security.

“The Rome principles basically hold countries accountable for investing in country-led plans in a comprehensive, coordinated and sustainable way. We would like to see the Rome principles, not just as principles countries should abide by, but as the fundamental framework for a new food security initiative,” Campbell told IPS.

It’s also important to evaluate impact targets, Campbell added. Instead of just allocating a certain amount of money, the pledge should calculate how many people are reached when country investment plans are fulfilled.

The new suggestions are improvements over the shortcomings of the current pledge. A 2011 report by ActionAid found that two years after L’Aquila, almost two-thirds of the way through, only 22 percent of the aid had actually been spent. Despite the U.S. leading the way and promising transparency of progress, delivery of aid has been significantly slow, mostly attributed to delays in the Congressional budget process.

Some G8 members had even “deliberately inflated aid to agriculture figures” by including previous aid commitments and money used in non- agricultural sectors in their calculations.

Campbell thinks solutions to such problems, other than holding governments accountable, is to ensure long-term investments rather than year-to-year ones. “If we make six- or seven-year investments, countries don’t have to necessarily rely on congressional appropriation.”

Campbell says the pledge has been relatively successful in its Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP). She just returned from Rwanda, where she witnessed GAFSP transforming the lives of farmers by building terraces on hilly land, increasing productivity tenfold.

Agriculture is the most effective way to drive economic growth in the world’s poorest communities, and women’s inclusion is considered paramount for any growth.

“We actually believe strongly that to pull people out of poverty and to improve food security is to invest in women smallholder farmers because women, especially in Africa, make up the majority of farmers and the majority of farm labour,” Campbell said.

Despite comprising 43 percent of the agricultural labour force, women in developing countries often lack access to resources male farmers have. By giving women access to credit, labour saving tools and so on, their impact in agricultural development can be multiplied.

“The second thing is climate resilience of agricultural practices. We are already seeing the impact of climate change in poor nations. So we feel it’s really important that any new investments in agricultural development need to be resilient to climate change and be sustainable,” Campbell said.

Activists in leprechaun costumes represented the Anglo-Irish Bank and the European Central Bank (ECB) grabbing a 4.1-billion-dollar "pot of gold". Credit: Jennifer Tong/IPS

By Charundi Panagoda
WASHINGTON, Mar 16 2012 (IPS)

On the eve of St. Patrick’s Day, activists dressed up as leprechauns appeared in front of the Embassy of Ireland to protest Irish taxpayer money being used to pay debts of the Anglo-Irish Bank and the Irish Nationwide Building Society (Anglo/INBS).

The leprechaun costumes represented the Anglo-Irish Bank and the European Central Bank (ECB) grabbing a 4.1-billion-dollar “pot of gold”, money taken from the Irish people.

The event was organised by Jubilee Network USA, an alliance of labour organisations and churches promoting global economic justice, in association with civil groups in Ireland.

“These debts are not the responsibility of the Irish people, and they should not be forced to pay,” the activists wrote in a letter presented to the Embassy.

Ireland had a robust “Celtic Tiger” economy from 1995 to 2007. From 2001 onwards, the economic growth was majorly based on a property price bubble fuelled by a massive rise in household debt, leading to reckless and speculative lending, mainly by Anglo/INBS.

According to Jubilee USA, the bank “recklessly financed some of Ireland’s worst property speculators for unsustainable golf courses, hotels and super markets, and saddled the Irish people with a massive unjust debt.”

In 2008, the Anglo loans scandal led to the resignations of the bank’s Chairman Sean FitzPatrick, CEO David Drumm, and board member Lars Bradshaw, who had given out hidden loans amounting to 87 million euros between years 2000 and 2007.

In 2009, the Irish government nationalised the bank. In 2010, the bank reported a 12.7-billion-euro loss, the largest in Irish corporate history, when the government had already injected four billion euros of capital into the lender.

“(The debt) was accumulated by a bank that was into risky speculation, not really investing money but gambling with the money. When the market crashed and the bank went belly up, the Irish government was in a place where they essentially had to back that debt,” Eric LeCompte, executive director of Jubilee USA, told IPS.

The Irish government struck a deal with ECB and the Central Bank of Ireland for Anglo to receive funding to repay debts, but without sufficient collateral, the Irish government created a “promissory note,” an unconditional promise, to pay for the liability.

The Irish government arranged to make 47.9 billion euros in promissory payments between March 2011 and March 2031, composed of 30.6 billion euros capital reduction and 16.8 billion euros in interest repayments.

“To put these repayments in context, 30.6 billion (euro) is equivalent to just under 20% of Ireland’s current GDP or 17,000 (euro) for each working person working for pay or profit in the State. 47.9 billion (euro) is 30% of Ireland’s current GDP,” Debt Justice Action, a coalition of organisations from Ireland and elsewhere against unjust debt payments, stated on their website.

The Irish government is scheduled to pay 4.1 billion dollars to the ECB on Mar. 31, which the activists say shouldn’t happen because the debt is illegitimate.

“Four point one billion dollars could pay for funding (Ireland’s) entire primary school system for a full year, (but) it will instead be paid into the Central Bank, be deducted from its liabilities and, effectively, be destroyed,” Jubilee USA wrote in a statement.

To pay off this debt, the Irish state will “essentially drain real money from the economy” with enormous impacts on people’s lives, especially women, Nessa Ní Chasaide, coordinator of Debt and Development Coalition Ireland, told IPS.

“Women often bear the brunt of unjust debts. In Ireland, services for children with special needs are being cut, benefits for single parents and vital community projects are being closed down that are key social supports for women in Ireland,” Chasaide added.

Some have raised concerns over the Irish defaulting on a debt, LeCompte said. Also, the international financial institutions and the banking community expect countries to pay off their debts.

“Essentially, there’s always concern about not paying a promissory note. But since the debt is unjust, illegitimate, there are greater risks to the Irish population for not entering negotiations to end this debt,” LeCompte told IPS.

“Even the situation in Greece, which is still very problematic, these kinds of negotiations have happened. Ireland is in just as bad of a spot, but they haven’t had any negotiations. We are calling upon the Irish government to practice common sense for a debt that’s not even being paid to an actually existing entity.”

Up until recently, illegitimate or unjust debts – loans in violation of human rights or rules of fairness, harmful to environment, given to oppressive governments, or intending to exploit in general – mostly impacted developing countries, or the Global South.

Now the same failed financial policies of the banks and International Monetary Fund that plagued the Global South has moved to the Global North, to Ireland, Iceland, Spain and Greece, LeCompte said. A situation similar to Ireland happened in 2008 in Ecuador.

“Ecuador had three billion dollars in loans from IMF, and the Ecuador government said ‘This debt is illegitimate; it was given to corrupt prior regimes, we are not going to pay it.’ That forced international financial institutions into negotiations,” LeCompte said.

The Irish government should follow similar suit and enter into negotiations with ECB, he added.

“Ironically, over a decade ago our partners in Ireland and Greece were fighting for debt relief and financial relief for countries in the South, like Zimbabwe and Zambia. Now these same organisations are leading protests in their own streets for debt relief in their own countries.”

Excerpt:

A major U.S. civil rights group filed a federal lawsuit in Massachusetts Wednesday on behalf of a Ugandan gay rights organisation, the Sexual Minorities of Uganda (SMUG), against a right-wing evangelist leader for inciting hatred against homosexuals that has led to increased violence against LGBT persons in the East African country.

Activists rally in Rome in memory of David Kato, a Ugandan gay rights activist who was murdered on Jan. 26, 2011. Credit: Certi Diritti/CC BY 2.0

The lawsuit was filed by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in the home state of Scott Lively, the defendant, who heads the Abiding Truth Ministries, a fundamentalist Christian group.

He is also the author of “The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party”, a 1995 book that claimed Nazism was created and propagated by homosexuals, and a second book, “Seven Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child”, a how-to guide for parents to “prevent” their children from becoming homosexual.

“Lively has been the man with the plan in this enterprise,” said Pam Spees, a senior CCR staff attorney.

“He long ago set out a very specific and detailed methodology for stripping away the most basic human rights protections, to silence and ultimately disappear LGBT people. Unfortunately, he found willing accomplices and fertile ground in Uganda,” she said.

Reached at the coffee house he owns in Springfield, Massachusetts, Lively, who has not been served yet, harshly denounced the lawsuit, which is being brought under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), a 1789 anti-piracy law that, since 1980, has been used by foreign nationals to sue corporations and foreign individuals for human rights abuses committed overseas.

“It’s a frivolous lawsuit. Everything that they are alleging is speech, and speech is not actionable. You can’t bring a lawsuit in the United States saying that someone is legally liable for their speech.” he told IPS.

He called the claims against him “just outrageous” and “without basis”.

Lively began working with Ugandan anti-gay forces in 2002. According to CCR, he headed a conference in 2009 with Stephen Langa, another U.S. evangelist, titled “Seminar on Exposing the Homosexual Agenda”, in which he characterised the gay movement as an “evil institution”.

In the same presentation, Lively told audiences that homosexuals were a threat to children, committed child rape and “recruited” children into homosexuality.

Among the attendees, who included prominent politicians and members of the media, was Ugandan parliamentarian David Bahati. One month later, Bahati introduced the “Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill”, which criminalised gay-rights advocacy, depriving LGBT activists of freedom of assembly, association and the right to be free of discrimination. It also called for the death penalty for being a “serial offender for the offense of homosexuality”.

At the same time, Ugandan tabloids and state-owned media called openly for persecuting homosexuals in what became a major campaign against them. After a number of attacks against homosexuals, many went into hiding.

In January 2011, an outspoken gay rights activist and chief litigation officer for SMUG, David Kato, was beaten to death in his neighbourhood after one tabloid published a photo of him and other advocates headlined “Hang Them”.

The murder drew international attention and strong denunciations from Western governments, including the U.S. and Britain, some of which threatened to cut aid to Uganda unless the pending bill was withdrawn.

The bill was shelved under international pressure but was reintroduced in October last year.

Gay rights advocates pointed specifically to U.S. evangelicals, including Lively and Langa, a member of the Washington-based extreme- right Christian group the Fellowship, as responsible for stoking the anti-gay hysteria that resulted in the death of Kato.

“U.S evangelical leaders like Scott Lively have actively and intensively worked to eradicate any trace of LGBT advocacy and identity…His influence has been incredibly harmful and destructive for LGBT Ugandans fighting for their rights,” said Frank Mugisha, executive director of SMUG, who received the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award in 2011 for his work promoting LGBT rights amidst the hostile climate in Uganda.

“We have to stop people like Scott Lively from helping to codify and give legal cover to hatred,” he said.

Lively asserted that he is protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which guarantees free speech.

“If you put everything I’ve said in context, nothing I said could motivate someone to hurt a homosexual. It’s taken out of context. They’re liars; they’re being dishonest,” he told IPS in a telephone interview.

But Heidi Beirich, director of the intelligence project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said Lively’s anti-gay propaganda “is not harmless”. The center characterised his Abiding Truth Ministries as a “hate group” in 2008.

“When you lie about people, saying they cause genocide or they are Nazis, it often makes these populations vulnerable to violence,” Beirich told IPS.

“Lively is being ridiculous,” she said, “He’s (in Uganda) saying anti-gay things and riling up the population to pass this disgusting legislation. He may have a right to free speech, but he needs to be held responsible for what he says as well.”

The Alien Tort Statute has attracted considerable controversy as a tool for foreigners to hold alleged human rights abusers accountable in U.S. courts for their activities overseas. The Supreme Court upheld its use for that purpose in 2005 but is expected to review it again in June.

CCR said the suit against Lively marks the first time the statute has been wielded by victims of persecution on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

By Charundi Panagoda and - -
WASHINGTON, Mar 7 2012 (IPS)

The United States has fallen behind. Many other countries have already implemented it, but the United States still has yet to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which promotes women’s rights as human rights.

In 1945, the United Nations (U.N.) created provisions for governments to protect human rights. Not until 1979 did the U.N. General Assembly pass CEDAW to protect fundamental human rights for women. As of May 2010, 186 out of 193 countries had ratified the treaty.

“CEDAW acknowledges the existence of women as half of humanity in this world, insists on inclusion of women in all spheres of life and obliges the state parties to support all of their citizens, both women and men,” Sima Samar, chairperson of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, said at a recent event on women’s rights.

United States is one of the seven countries that has not yet ratified CEDAW, leaving it in the company of Iran, Somalia, Naurau, Palau, Sudan and Tonga. CEDAW was signed by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, has passed twice in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with a bipartisan vote in 1994 and 2002, but has never come to the Senate floor for a ratification vote.

There’s a great deal of misinformation regarding CEDAW in the United States, Don Kraus, CEO of Citizens for Global Solutions, a grassroots organisation supporting responsible and cooperative U.S. foreign policy, offered by way of explanation.

Among these myths regarding CEDAW is the fear that U.S. ratification would undermine U.S. sovereignty, since Americans would have to answer to an international body.

In reality, the treaty doesn’t grant the U.N. or another body enforcement authority. Because of such fears, the United States has also failed to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a treaty for ensuring children’s rights, with provisions for prohibiting child pornography and child prostitution.

Other misconceptions regarding CEDAW include fears that ratification will interfere with American family values and would promote abortion.

“There are number of lies being told about CEDAW…One of the things opponents like to say is that if we ratify CEDAW, there won’t be a Mother’s Day anymore. That has not happened anywhere in the world. [Opponents] often will say it is a treaty about abortion,” Erin Matson, action vice president for the National Organisation for Women, told IPS.

“In fact, CEDAW is silent on the issue of abortion,” she explained.

Despite these misconceptions, CEDAW could benefit the United States greatly if ratified and implemented.

It would “providing a blueprint for increasing gender equality and reinforces our role as a global leader in standing up for the rights of women and girls. In countries that have ratified CEDAW, women have partnered with their governments to engage in a national dialogue about the status of women and girls, and as a result have shaped policies to create greater safety and opportunities for women and their families,” Kraus told IPS.

The provisions in CEDAW focus on ending violence against and trafficking of women and girls, increasing women’s political participation, improving conditions for women’s economic opportunities and increasing women’s political participation.

In Saudi Arabia, CEDAW is currently being used to draft new legislation to allow female lawyers to try family law cases in court, to let female law graduates serve as full lawyers instead of “law consultants” and to overturn rules that prohibit women from entering the courts alone, without a male guardian.

In Pakistan, CEDAW has allowed criminalisation of tribal practices where young girls are exchanged as “gifts” in resolving disputes. New laws are also being enacted to regulate the sale of acid, as acid attacks on women by husbands or jilted lovers are notoriously common.

In Netherlands, called a “destination country” for sex trafficking, new legislation is broadening the definition of human trafficking to encompass all forms of exploitation. It is also increasing jail terms for traffickers, in response to queries by the CEDAW committee.

But in the United States, the current polarised political climate makes promoting women’s rights difficult, Matson told IPS. She thinks women are being “politicised”, even though much progress remains to be made in America, with regard to equal opportunities for women in education, employment, wages, access to healthcare and protections against gender-based violence.

“There’s a tendency in this country to exoticise violence against women in other cultures and to ignore violence against women here and pretend like it’s not happening at all; sweep it under the rug,” Matson pointed out.

“The fact is that one in three women in this country is attacked by an intimate partner at some point in their life… We have cultural blindness to violence in our own country. There’s a tendency to say discrimination only happens somewhere else.”

The Obama administration supports ratification of CEDAW, Kraus said, and while no vote on CEDAW is currently underway in the Senate, senators such as Barbara Boxer continue to bring the treaty into attention.

If CEDAW were ratified, the United States will be able to participate immediately on the CEDAW committee and acknowledge women’s rights as human rights for the first time in national law, Maton said. Right now, “we are not even able to work with other countries with implementation of CEDAW”.

“San Francisco ratified CEDAW,” she added. “That has lead to greater participation of women in leadership and law enforcement and to things like placing street lights in areas unsafe for women before. There’s all sorts of practical knowledge around the world that’ll be open to us here.”

Excerpt:

By Charundi Panagoda and - -
WASHINGTON, Feb 29 2012 (IPS)

If an organisation wants to monitor how its projects in the developing world are affecting women in specific areas of female empowerment, it probably can’t, as it lacks the proper tools. But a new system, the “Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index”, is working to change that.

The new index is a first in directly measuring to what extent women are included in the agricultural sector. Previous surveys lacked specific questions of women’s empowerment in agriculture, in comparison to other areas such as household expenditures and family planning traditions.

“With this survey, taking two enumerators at the same house at the same time, we’ve been able to make a breakthrough in how gendered data is collected,” Sabina Alkire, director of Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, told IPS.

Agriculture is the most effective way to drive economic growth in the world’s poorest communities, and women’s inclusion is considered paramount to sustainable growth.

Yet despite comprising nearly half (43 percent) of the agricultural labour force, women in developing countries still own little land and have limited abilities to hire labour. Their access to credit extension and training services is also limited.

A partnership between the Obama administration’s Feed the Future initiative (FTFI), the U.S. for International Development (USAID) and other organisations, the index focuses on five areas: decisions over agricultural production, power over productive resources such as land and livestock, decisions over income, leadership and allocation of time.

Women are considered empowered if they meet four out of the five areas.

The index also offers insight into women’s own empowerment and gender parity in households, Alkire said. Pilot surveys have been conducted in Bangladesh, Uganda and Guatemala, and already the number of disempowered women is high.

In Guatemala, only 22 percent of women met the empowerment requirements.

“The Index identifies areas in which women are disempowered -these are precisely those areas where interventions might be the most useful” for policymakers, Agnes Quisumbing, senior research fellow for the poverty, health and nutrition division at the International Food Policy Research Institute, told IPS.

The index is designed to allow flexibility in the definition of “empowerment”, deviating from the standard way economists evaluate women’s empowerment through income and education, Alkire said, and indeed, women across different regions have different ideas of what empowerment means to them.

“Empowerment is a very personal thing. The woman will have different ideas about what it means to be empowered depending on her values, personality, upbringing and people with whom she has close relationships with,” Alkire said.

“It’s very difficult to compare empowerment across countries. What we have done in the index is to try to find very common aspects of women’s empowerment, such as being members of a group, having access to credit, (or) being able to control how income is spent,” Alkire explained.

Seema, a Bangladeshi participant in the pilot survey, for example, didn’t think leadership was necessary for empowerment. A 35-year-old mother of three who met her husband on the day of their wedding, Seema is disempowered, according to the Index.

She scores only 64 percent, somewhat higher than the 51 percent regional average. She lacks access to credit and doesn’t have gender parity with her husband.

But Seema sees empowerment as the ability to work on her own land, send her children to school and have adequate food and shelter. She doesn’t believe women should be leaders, even though a woman in a different region might view political decision-making power as a key element of empowerment.

“Cultural notions of what is appropriate may get in the way of women’s empowerment. In Seema’s case, gender norms got in the way of her seeing what is actually possible,” Quisumbing told IPS.

“But gender norms can change….One might say that culture takes a long time to change, but it does change – with development interventions being the stimulus. One of the things that many NGOs have done is precisely to awaken women to the possibility that leadership is something that they can attain,” she added.

Alkire thinks countries should have adaptations to reflect empowerment in a cultural context. For the sake of an international standard, definitions of empowerment are uniform across countries, but they may be complemented by versions tailored to specific cultural contexts.

The innovative but still young index could also use improvement in some areas, Alkire admitted. Some survey questions might need adjusting, for example.

“Right now, (participants are) questioned about the past 24 hours, which don’t necessarily reflect your average day. We need to adjust the time use module in the survey so it is a better reflection of the woman’s time burden across the year,” she added.

“If yesterday was my only holiday of the year or if a child was ill, then it’ll affect the entire index. That’s one problem we are very aware of. ”

Excerpt:

A group of Chinese boys plays in the mud. By 2013, one in 10 Chinese men of marriageable age will lack a female counterpart. Credit: Jimmiehomeschoolmom/CC BY 2.0

By Charundi Panagoda
WASHINGTON, Feb 21 2012 (IPS)

In 2005, there were 163 million more men in Asia, more than the entire female population of the United States. Asia is now facing serious consequences from sex selection, a situation the West might have inadvertently helped create.

In the 1970s, noticing the population boom in Asia, U.S. foreign policy initiatives concentrated on population control in developing countries over fears of hoards in Asia overwhelming U.S. borders, says Mara Hvistendahl, author of “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men.”

The U.S. Agency for International Development, the World Bank and other organisations began pouring money into the perceived problem.

A lot of effort also went into legalising abortion – not as a women’s rights issue, but as a method of population control, Hvistendahl said. Researchers noted that parents, particularly in Asia, kept having children until they had a boy. To them, the obvious method to bring down birth rates was to allow parents to have a male child on the first try.

This was around the same time as reproductive technology, notably fetal sex determination through amniocentesis, advanced. In 1975, doctors at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, funded by the Rockefeller Institute and Ford Foundation, experimented by providing free amniocentesis trials for poor women.

As a result, about 1,000 women with female fetuses aborted, and the doctors proclaimed sex-selective abortion as a productive method of population control, Hvistendahl notes.

Sex-selective abortion spread throughout countries like India and China. The method was openly endorsed by Population Council President Bernard Berelson, German scientist Paul Ehrlich and even some women such as former U.S. Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce.

Still, it’s a stretch to solely blame the West for sex-selection in Asia, Lena Edlund, an economics professor at Columbia University, told IPS. She believes the introduction of fertility technology made sex selection much easier, but it is the cultural norms and the willingness to reject a female child that mattered most.

The trend is no longer just confined to India and China. Increasing sex ratio imbalances are showing up in South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Albania, Armenia and other Caucasus countries. A Gallup poll in 2011 showed that even parents in the United States prefer sons.

Despite presumptions, sex selection is no longer an exclusive result of economic hardship or one-child policies. Hvistendahl believes it’s an “internal choice”.

“The desire to control reproduction isn’t the entire story… Say, for example, one day it becomes possible to select children for height. Since tall people tend to have an easier time in most societies, it’s reasonable to assume that over time we’d see an increase in children’s average height. The same has happened, more or less, with sex selection and son preference,” she said.

The full repercussions of sex selection are just dawning. In China, the now grown-up surplus males of the 1980s are unable to find female partners, Hvistendahl observed. By 2013, one in 10 Chinese men of marriageable age will lack a female counterpart. By 2020 in northwest India, an estimated 15 to 20 percent of men will lack female counterparts.

“Some American economists have predicted that as women become more scarce they will also become more valued in a meaningful way… But essentially what has happened is that women, and especially poor and at risk women, are instead increasingly seen as valuable commodities. That’s a critical distinction,” Hvistendahl told IPS.

Edlud thinks noticing only the dearth of women as the problem is “misguided”.

“The male perspective is that there aren’t enough women to marry or have as a partner. The female perspective is lost because, for women, the problem is they are becoming reduced to chattel being produced by poor and sold to the richer male population…I think (self correction of sex ratios) addresses the concern for men, who won’t be able to find partners, but does not address the concern for women’s welfare.”

The U.S. Department of State’s 2009 Trafficking in Persons report listed widening gender imbalance in Asia as a cause of increased sex trafficking. Trends are increasing in Asia for forced marriages, forced prostitution, and trans-border marriages where women in poor areas are married off to men in richer regions.

Some poor families in countries like Vietnam see better prospects in having daughters they can sell. That, in turn, creates other problems where there aren’t enough women for poorer men. Edlund notes that, disturbingly, the situation might confine women to a permanent “underclass“.

“(Poor people) will do better by having daughters, like in Vietnam, who can marry Taiwanese or Japanese or Korean men instead of having a son who’ll not be able to marry a Vietnamese woman because Vietnamese women are going to these other places…Then we can have a situation where rich countries produce sons and the women would be this ‘underclass’ produced by poor people. I think that’s a big problem,” she said.

Governments have tried to deal with the problem mainly by banning ultrasound screenings for sex determination, which Edlund thinks is inadequate.

“Prenatal screening is part of prenatal care needed for the health of the mother and the child, so it’s very difficult to ban prenatal sex determination. Once the identification is done, it’s difficult to ban sex-selective abortion without banning abortion altogether. I think these bans are essentially ineffective, they may send a signal but I think the important margin is to look at all the various ways in which parents discriminate against girls and try to rectify that.”

Excerpt:

The Sumatran tiger has been classified as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Credit: Cheetah100/CC BY 2.0

By Charundi Panagoda
WASHINGTON, Feb 20 2012 (IPS)

The survival of Sumatra’s tigers, elephants, orangutans, rhinos, as well as indigenous communities, is threatened by the “world’s fastest deforestation rate”, caused by none other than the pulp and paper industry, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

In a recent report, WWF named the Indonesian-based company Asia Pulp & Paper (APP) as “responsible for more forest destruction in Sumatra than any other single company”. APP and competitor Asia Pacific Resources International Limited (APRIL) have consumed the majority of the wood harvested from commercial forest clearances and agriculture conversion.

“In central Sumatra, the impact of APP’s operations on wildlife has been devastating. The company’s forest clearing in Riau Province has been driving Sumatran elephants and tigers toward local extinction,” the report said.

The companies have also begun clearing peat swamp forests. According to Indonesian ministry of forestry estimates, deforestation associated with peat decomposition and burning totals 1.2 gigatonnes of carbon emissions per year, making Indonesia the world’s third largest greenhouse gas emitter.

“Products made with APP fiber linked to forest destruction are flooding the U.S. market and landing in grocery stores, other retail chains, restaurants, hotels, schools and municipalities in the form of toilet tissue, paper towels, copier paper, stationery, paper bags and paper-based packaging,” WWF reported.

Two of APP’s products identified in the U.S. are Paseo and Livi tissues. APP products are distributed and marketed in North America by a variety of subsidiaries and affiliates including Solaris Paper, Mercury Paper and Papermax.

Despite concerns raised by environmental groups, APP claims to be “committed to being socially, environmentally and economically sustainable throughout its operations”. When Indonesia’s Eyes on the Forest released a report on APP clearing Sumatra’s Senepis Tiger Sanctuary, the company fired back saying the allegations were “clearly false”.

Philip Rundle, CEO of Oasis Brands which market Paseo and Livi, wrote in a letter that their products are “100 percent sustainable… (made from) plantation-grown, rapidly renewable fiber supplied by APP.”

“It’s plainly ridiculous, profoundly untrue to claim that anything APP produces is environmentally sustainable. To me, it borders on false labeling. …There are maps, evidence. It’s incontrovertible that some of the practices APP engages in are not sustainable,” Andrea Johnson, director of forest campaigns for the Environmental Investigation Agency, told IPS.

APP is engaging in a “very strong campaign” to “greenwash” their activities and to assert they are actually doing everything legally, Johnson added. APP’s declarations include asserting that only “degraded” land is being cleared, that only a little of Indonesian land is allocated for mills, and emphasising APP’s donations to environmental foundations.

What APP calls “degraded land” is what WWF calls “tiger habitat,” WWF forest programme manager Linda Kramme told IPS. She believes many of the sustainability statements made by APP and Oasis are misleading. Suggesting APP is only impacting a small amount of Indonesia is like saying the recent Gulf oil spill only impacted a small amount of the U.S., she added.

“[WWF] believes they are mischaracterising their practices happening on the ground. Many U.S. customers and companies don’t have the ability to go to Indonesia and see what’s happening, so it can be easy for them to read materials that APP and companies that market their products like Oasis say – that they have different certification, that they are doing things with conservation. But our teams for two decades have seen impacts on ground and we see and obligation to raise the questions and to raise the facts,” she said.

WWF started engaging APP in 2001 to introduce the company to long-term sustainability practices. However, WWF cut off ties with APP after the company broke its promises to stop using natural forest fiber despite signing a letter of intent.

Legally, bills such as the Lacey Act in the U.S. in principle should create various incentives not to buy illegally logged products, Johnson said. However, greenwashing campaigns and incredibly complicated supply chains make prosecution harder.

“APP has been increasingly using subsidiary companies and resorting to opening mills under other names in countries like U.S. and Canada…It’s not that difficult to start another company and put another name on it and use the same fibre. You see that tactic increasingly being used by companies… I think that structuring on part of the company is very intentional in order to make traceability almost impossible, which obviously makes it difficult to enforce the law,” Johnson said.

In 2010, APP was affected by the U.S. Commerce Department imposing anti-dumping duty orders for certain coated paper imported from Indonesia. “Dumping” is a predatory pricing practice in international trade that allows companies to sell their imported products at very low prices, driving out the competition.

“There is an environmental component to the fact that (APP products are) less expensive. One of the reasons they can afford lower costs is because they are getting fibre illegally (by illegal logging, for example). They are not engaging in the kind of business practices which cost a little bit more if you want to do things legally and that result in lower prices,” Johnson said.

Still, the U.S. can prosecute companies like APP only if the government of the producer country has criminal penalties for the same activity. Therefore, it’s the responsibility of the Indonesian government to effectively implement conservation laws, activists say.

Johnson says a strong case can be made that Indonesia has affectively subsidised the pulp and paper industry by not enforcing its own laws.

Excerpt:

As U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro once put it, “Women hold the keys to unlocking the barriers to sustainable development.”

Women in Muslim-dominated Metiabruz district in eastern India look forward to better opportunities after their IT education. Credit: Ranjita Biswas/IPS

Women play essential roles in the global economy, agriculture and development. But while the rhetoric regarding the importance of women’s inclusion in development projects has peaked in recent years, actual gender-inclusion in investment projects often fails to walk the talk.

The main challenges facing sustainable development in the future are gender inequality, climate change, natural resource degradation and the global recession, said Melanne Verveer, U.S. Department of State ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues, at a recent conference on gender equity and sustainable development.

“No effort to advance sustainable development will succeed that does not take into account half of the world’s population,” she said. “Women have long been promoting solutions to sustainable development challenges. They’ve been promoting climate change adaptation and mitigation, protecting biodiversity and vital ecosystems, securing water access, and combating indoor air pollution.”

According to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), women are responsible for half of the world’s food production. And they continue to bear most of the responsibilities at home, from caring for children to providing meals. Therefore, women’s participation is vital to the success of sustainable development projects.

However, while acknowledging the importance of gender equality for development, the World Bank and other international financial institutions (IFIs) continue to make gender-insensitive decisions, Elaine Zuckerman, the head of Gender Action, told IPS.

“A lot of people propose gender equality, women’s rights, women’s empowerment, but then when you look at what is budgetised, where the funds go, there is a huge disconnect. I think it’s critical to translate the rhetoric into investments… A lot of IFI staff don’t still, but those who do often speak in a vacuum,” Zuckerman told IPS.

IFIs still view gender as a “soft issue”, Elizabeth Arend, programmes coordinator for Gender Action, told IPS.

In 2011, while the World Bank’s World Development Report (WDR) highlighted gender issues, the Bank’s budget for “social development, gender and inclusion” investments decreased to 908 million dollars from 952 million in 2010. The Bank’s spending in this thematic category represents less than two percent of its 2011 budget, Arend noted.

“It is not enough to have a handful of ‘gender experts’ in an institution like the World Bank… nor is it permissible to address gender in a single paragraph within a 160-page project appraisal document. IFIs must understand that every component of every project in every sector has gender implications, and that marginalising gender issues fundamentally undermines the effectiveness and sustainability of IFI investments,” Arend told IPS.

Many IFI projects fail to address gender inequalities that prevent women and girls from participating and benefiting from project activities, experts say. And women tend to disproportionately suffer when gender inequalities are not included in development project designs, as exemplified by the World Bank-financed West African and Chad-Cameroon pipelines project.

Research by Gender Action in partnership with Friends of the Earth found that because gender dimensions were not taken into account in the project, “IFIs reinforced (existing) second-class status by sidelining women in consultation processes, discriminating against women in compensation schemes and employment opportunities, and undermining women’s critical livelihoods.”

Arend believes there are several reasons for the World Bank’s persistent gap between gender equality rhetoric and actual funding. First is the historic discrepancy between what the Bank’s research team prioritises and what actually gets funded. Secondly, if the leadership doesn’t see gender as a priority, then gender simply will not be integrated in the Bank’s investments. Finally, the Bank is ultimately a business.

“The World Development Report provides an example. Gender Action’s founder, Elaine Zuckerman, has followed WDRs since their inception and has (hardly) seen a correlation between the WDR and actual funding. This holds true for the Gender Equality and Development WDR as well. While the Bank is busy promoting this report and its findings, in addition to its ‘Think Equal’ social media campaign, it is not investing more in gender at all,” Arend said.

However, this situation might be slowly changing. Arend noted that the Bank has committed 40 million dollars to re-launch a “strengthening agriculture public services project” in Haiti following the original project in 2009.

The new project has “developed a financial literacy programme for women agriculture producers and traders, strengthened the agriculture ministry team’s capacity on gender issues and supported the integration of a Gender Focal Point into the ministry” as requested by female beneficiaries.

“The (Haiti) project is far from perfect, but this shows that the World Bank is capable of making investments in a gender-sensitive manner. All that seems to be lacking is the will,” Arend said.

Two days after some 400 people were arrested during a protest organised by Occupy Oakland on the U.S. west coast, members of Occupy DC say they have no plans to leave despite the threat of police action.

Protesters have been camping out at McPherson Square since October. Credit: Amanda Wilson

Gathered at McPherson Square in Washington, most were unfazed by the National Park Service’s intention to enforce a “no camping” rule starting at noon on Monday. The occupiers gathered under a “Tent of Dreams”, a blue tarp over a statue, to showcase solidarity and waved slogans that read “Eviction? Bring it!”

“We are going to take a stand and stay as long as possible,” Carla Boccella, a registered nurse, told IPS.

The protesters have been camping out at McPherson Square since October without any Park Service action. The enforcement follows a House oversight subcommittee hearing where Republican lawmakers, led by Rep. Darrell Issa, questioned why the occupiers were allowed to disregard a no-camping rule on Park Service property.

An Occupy DC press release stated that the protesters will “defend the public space we have used as our center for activism” and “peacefully resist this politically motivated attempt to suppress the free speech of the disenfranchised 99%.” Some protesters even expected arrests.

“I think it’s going to get to arrests, maybe not in the morning. I think the stance the occupiers have taken is almost a challenge to the government. I do think that there will be a crackdown,” Boccella told IPS.

The protesters won’t be evicted, but they could be subjected to citations or arrests if they continue to camp.

“It means you can’t sleep or have personal property in a tent. The tents themselves are protected first amendment speech. The most important thing to remember is our signs and what we say are not our protected first amendment speech, the 24/7 occupation of the park is our protected first amendment speech…Nobody is leaving today. We are just going to sleep elsewhere,” an occupier who identified himself only as James told IPS.

The occupiers have no intentions of abandoning the site completely. James said he’d sleep on the sidewalk in front of the public library with fellow “homeless bothers and sisters” and come back to the site during the day. Similarly, many protesters are looking for places to stay around the park.

“I think there are some plans for people to stay around the park. I think people are also looking at other places to occupy in the city. I know some of the occupiers have relocated to warmers locations and are planning on coming back in spring so they may even try to re- encamp,” Boccella told IPS.

Along with the protesters, the homeless are also significantly affected by non-camping laws. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, city ordinances prohibiting camping in certain public places are a prominent tool to indirectly criminalise homelessness.

There are an estimated 6,500 homeless people living in D.C., which has the third worst poverty rate in all of the U.S., according to Census Bureau data. Unemployment rate in the District’s Ward Eight is highest in the nation. There’s a wide income gap between the District’s rich and the poor, and one of the widest income gaps between whites and blacks in the country.

Some of the local homeless eagerly joined when the politically- homeless occupiers started erecting tents in areas they often frequented. The occupiers shared free meals and donated clothing with the homeless and helped them with free medical help. The homeless depended on such services that were not provided for them by the government, Boccella told IPS.

The protesters were composed mostly of young people and college students, some older individuals, a few hippies and a handful of homeless people. Protesters like Boccella, a nurse, made sure the occupiers had their basic first aid needs met while advocating for healthcare for all.

Some others, like the elderly Jan Chastain who sat knitting near the library tent, came to the site everyday to cook meals and give her support for the political causes.

“People have said that they can’t describe the occupy movement with one word. I think there is a word to describe it: Justice,” Chastain told IPS.

Non-member volunteers, like Justin Martin from the Unitarian Universalist Congregation that provided full meals to the occupiers, stood by the “Tent of Dreams” to support the protesters’ right to stay in the park.

“I think the Occupy movement itself has grown beyond the people sleeping on the ground. I think nothing is going to stop that. I think it’s wonderful to have people here reminding us every day about income inequality, about corporate control of our country, and I hope that they get to stay,” Martin told IPS.

Many cities have ramped up Occupy evictions in the past months, claiming health and safety concerns or municipal code violations.

Two years ago, 40-year-old Vidya Sri decided to leave the devastating marriage her parents had forced her into nearly two decades ago. Alone for the first time, she began an earnest quest for support groups, women’s organisations or service providers who might help her in the healing process.

Instead, what she found was a shocking lack of awareness on forced marriages in the United States.

Sri came to the U.S. with her parents as a toddler and grew up in New York. Her Indian parents were quite traditional, especially her father, who was adamant that she not mingle with the opposite sex.

“My parents were very strict about family honour. It was (important) to my father that I remain untouched, unspoiled, pure and pristine because I would be of marriageable age very soon,” Sri said.

Her parents were outraged when she started dating a boy in college. She was sent to India against her will and told she could only return with a husband. Sri wanted to continue her studies and did not want to marry so young. However, under emotional coercion by her family, she married the man her parents chose.

She spent the next 17 years developing an addiction to alcohol and falling deep into depression for the sake of honouring her family’s wishes.

At 40, she finally decided to defy tradition and get a divorce. During the process, she came across the term “forced marriage” and her predicament became very clear to her.

“My sense of balance, sense of right and wrong completely changed and fell back into place…it was like a fog had lifted,” she said.

Today, as Sri gives speeches about her experience through her advocacy organisation Gangashakti, a remarkable number of South Asian women come up to her and say, “You just described my entire life.”

Even women from various other ethnic communities such as Hispanic, Chinese and African identify with her. Sri found that, though there is some basic awareness of the incidence forced marriages, there were very few people directly addressing the issue. Most people living in the U.S. believe that forced marriages happen only in remote corners of the third world and are shocked to hear about it happening in their own.

This year, says Sri, Tahirih Justice Center released the results of the very first U.S. forced marriage survey, finding about 3,000 cases in the country in the last two years. Heather Heiman, senior public policy attorney for Tahirih, said this number is “just scratching the surface” of the problem, as many victims are reluctant to come forward with their stories.

The practice crosses religious and ethnic boundaries and varies hugely from case to case. Complying with custom or tradition, honoring contractual arrangements between families, poverty and preserving family honour against accusations of promiscuity are some of the most consistent reasons.

Sometimes, a person thought to be homosexual might be forced into a heterosexual marriage.

Most women in forced marriages are not aware that their human rights are being violated, said Rupa Khetarpal, director of Cross Cultural Counseling Center at the International Institute of New Jersey, a refugee resettlement agency. Women and girls can be threatened with physical violence or even death until they comply.

Such was the case for a Russian woman who was beaten and starved by her brother when she refused a forced marriage. Other times, women are forced by subtle emotional abuse and overwhelming parental pressure.

Most forced marriages are discovered through screening for other forms of gender-based violence, like domestic abuse.

“If you ask women directly, ‘Were you forced to be married?’ they wouldn’t answer. Many women see it as a marriage they didn’t want, or weren’t ready for at the time but the word ‘forced,’ they do not relate to that,” Khetarpal said.

Service providers are just beginning to understand the terminology of forced marriage, she added. Agencies are becoming aware of forced marriages as a root cause of abuse. There is a dearth of research on this issue in the U.S. and absent proper statistics and hard data, funding remains elusive.

“It’s a vicious cycle. Once we get the data, it’ll help us move forward, not just to get funding, but also to try to create services that would effectively meet the needs of our clients because they don’t currently fall into any category,” Khetarpal said.

A serious lack of legal definitions have made it difficult for survivors, especially those who are underage, to seek help through the criminal justice system. There’s a disturbing number of underage girls being forcibly married to older men in the United States, Julia Alanen, cofounder and director of the Global Justice Initiative, told IPS.

Most of these cases must rely on ancillary crimes such as rape or assault to be prosecuted. The lack of legislation also affects how Child Protective Services can help underage victims.

Forced marriage has only been criminalised in about eight jurisdictions in the U.S., Alanen added. The U.S. Department of State follows the U.N. mandate and considers forced marriage a violation of human rights and a form of child abuse when involving minors. However, there are very few U.S. laws preventing forced marriage and there are no federal laws addressing the issue. In this regard, the U.S. falls far behind the United Kingdom.

“U.K. has been dealing with this issue head on for years. They’ve passed national legislation, they’ve created a forced marriage unit and a forced marriage hotline. There are training manuals for educators, healthcare providers, social services providers, lawyers and there are resources for both the advocates and victims. In the U.S., we have none of that,” Alanen said.

Two bills have been introduced to the Congress regarding forced marriage so far. But the International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act and the International Child Marriage Prevention and Protection Act only address forced marriages happening in developing countries. Such bills don’t even acknowledge that this happens in the Unites States, Alanen said.

However, advocacy around this issue might increase dramatically in coming years, Alanen said.

Heiman added that Tahirih is working on more surveys and developing a national coalition of advocates and survivors on the issue.

“I’m hoping once we get the data and start really focusing on this issue in terms of documenting the cases, we could potentially create some services that would help us to work with law enforcement and criminal justice system in securing support for these young women so that they don’t end up in abusive relationships and we don’t end up picking up after the damage has been done,” Khetarpal said.