A Warsaw protest in solidarity with Ameer Alkhawlany. The banner reads 'Free Ameer'. Credit: TV Kryzys

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Apr 8 2017 (IPS)

Ameer Alkhawlany moved to Poland in September 2014 to pursue a Master’s in biology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland’s second largest city. Two years later, the Polish state awarded him a scholarship to complete a PhD in the same faculty.

Pawel Koteja, his professor at the institute, told Polish media that Alkhawlany was “very committed to his scientific research, to which he dedicated a lot of time and effort, and was determined to pursue an academic career.”Law and Justice, the party governing Poland since 2015, has a nationalistic and ultra-Catholic discourse, presenting itself as a defender of embattled Poles against its various 'enemies': the European Union, globalisation, Islam.

According to activists in contact with Alkhawlany, the student had an uneventful life in Poland until last summer, when he was allegedly approached by Poland’s secret services (ABW) with the offer to inform on Muslims residing in Poland. He would have to report back from mosques and actively seek out contact with specific people.

Alkhawlany refused. He said he was an atheist so he didn’t attend religious services and that some of the people he was asked to contact were from non-Arabic speaking countries so he might not have a common language with them.
In July, when the man was allegedly approached by ABW, Krakow was hosting the annual Catholic ‘World Youth Day’, attended by the Pope and an estimated three million people. Polish authorities were tightening security.

On October 3, the student was suddenly arrested in the center of Krakow by officials from the Polish Border Guard. He was given no reason for his apprehension. Hours later, during which time he was not allowed to contact a lawyer, a court sentenced Alkhawlany to 90 days of detention followed by deportation to Iraq.

In a letter written from detention by Alkhawlany and published in March by website Political Critique, the man said the court justified its ruling by the fact that the Polish secret services considered him a security threat. Despite the man’s questions, the judge did not offer any explanations as to why he was considered a threat.

“I have been living and studying in Poland since 2014. I have never broken the law ever,” Alkhawlany said to the court, according to his published letter. “I never crossed at the wrong light, never been in the bus without ticket! I did my master’s degree and I started my doctoral studies without any problem. I don’t want to leave Poland!”

At the time of his deportation, Alkhawlany had been detained for six months without break in the detention center for foreigners in Przemysl, in the southeast of Poland.

Polish authorities never explained publicly the reasons why the man was considered a security threat. However, anonymous sources quoted by Polish media claimed the secret services had information that Alkhawlany had been in touch with ‘radicals’ from abroad monitored by other countries’ services.

“The provisions of Polish national law do not provide solutions for a foreigner to defend themselves when the decision of return has been issued on the basis of undisclosed circumstances,” commented Jacek Bialas, a lawyer with the Helsinski Foundation for Human Rights. “This raises doubts as to compatibility with the Polish Constitution, the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights.”

“It’s as if a controller gave a citation to someone waiting at the bus stop, being sure the person would go on the bus without a ticket,” Alkhawlany commented in a February interview with Wirtualna Polska.

At the time of his arrest, Alkhawlany had just renewed his residence permit in Poland, which was valid until January this year. During his detention, he applied for asylum in Poland arguing that it was unsafe for him to return to Iraq, where the Iraqi military is battling ISIS in the north. He was denied asylum (the final decision following an appeal came April 4) because of confidential information provided by the security services which indicated he was a security threat.

Yet on April 5, after reviewing the same evidence provided by the secret services, the regional court in Przemysl ruled that Alkhawlany should be released from detention as he had been residing legally in Poland and there had been no solid reason for his arrest. The ministry in charge of the secret services retorted that the court ruling ‘did not undermine’ the evidence presented by ABW.

To the surprise of his lawyer and those engaged in a campaign to get him released, Alkhawlany was not released from detention but instead deported on the evening of April 5. Neither his lawyer nor his brother also residing in Poland were informed about the deportation decision.

Alkhawlany himself called from Iraq upon arrival to inform he had been transported to Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Speaking to Polish media April 6, Marek Ślik, the student’s lawyer, said “The deportation is illegal because I have not yet received any notification about his deportation. The procedure of appeal (after asylum was denied) was never completed as I never got a final notification.”

The Polish Border Guard did not respond to a request to justify the legality of the deportation.

An image from the official website of the Polish Border Guard. It says: ‘We defend Polish men and women. We do not agree to the influx of Muslim migrants.’ Credit: Police Border Guard

“The way the Polish secret services dealt with this case was absurd: they just picked a random person because he came from a specific country and expected him to inform on the moves of others,” said Marta Tycner from leftist party Razem, who was engaged in the campaign to free Alkhawlany.

“They think that any person coming from a Muslim country is a suspect of anti-state activity,” Tycner told IPS. “They were incompetent and now they are trying to cover it up by deporting him fast.”

Law and Justice, the party governing Poland since 2015, has a nationalistic and ultra-Catholic discourse, presenting itself as a defender of embattled Poles against its various ‘enemies’: the European Union, globalisation, Islam. It has overblown fears of a potential terrorist attack by Islamists – although no incidents of this kind or actual threats of it were recorded in Poland – to strengthen its control over society.

Last year, Law and Justice adopted a new anti-terror law which gives authorities the power to fingerprint foreigners or listen to their phones and check their emails without any court order. It also imposed restrictions on the right to protest and online activity.

The right-wing and Catholic media, which are essential in harnessing popular support for the party, routinely associate Muslims with violence. The leader of Law and Justice, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, infamously declared last year that migrants carry ‘very dangerous diseases long absent from Europe’. Alongside Hungary, Poland has been staunchly opposed to hosting refugees under the European Union’s system of relocation quotas.

Poland is one of the world’s most homogeneous countries, with over 97 percent of the population declaring themselves ethnically Pole. Despite very low rates of migration to the country, the most recent ‘European Islamophobia Report‘ showed that over 70 percent of Poles want to see migration of Muslims to Europe restricted, the highest rate among all European countries surveyed. Negative attitudes to refugees increased significantly in the last years.

Former President Lech Kaczyński at an energy conference three years before his death. Credit: Archive of the Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland/GNU license

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Dec 23 2016 (IPS)

Despite the pain to victims’ families, critics say the Polish government is turning the Smolensk plane crash into a macabre reality show for political gain.

The remains of former president Lech Kaczyński and his wife Maria were exhumed Nov. 14 from Wawel Castle in Krakow as part of a state-sponsored investigation into whether the plane crash that killed them in Apr. 10, 2010 was an accident or foul play."This catastrophe ...initially united us in mourning [and] later became a tool in the political fight between Law and Justice and Civic Platform.” --Barbara Nowacka, whose mother Izabela Jaruga-Nowacka, a former deputy prime minister, died at Smolensk.

A state-owned Tupolev plane went down while taking Lech Kaczyński and top Polish military and political figures to Russia to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre in which more than 20,000 Polish soldiers and intellectuals were killed by the Stalinist secret police. Ninety-six people died in the crash.

An investigation conducted under the previous government — the center-right Civic Platform — concluded that the crash was an accident caused by adverse weather conditions and pilot error.

But Jaroslaw Kaczyński, leader of ruling party Law and Justice and twin brother of Lech, has an alternative reading. “The one interpretation that clarifies everything is an assassination,” Kaczynski said, as quoted by the web portal natemat.pl. “If that’s not 100 percent sure, then it’s 99 percent.”

Victimisation

Since the Kaczynski twins founded the party in 2001, Law and Justice has represented a counterbalance to the pro-European, liberal direction of the Polish post-communist transition. Law and Justice are Euro-skeptic and nationalist, Catholic and socially conservative, and advocate for a statist economy.  They speak to those left behind by the transition.

To build up political support, Law and Justice relied on a vision of a Poland under persecution by foreign enemies (especially Russia and Germany) and of Poles as victims of political elites at home, an alleged alliance of communists and liberals.

The Smolensk plane crash happened right at the start of the campaign for the 2010 presidential elections in which incumbent Lech Kaczynski faced Civic Platform’s Bronislaw Komorowski. During the previous three years, Lech’s presidency had been marked by conflicts with Donald Tusk, the head of Civic Platform and prime minister since 2007.

The shock of the tragedy was absorbed into the Law and Justice grand narrative, answering the needs of the campaign: Lech Kaczyński, claimed Law and Justice, was a national hero who fell victim to a lurid alliance between his foreign and domestic enemies, as had happened to Poles many times before.

While Jaroslaw Kaczyński did not win the 2010 presidential election (he ran instead of his brother) nor did his party win the parliamentary election in 2011, Law and Justice spent the next four years in opposition building up a cult of Smolensk which contributed to it winning last year’s election.

The party organised monthly commemoration events and its message was echoed by the Polish Catholic Church and the influential media empire centered around Radio Maryja.

Civic Platform’s strategy of waiting it out and letting Law and Justice politicians make fools of themselves by endorsing a conspiracy theory was a mistake.

According to an October poll by Ipsos, 27 percent of Poles believe Smolensk was not an accident, at least twice as many as five years ago.

Ireneusz Krzeminski, from Warsaw University’s Institute of Sociology, who has looked into responses to Smolensk in Polish society, said the Law and Justice version of the air crash resonated with Poles who “felt unhappy in their lives for different reasons.”

The feeling of perceived injustice was fertile ground for Law and Justice’s rhetoric about a Poland martyred by its enemies, said Krzeminski. The result was hatred towards the alleged enemies, especially Russia and Civic Platform.

Escalation

Since it got to power in 2015, Law and Justice intensified the instrumentalisation of Polish history. Sociologist Krzeminski notes that commemorations of historical events where Poles have suffered (like the 1944 anti-Nazi Warsaw uprising) are a bigger deal now. School curricula have changed to include more on the traumatic episodes. Krzeminski argues that Law and Justice keeps Poles “in a state of permanent mourning” – it brings support for the party.

This year, Poland announced that it would not back Donald Tusk for a second mandate as President of the European Council. Law and Justice members have mentioned the possibility of putting Tusk on trial for treason over Smolensk, once his Brussels term finishes. With Law and Justice moving to control the justice system in Poland, Tusk’s prospects if prosecuted could be bleak.

The focus on Smolensk is a useful distraction from socio-economic woes. Law and Justice remains popular among its voters because of measures such as subsidies for families with children or lowering the retirement age, but the economy has been slowing down this year and foreign investments are dropping.

Crossing the line?

In a country with a strong cult of the dead, unearthing bodies and examining them breaks the biggest taboo.

“The (planned) exhumation of my wife represents for me a big trauma and pain, it destroys the peace of my family, it affects our privacy, and it encroaches on our personal wellbeing, which is based on the cult of the memory of our dead,” said Pawel Deresz, whose wife Jolanta Szymanek-Deresz, a lawyer and politician, died in the crash.

Before answering a single question, Deresz pulled out a large photo of his wife and a copy of the Polish Constitution, before reading out Article 47 about “the right to the legal protection of private and family life.”

Deresz had written to Poland’s prosecutor general Zbigniew Ziobro asking him not to exhume his wife. He said he was prepared to sue the Polish government if needed.

He’s not the only relative angered by the decision.

Last month, Izabella Sariusz-Skąpska, the daughter of Smolensk victim Andrzej Sariusz-Skąpski, published an open letter to President Andrzej Duda, asking for the exhumations to be halted.

“We stand alone and helpless against this ruthless and cruel act: our beloved are to be dragged out of their graves despite the sacred taboo of not disturbing the dead,” Sariusz-Skąpska wrote in the letter, which was signed by 238 family members of 17 victims.

Other families, however, want their loved ones dug up and given a proper burial. In six of the nine exhumations carried out under the previous government, there was evidence that Russian authorities had mixed up body parts or coffins in the chaos after the crash.
 Others share the government’s suspicions that the crash was no accident.

“This catastrophe …initially united us in mourning [and] later became a tool in the political fight between Law and Justice and Civic Platform,” said Barbara Nowacka, whose mother Izabela Jaruga-Nowacka, a former deputy prime minister, died at Smolensk.

“What is most difficult for me is that now Smolensk has become a kind of religion for some core Law and Justice supporters and they would do anything to prove it was more than a plane crash,” said Nowacka. “And on the other hand the majority of society is either getting tired or trying to get rid of the topic by turning it into a joke, which is painful.”

The Ipsos poll in October showed that only 10 percent of Poles are in favour of the exhumations.

The government is treading carefully and has sought the official backing of the powerful Polish Catholic Church. The unearthing of Lech and Maria Kaczyński was accompanied by a religious mass.

However, the Catholic Church warned that Smolensk should not be exploited for political purposes. Some individual priests have publicly objected.

The government wants to unearth all the bodies by the end of next year, but the investigation could last years.

Unearthing the remains of those whose families think the dead should rest in peace will be hard to justify to the public, especially if nothing suspicious is found upon inspecting the first coffins.

Anti-coal human chain crossing the Niesse river which separates Poland and Germany, August 2014. Credit: Courtesy of Greenpeace Poland

By Claudia Ciobanu and Silvia Giannelli
GRABICE, Poland / PROSCHIM, Germany, Aug 26 2014 (IPS)

“People have gathered here to tell their politicians that the way in which we used energy and our environment in the 19^th and 20^th centuries is now over,” says Radek Gawlik, one of Poland’s most experienced environmental activists. “The time for burning coal has passed and the sooner we understand this, the better it is for us.”

Gawlik was one of over 7,500 people who joined an 8-kilometre-long human chain at the weekend linking the German village of Kerkwitz with the Polish village of Grabice to oppose plans to expand lignite mining on both sides of the German-Polish border.“It's high time to plan the coal phase-out now and show the people in the region a future beyond the inevitable end of dirty fossil fuels" – Anike Peters, Greenpeace Germany

They were inhabitants of local villages whose houses would be destroyed if the plans go ahead, activists from Poland and Germany, and even visitors from other countries who wanted to lend a hand to the anti-coal cause. The human chain – which was organised by Greenpeace and other European environmental NGOs – passed through the Niesse river which marks the border between the two countries, and included people of all ages, from young children to local elders who brought along folding chairs.

At least 6,000 people in the German part of Lusatia region and another 3,000 across the border in south-western Poland stand to be relocated if the expansion plans in the two areas go ahead.

In Germany, it is Swedish state energy giant Vattenfall that plans to expand two of its lignite mines in the German states of Brandenburg and Saxony; state authorities have already approved the company’s plans. In Poland, state energy company PGE (Polska Grupa Energetyczna) plans an open-cast lignite mine from which it would extract almost two million tonnes of coal per year (more than from the German side).

On the German side

Germany has for a long time been perceived as an example in terms of its energy policy, not in the least because of its famous Energiewende, a strategy to decarbonise Germany’s economy by reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80-95 percent, reaching a 60 percent renewables share in the energy sector, and increasing energy efficiency by 50 percent, all by 2050.

Today, one-quarter of energy in Germany is produced from renewable sources, and the same for electricity, as a result of policies included in the Energiewende strategy.

Expanding coal mining as would happen in the Lusatia region contradicts Germany’s targets, argue environmentalists. “The expansion of lignite mines and the goals of the Energiewende to decarbonise Germany until 2050 do not fit together at all,” says Gregor Kessler from Greenpeace Germany.  “There have to be severe cuts in coal-burning if Germany wants to reach its own 2020 climate goal (reducing CO₂ emissions by 40 percent).

“Yet the government so far is afraid of taking the logical next step and announce a coal-phase-out plan,” Kessler continues. “So far both the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats keep repeating that coal will still be needed for years and years to provide energy security. However even today a lot of the coal-generated energy is exported abroad as more and more energy comes from renewables.”

Proschim, a town of around 360 people, is one of the villages threatened by Vattenfall’s planned expansion. Already surrounded by lignite mines, this little community has one feature that makes its possible destruction even more controversial: nowadays it produces more electricity from renewable energy than its citizens use for themselves.

Wind farm in Proschim, Lusatia, Germany. Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

But Vattenfall’s project to extend two existing open cast mines, namely Nochten and Welzow-Süd, would destroy Proschim along with its solar and wind farm and its biogas plant.

“It is such a paradox, we have so much renewable energy from wind, solar and biogas in Proschim. And this is the town they want to bulldoze,” says former Proschim mayor Erhard Lehmann.

The village is nevertheless split on the issue, with half of its citizens welcoming Vattenfall’s expansion project, including Volker Glaubitz, the deputy mayor of Proschim, and his wife Ingrid, who came from Haidemühl, a neighbouring village that was evacuated to make room for the Welzow-Süd open-cast mine. The place is now known as the “ghost-town”, due to the abandoned buildings that Vattenfall was not allowed to tear down because of property-related controversies.

Abandoned buildings in Haidemühl, Lusatia, Germany. Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

Lignite undoubtedly played a major role in Lusatia’s economic development, creating jobs not only in the many open-cast mines spread over the territory, but also through the satellite activities connected to coal processing. Lehmann himself was employed as a mechanic and electrician for the excavators used in the mines. Ingrid Glaubitz was a machinist at ‘Schwarze Pumpe’, one of Vattenfall’s power plants and her son also works for Vattenfall.

“There must be renewable energy in the future, but right now it is too expensive and we need lignite as a bridge technology,” Volker Glaubitz told IPS. “The mines bring many jobs to the region: without the coal, Lusatia would be dead already.”

Johannes Kapelle, a 78-year-old farmer of Sorb origin and at the forefront of the battle against Proschim’s destruction, sees coal in a completely different way: “Coal is already vanishing, it something that belongs to the past.”

His house, right in front of the Glaubitz’s, is covered in solar panels, and from his garden he proudly shows the wind park that provides Proschim with an estimated annual production of 5 GWh.

Johannes Kapelle in his courtyard, with roof covered in solar panels, Proschim, Lusatia, Germany. Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

According to Kapelle, lignite extraction has been threatening the Sorb culture, which is spiritually connected to the land, since the beginning of industrialisation over a hundred years ago. “When a Sorb has a house without a garden, and without farmland, without forests and lakes, then he’s not a true Sorb anymore, because he has no holy land.”

On the Polish side

Poland is Europe’s black sheep when it comes to climate, with 90 percent of electricity in Poland currently produced from coal and the country’s national energy strategy envisaging a core role for coal for decades to come. The Polish government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk has over the past years tried to block progress by the European Union in adopting more ambitious climate targets.

For Polish authorities, the over 100,000 jobs in coal mining in the country today are an argument to keep the sector going. Additionally, says the government, coal constitutes a local reserve that can ensure the country’s “energy security” (a hot topic in Europe, especially since the Ukrainian-Russian crisis).

Coal opponents, on the other hand, note that the development of renewables and energy efficiency creates jobs too (according to the United Nations, investments in improved energy efficiency in buildings alone could create up to 3.5 million jobs in the European Union and the United States). Environmentalists further argue that coal is not as cheap as its proponents claim: according to the Warsaw Institute for Economic Studies, in some years, subsidies for coal mining in Poland have reached as much as 2 percent of GDP.

“In Poland, the coal lobby is very strong,” says Gawlik. “I also have the impression that our politicians have not yet fully understood that renewables and energy efficiency have already become real alternatives and do not come with some mythically high costs.”

The future of coal in Europe

In Europe as a whole, coal has seen a minor resurgence over the past 2-3 years, despite the European Union having the stated goal to decarbonise by 2050 (out of all fossil fuels, lignite produces the most CO₂ per unit of energy produced).

Access to cheap coal exports from the United States, relatively high gas prices, plus a low carbon price on the EU’s internal emissions trading market (caused in turn by a decrease in industrial output following the economic crisis) led to a temporary hike in coal usage. Yet experts are certain that coal in Europe is dying a slow death.

“In the longer term the prospects for coal-fired power generation are negative,” according to a July report by the Economist Intelligence Unit. “Air-quality regulations (in the European Union) will force plant closures, and renewable energy will continue to surge, while in general European energy demand will be weak. The recent mini-boom in coal-burning will prove an aberration.”

“Additional coal mines would not only be catastrophic for people, nature and climate – it would also be highly tragic, as beyond 2030, when existing coal mines will be exhausted, renewable energies will have made coal redundant,” says Anike Peters, climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace Germany.

“It’s high time to plan the coal phase-out now and show the people in the region a future beyond the inevitable end of dirty fossil fuels.”

* Anja Krieger and Elena Roda contributed to this report in Germany

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Organic farmer Slawek Dobrodziej with volunteers from Warsaw helping on his farm. Credit: Courtesy of Malgosia Dobrodziej

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Aug 21 2014 (IPS)

Polish farmer Slawek Dobrodziej has probably the world’s strangest triathlon training regime: he swims across the lake at the back of his house, then runs across his some 11 hectares of land to check the state of the crops, and at the end of the day bikes close to 40 kilometres to and back from a nearby town for some shopping.

That Dobrodziej would still want to enter the triathlon, despite working daily in the fields from dawn until well into the night, speaks volumes about his supra-human levels of energy.

But it takes this kind of stamina to succeed as an ecological farmer in Poland.Community-supported agriculture “could help promote farm biodiversity because consumers buy different types of vegetables and products in this scheme, and it could also help to spread the certified organic model, which is only marginally developed in Poland today” – organic farmer Sonia Priwieziencew

Today, around 3.5 percent of Poland’s agricultural land is taken up by organic farms. Their number has been growing steadily over recent years, yet farmers complain of obstacles. Of the country’s some 1.8 million farmers, just 26,000 have organic certification (though some of these farms are just meadows and do not necessarily produce food), and only 300 of these are vegetable producers.

Under the most recent national policies (adopted in parallel to the new European Union’s 2014-2020 budget, which will finance Polish agriculture), Polish authorities have been cutting subsidies for medium and large organic farms, and they have practically eliminated public support for organic orchards.

Smaller organic producers have to struggle with complicated bureaucratic procedures in place for obtaining national or European funding.

Slawek Dobrodziej and his wife Malgosia clearly have the determination to penetrate these procedures. Over the past eight years, the couple have managed to build up a successful organic farm in the village of Zeliszewo, near the western city of Szczecin. They sell some 100 types of fruit and vegetables to consumers in several Polish major cities, including the capital Warsaw.

According to Malgosia, the book-keeper of the family farm, the first years were particularly rough. Selling large quantities of one product to food processing companies did not pay off: organic farming, which uses no pesticides, is labour-intensive, and the prices paid by the companies were not enough to cover costs.

The family managed to access some national and European funds, but the amounts were barely sufficient to buy some basic machinery. European money must often be co-financed by the recipient, meaning that obtaining more funds would be impossible without becoming heavily indebted to banks.

The Dobrodziej’s fortunes improved once they diversified their vegetable production and found opportunities to sell their produce directly to consumers in big cities. Selling to a bio bazaar in Warsaw was a turning point.

Additionally, for the first time this year, they started selling to consumers via two community-supported agriculture (CSA) schemes in the cities of Szczecin and Poznan, through which the roughly 30 consumers in each scheme pay them in advance for vegetables they will receive weekly throughout the summer and autumn months.

The CSA model is based on the idea that consumers share risks with the farmers: consumers enter the scheme agreeing to take whatever vegetables the farmer is able to produce given weather conditions. They are also able to volunteer on the farm, which provides an understanding of seasonality and farm work that few city inhabitants have. Malgosia says that CSA is an excellent way of offering financial stability to a small farm.

The first CSA was created in Poland in 2012 in Warsaw, and this year six such schemes are operational in the country, including the two served by the Dobrodziej. More schemes are expected to be launched next year, given the warm welcome the model has received from city consumers and the farming community.

At the moment, the Dobrodziej’s week is a mad rush among various cities in Poland, with night-long drives to deliver fresh products, followed by days in the field. Yet Malgosia hopes that next year, once the bank credits are paid, they will be able to rely only on the two CSA schemes and sales to bio bazaars in Warsaw and Katowice. Meanwhile Slawek dreams of setting up an organisation to promote the model nationally.

“We do absolutely too much work right now, and we spend too much time packaging half kilos of vegetables to sell to small organic shops,” explains Malgosia. “The CSA model seems very promising, because we get rid of the packaging ordeal and we also get money in hand at the start of the season from which we can make investments in the machinery we need.”

“I think many Polish farms could go this way, because the model is really economically viable for farmers,” says Sonia Priwieziencew, who together with her partner Tomasz Wloszczowski, runs a 6 hectare organic farm in the village of Swierze Panki, 120 km northeast of Warsaw, which has been serving the first CSA in Poland for three years.

Priwieziencew and Wloszczowski had been active for years in NGOs promoting organic farming in Poland and they wanted to put theory into practice.

“CSA could help promote farm biodiversity because consumers buy different types of vegetables and products in this scheme, and it could also help to spread the certified organic model, which is only marginally developed in Poland today,” says Priwieziencew.

After years of experience with advocacy work and promotion of the organic model among farmers, Priwieziencew is quite critical of the authorities’ approach to ecological farming. According to her, despite the fact that the vast majority of farmers in Poland today have small plots of land, the policies issued both by the Polish government and the European Union are more favourable to large-scale industrial farming.

Despite the new Common Agricultural Policy adopted this year in Brussels, which is supposed to provide guidance to farming in the European Union for the coming years, paying much lip service to organic farming and small-scale agriculture as means to ensure food security, limit climate change and preserve biodiversity, national policies and financing do not necessarily follow this direction, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe.

Yet, over recent years, citizens in these regions have become increasingly aware of the faults of industrial food production and numerous initiatives intended to safeguard small farming and promote ecological agriculture have been created across both regions.

This month, Warsaw saw the opening of the first cooperative shop bringing vegetables and other foods directly from producers, most of them local, and selling them at a discount to members of the cooperative who volunteer work.

Cooperatives and vegetable box schemes exist in most big Polish cities and are even developing at the level of neighbourhoods. A newly discovered passion for urban gardening in the country has led museums in Warsaw and other cities to open up their green areas to local inhabitants who want to grow vegetables.

Other countries in the region are not lagging behind. At least 15 CSA initiatives exist in the Czech Republic and, in addition, vegetable box schemes and urban gardens are continually appearing. In Romania, CSA groups exist now in at least six different cities, with some of the farms explicitly employing people from marginalised social categories.

”Every such new initiative gives small-scale ecological farmers a new chance to sell more and develop in Poland,” says Warsaw-based food activist Piotr Trzaskowski, who set up the first CSA in Poland. ”These farmers must survive because they are real caretakers of the land and the environment, unlike large-scale conventional producers who commodify the land, buying it, using it up and ignoring the impact on biodiversity, people and the environment.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Polish conservatives protesting against a reading of Golgota Picnic in Warsaw. Credit: Maciej Konieczny/Courtesy of Krytyka Polityczna

By Claudia Ciobanu
WAESAW, Jul 8 2014 (IPS)

A mix of conservative Catholicism and nationalism has become the predominant view in Polish public debate, with some worrying effects.

These were the values around which the opposition to communism led by trade union Solidarity built itself up in the 1980s but, after the fall of communism, opinion makers in the media and politicians continued to depict them as part and parcel of being Polish.

Observers note that the Polish Catholic Church has also grown increasingly conservative since 1989, in apparent contrast to an opening up of the Church worldwide.Conservative Catholicism and nationalism were the values around which the opposition to communism led by trade union Solidarity built itself up in the 1980s but, after the fall of communism, opinion makers in the media and politicians continued to depict them as part and parcel of being Polish.

Last month, the director of a theatre festival in the city of Poznan decided to cancel showings of a play fearing he could not ensure the safety of viewers in the face of threats by conservative and far-right groups. The play – “Golgota Picnic” by Argentinian director Rodrigo Garcia – describes the life of Jesus using striking depictions of contemporary society, including some with a sexual meaning.

Among those asking for play to be cancelled were representatives of Poland’s main opposition party, Law and Justice, the main trade union Solidarity, and the far-right Ruch Narodowy (National Movement), all of which stand for traditional Catholic values. The Church also voiced its opposition to the play.

In itself, protesting against the play was unremarkable (it has also been met with opposition from Catholics in other countries, for example in France), but the Polish response was interesting: even if the festival was largely financed from public sources, the show was cancelled and there was hardly any resistance from public authorities to the decision. The public, however, made itself heard and readings of the play were organised in major Polish cities, with hundreds attending.

Meanwhile, the dynamics surrounding “Golgota Picnic” are being replicated over other issues in Polish society, among which the most striking is women’s reproductive rights. Poland is one of only three countries in the European Union where abortion is prohibited, unless the pregnancy is a result of rape or incest, there is a serious threat to the mother’s health or foetal malformation has been detected.

Abortion had been legal in communist Poland but was outlawed in 1993 after pressure from the Catholic Church. Ever since, attempts to make abortion legal have failed. In 2011, the Polish parliament came close to further tightening the law on abortion by prohibiting it no matter the circumstances.

At the time, it was not only the political forces explicitly standing for Catholic values that endorsed a total ban, but also many members of the governing centre-right Civic Platform, which depicts itself as Poland’s main liberal political force.

De facto, even the current restrictive law is not being implemented. In a series of high profile cases over the years, Catholic doctors in public hospitals have refused to perform abortions even if girls were pregnant as a result of rape, had serious health conditions or malformation had been detected in foetuses.

In May, in an escalation of the situation, over 3,000 Polish doctors, nurses and medical students signed a “Declaration of Faith” in which they rejected abortion, birth control, in vitro fertilisation and euthanasia as contrary to the Catholic faith. Signatories included employees of public clinics and hospitals. One of them was the director of a Warsaw maternity hospital who said he would not allow such procedures to take place in his institution.

The “Declaration of Faith”, which has been endorsed by the Polish Catholic Church, is contrary to Polish law and Prime Minister Donald Tusk has spoken out against it.

State authorities have been carrying out check-ups at those institutions in which signatories of the Declaration work to establish whether the law is being respected, and one fine has been imposed on the Warsaw maternity hospital whose director prohibits legal abortions. Yet more determined measures are still pending.

“Lack of massive resistance [to the Declaration] is not a sign of approval on the part of the general public,” comments Agnieszka Graff, writer and feminist activist. “It is rather a question of resignation: for 20 years we have seen politicians court the Church while ignoring public opinion on matters that have to do with reproductive rights. The pattern of submission has emboldened the radical anti-choice groups.”

Political power in Poland is firmly in the hands of conservatives. Law and Justice, the party with the best chance of winning next year’s parliamentary elections, is staunchly pro-Catholic and nationalist, and has in the past allied in government with far-right politicians. The governing Civic Platform, the choice of many liberals in this country, is bitterly divided between social conservatives and liberals, meaning it cannot enforce the constitutional secularity of the Polish state.

As Graff explains, in this political context, those who oppose the Catholicism-nationalism nexus find it difficult to coalesce into a strong movement. And ultra-conservatives continue to advance.

Far-right elements breeds in this environment and, in an ethnically and racially homogeneous country, their main targets are feminists, the LGBTQ community and leftists (the same groups that the Church condemns). Their strength is most visible in Poland during the annual Independence March on November 11, when tens of thousands of far-right youth take to the streets of Warsaw and other cities wreaking havoc.

According to June polls, the third strongest political force in Poland is the New Right Congress, which has a neo-liberal far-right agenda. The party, whose leader Janusz Korwin-Mikke has declared that women have lower IQs than men and that they enjoy being raped, gathered 7.5 percent of the vote in the May elections for the European Parliament.

“There is no clear demarcation between the Polish extreme right, the populist right and the mainstream right,” notes political scientist Rafal Pankovski of anti-racist group Nigdy Wiecej (Never Again). “The notion of a cordon sanitaire against the far-right does not seem to have been accepted in Polish politics and the media.”

Over recent years, civic mobilisation by progressive forces has nevertheless grown, and political parties with a strong liberal, secular and anti-nationalist message have been forming, but they still lack consolidation. Faced with the constant accusation of being “communists”, leftist forces that might counterbalance the conservative, nationalist and far-right trend are slow to grow in Poland.

Crossing the border from Turkey into Bulgaria. Credit: Graneits, CC 2.0 on Flickr

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, May 15 2014 (IPS)

Since November last year, Bulgaria has virtually closed its borders to an inflow of Syrian asylum seekers and other migrants trying to enter the country from Turkey, while EU institutions concerned appear to have acquiesced to this. 

Faced with a massive inflow of asylum seekers in 2013 – around 11,000 people lodged asylum applications in the country in 2013 compared with 1,000 on average in previous years – Bulgaria implemented a plan in autumn last year “to manage the crisis resulting from the enhanced migratory pressure.” Its main elements included building a 33 kilometre fence on the border with Turkey and increasing by 1,500 units the border police contingents patrolling that border.

"HRW believes that the Bulgarian government has, since November 6, 2013, embarked on a systematic practice to prevent undocumented asylum seekers from crossing into Bulgaria to lodge claims for international protection.” - HRW report from April 29
It seems to have paid off: just over 100 asylum seekers managed to enter Bulgaria each month in the first part of this year, while at the start of the implementation of the plan, as many as 100 people on some days were being prevented from entering the country, according to statements of the Ministry of Interior. Svetozar Lazarov, Secretary General in the ministry, told Bulgarian media at the end of April that, since the beginning of 2014, 2,367 people have been prevented from crossing the border into Bulgaria.

The influx last year, which frightened Bulgarian authorities, came about in the context of a tightening of Greece’s borders and consequent shift northwards of land migrant routes from Turkey. Over half of the asylum seekers lodging claims in Bulgaria last year came from war-torn Syria. Over two million Syrians are currently seeking protection abroad, half of them children. Turkey alone is currently hosting over 700,000 Syrians.

Human Rights Watch published a report on April 29 in which it documents how, as part of implementation of the Bulgarian plan, people crossing the border from Turkey into Bulgaria were being summarily pushed back into Turkey, without being given a chance to lodge asylum applications and sometimes suffering abuse from border guards. The evidence of pushbacks comes from 177 interviews HRW conducted with migrants in Bulgaria, Turkey and Syria, during which 44 cases of summary return involving 519 people were reconstructed.

“From the situation in the countries of origin of most of the irregular border crossers – Syria and Afghanistan – it is reasonable to believe that many are seeking protection, yet the people we interviewed who were rejected at the border or from within the territory of Bulgaria were not given the opportunity to lodge asylum claims upon apprehension,” Bill Frelick, Director of HRW’s refugee programme, told IPS.

“HRW believes that the Bulgarian government has, since November 6, 2013, embarked on a systematic practice to prevent undocumented asylum seekers from crossing into Bulgaria to lodge claims for international protection,” says the report.

According to the rights group, this strategy by the Bulgarian government breaches the non-refoulement principle (not returning or expelling people to places where their lives and freedoms could be threatened) included in the 1951 Refugee Convention that Bulgaria has ratified, as well as in EU legislation that Bulgaria is bound to implement (the EU’s Return Directive, the Schengen Border Code and the EU Charter of Fundamental Human Rights).

“The border pushbacks documented in this report follow no proper procedure and carry a negative presumption that irregular border crossers are not seeking asylum when the presumption, at least with regard to people fleeing Syria and Afghanistan, ought to be that they are,” explains the report.

The study was lambasted in Bulgaria, including by the head of the State Agency for Refugees and the director of the Bulgarian Red Cross – one of the non-governmental bodies that works most closely with authorities – though both individuals have admitted to not having read the analysis. While critics focus on the fact that conditions for migrants in Bulgaria have improved since last year – a fact that the HRW report mentions anyway – no one addresses the main allegation, that the country has been implementing a systematic refoulement plan.

Bulgaria’s Minister of Interior Tsvetlin Yovchev, the main figure behind the plan, disputed claims by HRW that violence had been committed by border police against migrants entering the country. He told Bulgarian media that a guarantee of proper behaviour by Bulgarian police is the constant presence in border areas of specialists of Frontex, the EU border management agency.

That Frontex lends credibility to the Bulgarian government, at least in front of domestic audiences, is further hinted at by the fact that the Bulgarian Ministry of Interior tends to play up the numbers of Frontex troops present in the country. According to Frontex, only 40-50 Frontex officers have been present in Bulgaria at a time since 2011, and the Bulgarian Ministry of Interior is adding up numbers to report for example that, “in 2013, 3 joint operations were conducted on Bulgaria’s external borders which are also external for the European Union, with a total number of 216 experts and 30 translators from Frontex.”

Asked by IPS about Frontex’s participation in the plan implemented by the Bulgarian authorities, Frontex spokesperson Ewa Moncure replied that Frontex is an operational agency which merely implements border surveillance and second line activities (such as interviewing of migrants) agreed with the government in Sofia. According to Frontex, whatever measures the Bulgarian government has taken since November, even if Frontex was involved in implementation, are Bulgaria’s primary responsibility. Frontex also says that it investigates any complaints received about human rights abuses but that it had not received any in Bulgaria that refer to the violations cited by the HRW report.

In November last year, the European Ombudsman rejected “Frontex’s view that human rights infringements are exclusively the responsibility of the Member States concerned,” invoking as a case in point the deployment of EU border guards to Greece where migrant detainees were kept in detention centres under unacceptable conditions..

Given that refoulement is contradictory to EU legislation, human rights groups have said the European Commission could potentially start infringement procedures against the country (this can lead to legal action in front of the European Court of Justice and sanctions), but no decisive steps have been taken so far. Michele Cercone, spokesperson for the EU Commission on Home Affairs, responding to claims in the HRW report, told IPS that “the Commission is closely monitoring the asylum situation in Bulgaria and is in regular contact with the Bulgarian authorities.”

He said a so-called “pilot letter” has been sent to Bulgaria with a request for information, on the basis of which the EC will decide on the next steps; this, however, does not constitute the start of an infringement procedure, which would require a “letter of formal notice” coming only if the Commission were unsatisfied with the performance of the Bulgarian authorities.

3,000 people crossing the Bulgarian border in October 2013 compared with 99 in January 2014 are “figures which speak for themselves,” Ana Fontal from the European Council on Refugees and Exile, a pan-European alliance of 82 migrant rights groups, told IPS.

“The European Commission should examine without delay border practices at the Bulgarian/Turkish border to investigate possible breaches of relevant provisions in EU asylum and migration law and consider initiating infringement proceedings if Bulgaria fails to take action to remedy the breaches identified,” said Fontal. “Other EU countries should not send asylum seekers back to Bulgaria until conditions there improve and authorities comply with international and EU law.”

Environmentalists protesting against coal outside the Polish Ministry of Economy. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS.

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Apr 20 2014 (IPS)

A European ‘energy union’ plan proposed by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk as an EU response to the crisis in Ukraine could be a Trojan horse for fossil fuels.

On account of Poland’s proximity and deep historical ties to Ukraine, the country’s centre-right government led by Donald Tusk has assumed a prominent position in attempts to ease the crisis in Ukraine. Notoriously, Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski helped negotiate a February deal between then Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych and opposition leaders of Euromaidan, the name given to the pro-EU protests in Kiev.Asking for a prominent role for coal and shale gas is mostly a Polish game.

The Polish government’s assertiveness came with quick electoral gains. According to a poll conducted in early April by polling agency TNS Polska, Tusk’s Civic Platform for the first time in years took a lead in voters’ preferences over the conservative Peace and Justice Party of Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

“Not only is Civic Platform back in the lead, but also more Poles are ready to vote and vote for the government,” Lukasz Lipinski, an analyst at think tank Polityka Insight in Warsaw, told IPS. “All opposition parties now want to move the debate [ahead of the May 25 European elections] to domestic issues because on those it is much easier to criticise the Civic Platform after six years of government.”

Yet Tusk’s executive insists on Ukraine because of the benefits the topic can still bring. In the last weekend of March, the prime minister announced a Polish proposal for a European energy union that would make Europe resilient to crises like the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.

“The experience of the last few weeks [Russia’s invasion of Ukraine] shows that Europe must strive towards solidarity when it comes to energy,” said Tusk speaking in Tychy, a city in the southern coal-producing Silesia region.

He went on to outline the six dimensions of the ‘energy union’: the creation of an effective gas solidarity mechanism in case of supply crises; financing from the European Union’s funds for infrastructure ensuring energy solidarity in particular in the east of the EU; collective energy purchasing; rehabilitation of coal as a source of energy; shale gas extraction; and radical diversification of gas supply to the EU.

“It is very disappointing to note the total absence of energy efficiency measures from this vision, even though it featured centrally in the March European Council on Crimea conclusions,” Julia Michalak, EU climate policy officer at the NGO coalition Climate Action Network (CAN) Europe, told IPS. “If the Crimea crisis did not make the government realise that energy efficiency is the easiest and cheapest way to achieve real energy security for Europe, I’m not sure what would.”

While some of the measures proposed by Tusk would indeed lead (assuming they could be implemented) to increased European solidarity in the energy sector, asking for a prominent role for coal and shale gas is mostly a Polish game.

At the moment, the EU has no common binding EU policies on shale gas – various EU countries such as France and Bulgaria even have moratoriums on exploration. And the EU’s long-term climate objectives, primarily the 2050 decarbonisation goal, make a true coal resurrection unlikely.

According to Michalak, the coal and shale gas elements of the Polish six-point plan must be understood, on the one hand, as aimed at domestic audiences who want to see their government play hard ball and, on the other, as a negotiating tool meant to draw some specific gains out of Brussels.

The Tusk government has made herculean efforts to persuade foreign companies interested in shale gas to stick to the country, including firing environment minister Marcin Korolec during the climate change talks COP19 last year for reportedly not being shale gas friendly enough. Nevertheless, in April this year, France’s TOTAL became the fourth company to announce dropping exploratory works in Poland, as shale gas here is proving more scarce than initially thought.

The Polish national consensus on coal too is starting to show minor cracks.

Nearly 90 percent of electricity used in Poland comes from coal, and the government’s long-term energy strategy envisages a core role for coal up to 2060. Tusk’s executive has been unsuccessfully trying to torpedo the EU’s adoption of decarbonisation targets, so at the moment it is unclear how authorities will reconcile EU commitments with a coal-dependent economy.

Last year, the chief executive of state energy company PGE resigned, arguing that an expansion by 1,800 MW of Opole coal plant in south-western Poland is unprofitable. The government chose to go ahead with expansion plans anyway.

Despite the generalised perception in Poland that coal is a cheap form of energy, this month saw leading newspapers (including the conservative Rzeczpospolita) discussing externalities of coal following a study by think tank Warsaw Institute for Economic Studies showing that, between 1990-2012, Polish subsidies for coal amounted to 170 bn PLN (40 billion euros).

In 2013, a series of international financial institutions, including the World Bank and the European Investment Bank, announced significant restrictions to their financing of coal – lending to Polish coal, for instance, would be impossible for these institutions under the new guidelines.

Poland also has to implement the EU’s Industrial Emissions Directive which calls for stricter pollution standards at energy producing units as of 2016 or closure of plants which do not comply. And it is potentially in this space that some of the benefits of Poland’s tough game on coal in Brussels could be seen.

In February, the European Commission allowed Poland to exempt 73 of its energy producing units from the requirements of the Directive, including two outdated units at Belchatow coal plant in central Poland, Europe’s largest thermal coal plant (5,298 MW) and biggest CO2 emitter.

Additionally, it has emerged this month that Poland intends to use regional funds meant for tackling urban air pollution from the next EU budget (2014-2020) to finance modernisation measures at the country’s biggest coal and gas producers, both private and state-owned.

Fifty Greenpeace activists were arrested on Dec. 9 during a symbolic action of "digging for gold" in front of the Romanian parliament. Credit: Courtesy of Greenpeace Romania

By Claudia Ciobanu
BUCHAREST, Dec 10 2013 (IPS)

Authorities in Romania have been attempting to bulldoze through public opposition to push through controversial extractive projects such as gold mining at Rosia Montana and shale gas drilling at Pungesti.

However, amendments to the national mining law, which would have given Rosia Montana Gold Corporation extraordinary powers to implement its project to build Europe’s biggest gold mine in the Apuseni mountains, failed to be passed by the Romanian parliament Dec. 10 mainly because of a lack of quorum.

Tuesday’s vote was part of a long-term strategy by the Romanian government to give the project a green light despite public opposition and legal objections.

While the parliament voted, hundreds of protesters occupied the headquarters of the ombudsman in Bucharest and camped outside the offices of political parties in the western city of Cluj.

If the law had been adopted, projects involving the extraction and processing of mineral resources could have been declared “of exceptional public interest” allowing project promoters to receive extraordinary powers, such as the right to conduct expropriations, skip permitting procedures for working on archaeological sites, and be reissued permits within 60 days if they were cancelled by courts.

The new law represented a means for the authorities to push the Rosia Montana project – and potentially others like it – in a less than transparent manner after a previous attempt to give special powers to Gold Corporation had been dropped due to public pressure.

In August, the Romanian government led by Social Democratic Prime Minister Victor Ponta proposed a draft law that declared the Rosia Montana gold project one “of national interest” and gave Gold Corporation extraordinary powers – expropriations, automatic reissuing of permits, etc.

The draft law sparked massive protests in Romania starting Sept. 1, with tens of thousands taking to the streets for weeks in a row across the country.

Faced with such discontent, the special parliamentary commission analysing the Rosia Montana law rejected the text in November, arguing that the project would be illegal on multiple counts.

In appearance, the decision by the special commission meant the project had been rejected.

Yet as the commission announced its conclusions, the Romanian parliament – dominated by Ponta’s party – was preparing amendments to the mining law which meant potentially giving all mining companies the same controversial extraordinary powers intended to be granted to Gold Corporation.

The political bet was that the amended mining law would be passed under the radar, as the text did not single out Rosia Montana and some of the public thought the project dead with the rejection of the first law.

It was only on Monday Dec. 9 that the public learned that the mining law would be voted on by parliament the next day. The full text of the new law was not available to the public at the time of the Tuesday Dec. 10 vote.

On Monday, the mining law was debated by parliamentary commissions. According to Stefania Simion, a lawyer who has been working for years on the Rosia Montana case and who observed the proceedings, most of the parliamentarians did not have a chance to study the amendments and there was virtually no debate.

In the Rosia Montana case, Romanian authorities are using secrecy and legal artifice to try to push through a project facing significant public opposition.

In the case of drilling for shale gas at Pungesti, in the eastern county of Vaslui, they are relying instead on policing.

During the months of battle over Rosia Montana, at the other end of the country a new campaign was born: in October, as U.S. energy giant Chevron was preparing to start exploratory works for shale gas in Pungesti, locals mobilised to stop the company’s operations. They set up a camp next to the land where Chevron was preparing to install exploratory drills and tried to block access by machinery to the site.

The villagers, mostly farmers, were worried about the impacts that fracking – hydraulic fracturing, the technique used to extract natural gas from shale – on a perimeter inside their village could have on their lands and water. Some told the Romanian media they had seen movies about the negative effects of fracking in U.S. communities.

Opposition to shale gas exploration – albeit not massive – has grown gradually in Romania over the past two years as successive governments gave exploration permits to several companies; rejecting fracking was one of the themes brought up by protesters during the January 2012 anti-austerity protests and this year’s Rosia Montana demonstrations.

When locals in Pungesti started protesting against Chevron in October, anti-Rosia Montana activists were already mobilised in major cities and ready to offer some support.

The villagers’ attempts to block Chevron operations and the police response were broadcast live on the internet from the early days. The national media also reported on Pungesti, after being criticised for failing to properly cover the anti-Rosia Montana mobilisation.

In their turn having learned from the Rosia Montana case, Romanian authorities responded decisively from the start to prevent the opposition from escalating. For weeks now, the hundreds of villagers protesting at Pungesti are outnumbered by military police deployed on the ground. Tens of people have been arrested. Protesters complain of police brutality and systematic harassment.

“As I camped at Pungesti last Friday, I saw the police attacking people, I witnessed at least four people who had to be saved by the crowds from police abuse,” retired engineer Gherghina Vladescu told IPS.

Responding to the accusations of police brutality in Pungesti, Romania’s minister of interior, Radu Stroe, told the national media Dec. 8: “Others were violent too, they broke down fences…Everyone is free to protest in this country as long as they do it peacefully.”

The minister was referring to the protesters’ tearing down Dec. 7 of a wire fence protecting the area for which Chevron was granted the exploration permit.

In November, villagers from Pungesti submitted an official complaint to the National Anti-Corruption Agency in which they accuse the mayor of Pungesti, who leased land to Chevron, of obtaining property rights over it through an illegal land exchange.

Since protests began at Pungesti, Chevron has suspended operations repeatedly saying that it “is committed to having constructive and positive relations with communities where it conducts operations”. Each time, it resumed works; this month, it filed criminal complaints against villagers for destruction of property.

On Dec. 8., Romanian authorities declared Pungesti “a special public safety zone”. This was needed to justify the ongoing police practices of checking all cars coming into Pungesti, keeping guard outside homes, ID-ing people at will and removing protesters from the site.

Claudiu Craciun, one of the prominent figures in the Rosia Montana and shale gas protest movements, said the situation in Pungesti brought to mind a dystopian future: “Imagine for a second a country where hundreds of industrial perimeters are permanently guarded by tens of thousands of police and private contractors.”

Resistance will continue, he said, adding, “The more the government tries to appear in charge of things, the weaker it is. Legitimacy and the use of force are in an inverse proportionality relation to one another.”

The G77+China group of 133 developing countries negotiating a new international deal at COP19 in Warsaw to combat climate change walked out of the talks in the wee hours of Wednesday morning to protest developed countries’ reluctance to commit to loss and damage.

“Today at 4 a.m. the delegation of Bolivia and all delegations of G77 walked out because we do not see a clear cut commitment by developed countries to reach an agreement,” said Bolivian negotiator Rene Orellana speaking on Wednesday morning at the COP19 climate summit.

What seems to have happened at the closed night-time session of the so-called contact group of loss and damage is that Juan Hoffmaister, the Bolivian negotiator on loss and damage, who was representing the entire G77 + China group, walked out in the name of developing countries. The walk-out has a strong symbolic value and is unprecedented in the last decade of climate talks.

Orellana further explained that the walk-out was sparked by the attitude of developed countries, among them Norway, which proposed that loss and damage be discussed not under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as developing countries requested but under the looser Rio+20 sustainable development framework.

“G77 put forward a very constructive proposal on loss and damage and have been engaging meaningfully with all countries, but [during the loss and damage session taking place into the early hours of Nov. 20], Australians were behaving like high school boys in class, their behaviour was rude and disrespectful,” commented Harjeet Singh from the NGO ActionAid International on Wednesday.

“On top of that, in the middle of the night, Norway came up with a proposal whereby they rejected everything, they rejected discussing socioeconomic losses, non-economic losses, rehabilitation, compensation,” added Singh. “But these are the crucial elements of loss and damage; if you do not discuss these, how can you discuss loss and damage?”

Developing countries negotiating at COP19 have repeatedly stated that creating an international mechanism under UNFCCC to address loss and damage is the biggest expectation they have of the Warsaw meeting.

G77+China last week proposed a text meant to provide the basis of negotiations for creating such an international mechanism for loss and damage, which called for this issue to be treated as a third, separate, pillar in the UNFCCC process, in addition to mitigation and adaptation.

The super-typhoon Haiyan which hit the Philippines right before COP19 started brought even more to the fore the fact that some countries are already suffering the deadly impacts of climate change, having moved into the so-called “post-adaptation” phase. For these countries, assistance to deal with the loss and damage already caused by climate change would be crucial, argued G77+China.

But developed countries have been reluctant to give such a prominent role under UNFCCC to loss and damage.

According to a U.S. document outlining Washington’s negotiating position at COP which was leaked to the media during the first week of the Warsaw meeting, accepting loss and damage as a third pillar would mean “focusing on blame and liability”. That is, developed countries would have to accept historical responsibility for emissions causing climate change and commit to paying the price.

Australia and Norway appear to have carried this reluctance towards loss and damage into the midnight session.

Speaking on Wednesday, UK negotiator Ed Davey confirmed his country’s support for the developed countries’ resistance. Davey said, “We do not accept the argument on compensation. I don’t think the compensation analysis is fair and sensible, but that does not mean we are not committed to helping the poorest countries adapt.”

EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard stated that it was concerning that developing countries took such a tough stance and made an appeal for countries not to backtrack on talks.

While the walk-out makes developing countries vulnerable to the accusation of being responsible for holding back the Warsaw negotiations, developing countries and NGOs are pointing out that it was the attitude and behaviour of developed countries that forced them to issue such an ultimatum in the first place.

“We are very disappointed by the slow process on negotiations on loss and damage, the most important measure of success here in Warsaw,” said Philippines negotiator Yeb Sano on Wednesday.

“The walk-out happened because a very strong proposal for a loss and damage mechanism put forward by G77 and China did not receive enough traction,” explained Meena Raman from the NGO Third World Network. “This is a postponing tactic by developed countries in order not to make a decision on loss and damage here in Warsaw.”

Since COP19 began on Nov. 11, developed countries have given few signs of being committed to a meaningful international climate deal.

This week, Japan announced that it would cut a previous commitment of reducing CO2 emissions by 25 percent by 2020 to a three percent cut only. Australia recently announced an intention to scrap an existing carbon tax, while Canada indicated it might not meet a pledge to reduce emissions made at the Copenhagen 2009 COP.

Developing countries have indicated that they are ready to discuss more if developed countries take a more serious stance. As an example, Indian Minister of Environment Jayanthi Natarajan declared Wednesday upon arrival in Warsaw that her country would be open to temporarily using the existing Green Climate Fund for doing immediate disbursements for loss and damage, until a proper international mechanism is set in place.

Environmentalists protesting Monday morning outside Polish Ministry of Economy as the coal summit kicks off inside. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Nov 18 2013 (IPS)

An International Coal and Climate summit organised by the Polish Ministry of Economy and the World Coal Association kicked off Monday in the Polish capital Warsaw in parallel to the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP19, amid outcry from environmentalists who accused COP host Poland of bias in favor of the coal industry.

The presence of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres at the coal summit was also broadly criticised.

Speaking at the opening of the summit on the morning of Nov. 18, Figueres said the coal industry must clean up if it wants to have a future.

“I am here to say that coal must change rapidly and dramatically for everyone’s sake,” Figueres said to a room full of industry representatives. “By now it should be abundantly clear that further capital expenditures on coal can go ahead only if they are compatible with the two degrees Celsius limit.”

Coal is the dirtiest of fossil fuels, accounting for over 40 percent of global CO2 emissions coming from fuel combustion, according to the International Energy Agency.

During the coal meeting on Monday morning, the Polish Ministry of Environment and the World Coal Association collected endorsements and formally presented to Figueres a document called The Warsaw Communiqué.

It contains three main calls: “for the use of high-efficiency, low-emission coal combustion technologies wherever it is economically and technically feasible at existing and new coal plants”; for governments to push for moving the industry towards state of the art technology and support research and development in that direction; and for “development banks to support developing countries in accessing clean coal technologies.”

The document adds up to a call for public support for an industry that is feeling the heat from climate policies adopted around the world.

While the fate of the coal industry varies globally, in Europe and the U.S. coal producers are certainly under pressure. In the EU, revenues from coal have been plummeting over the past years, on account of diminished demand during the crisis and rising supply of electricity from wind and solar as the block is moving ahead on its target to have 20 percent of its energy needs met from renewables by 2020.

At a global coal industry conference that IPS attended in October in Berlin, Germany, the mood was gloomy: coal plant operators in Europe were complaining of severe losses, while utilities in the continent spoke of plans to shut down coal units and move increasingly towards gas and renewables.

During 2013, the two biggest international financial institutions, the World Bank and the European Investment Bank, have significantly tightened their lending to coal, and the U.S. administration and Nordic countries in Europe decided to put an end to financial support for coal plants abroad.

Poland is one of the few countries in Europe to maintain a bombastic pro-coal rhetoric. Less than two months before COP, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk infamously declared, “The future of Polish energy is in brown and black coal, as well as shale gas. Some wanted coal to be dispensed with, but energy independence requires not only the diversification of energy resources, but also the maximum use of one’s own resources.” Almost 90 percent of the country’s electricity comes from coal.

Yet, even in Poland, the reality is shakier than the rhetoric. Speaking in November to news agency Bloomberg, Krzysztof Kilian, head of the Polish state power company PGE which plans to add two 900 MW units to its existing 1,500 MW Opole coal plant in the southwest of the country, said there was one way for PGE to avoid making losses from the new units: if it secures state-backed guarantees for prices of the type nuclear producers in the UK are obtaining – in practice, that would mean that the state would guarantee as much as twice the market rate.

The coal industry, at least in Europe, has of late engaged in an offensive for drumming up public support and for diminishing the amount of public resources going to renewables. But given the ascension of climate policies around the world, for public support for coal to continue one crucial argument needs to be made: that coal can be clean. And this is the focus of the Warsaw coal summit.

“This summit is not an attempt to distract from the important work done during the COP negotiations,” said Milton Catelin, World Coal Association chief executive, during the opening of the conference. “We want to figure out ways in which the world can retain the benefits of coal but at the same time reduce and even eliminate the costs in terms of CO2 emissions.”

On the agenda of the coal summit were three main ways put forward so far for “cleaning up coal”: carbon capture and storage, underground gasification, and efficiency improvements at plants.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) – the biggest hope of the industry and mentioned by Figueres herself in the coal summit speech as a way forward for coal – would involve capturing CO2 from coal units before it is emitted into the atmosphere, and storing it underground.

Yet despite significant investments being made in the development of CCS, its deployment on a commercial scale has to date not been proven feasible. This September, Norway gave up a large-scale CCS project at Mongstad deeming it too risky; the country’s auditor general had criticised Norway’s spending over one billion dollars on CCS projects between 2005 and 2012.

Another “clean coal” scenario involves what is called underground coal gasification. The technology is based on partially burning coal underground instead of extracting it. Yet the combustion process used in this method results in high carbon emissions, not only of CO2, but also of methane, which has 23 times the warming potential of CO2. As a consequence, underground gasification would still need CCS deployment.

Another idea for cleaning up coal involves improving the efficiency of plants. Yet existing coal plants are generally less efficient than gas ones, and making them more efficient (46 percent efficiency for a coal plant is considered the best possible, compared to 60 percent for gas) is costly – given the current energy price context in Europe, this does not yet make business sense.

Co-generation – that is, using the heat released when burning coal for electricity to produce heat – would be another way to improve efficiency. In this scenario, however, units would have to be smaller and closer to communities – which raises the dilemma of social acceptability.

“The fact that the industry is here right now handing in a plea for subsidies to COP in a way shows that they are not as strong as we may have thought, that without subsidies there may not be any future for coal,” Mona Bricke from the German NGO Klimalianz commented in Warsaw. “The Warsaw Communiqué is in a sense the coal industry’s last big plea: they know that if they want to have a future they have to say that coal is clean – which is a lie – and they have to ask for money to build new expensive plants.”

Youth activists organising a mock lemonade sale to get money for the Green Climate Fund to highlight the lack of serious commitments. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Nov 14 2013 (IPS)

The U.S. delegation negotiating at the U.N. international climate change conference in Poland is pushing an agenda of minimising the role of “Loss and Damage” in the UNFCCC framework, prioritising private finance in the Green Climate Fund, and delaying the deadline for post-2020 emission reduction commitments, according to a State Department negotiating strategy which IPS has seen.

The document, which has been leaked to a pair of journalists covering the Nov. 11-22 COP in Warsaw, outlines the U.S. strategy for the negotiations to diplomats at their various embassies as well as ‘talking points’ for them to push with their respective countries before the talks began.

The paper makes it clear that, despite President Barack Obama’s progressive stances on climate issues over the past year, the U.S. continues to pose difficulties to closing an international global climate deal by strongly resisting the concept of historical responsibility for emissions and positioning itself in opposition to developing countries on the main issues at stake.

COP19 started this year under the shadow of the Haiyan typhoon in the Philippines which put a tragic emphasis on what was anyway going to be one of the main issues to be debated here in Warsaw: the so-called “Loss and Damage” – that is, assistance for countries that are already hit by the devastating effects of climate change (what is already “beyond adaptation”).

Loss and Damage is a relatively new issue on the public agenda of COP meetings: it was in Doha at COP18 last year that negotiators decided to establish in the future a mechanism for dealing with LD.

On Nov. 12, the developing countries’ group G77+China made a public submission to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) with their proposal for what an international mechanism for Loss and Damage under the UNFCCC framework could look like and how it could function. This would now constitute the basis for further negotiations here.

But according to the U.S. State Department position, any work on Loss and Damage should be done under the already existing framework for dealing with adaptation to climate change, not as a third, separate pillar (in addition to the two existing ones, mitigation and adaptation), as the G77+China submission requests.

“A third pillar,” says the U.S. position, “would lead the UNFCCC to focus increasingly on blame and liability which in turn could be counterproductive from the standpoint of public support for the conference.

“We are strongly in favour of creating an institutional arrangement on loss and damage that is under the Convention’s adaptation track, rather than creating a third stream of action that’s separate from mitigation and adaptation,” writes the leaked U.S. document.

The U.S. fears an increased “focus on liability” during the international negotiations on climate because that would de facto translate into an admission of historical responsibility by developed countries for emissions leading to climate change and a subsequent legal obligation to pay a price for this responsibility.

The issue of historical responsibility for emissions has been one of the main bones of contention, if not the main one, over successive COP meetings.

Yet for most developing countries coming to Warsaw, particularly for small island states and the least developed countries, making solid progress on Loss and Damage is a key point on their agenda.

“And if we have failed to meet the objective of the Convention [i.e., preventing anthropogenic climate change], we have to confront the issue of loss and damage,” said Philippine head of delegation Yeb Sano in his emotional introductory speech at the COP.

“Loss and damage from climate change is a reality today across the world. Developed country emissions reductions targets are dangerously low and must be raised immediately, but even if they were in line with the demand of reducing 40-50 percent below 1990 levels, we would still have locked-in climate change and would still need to address the issue of loss and damage,” he said.

“Loss and Damage has been causing very intense discussions,” said Chinese negotiator Su Wei during a briefing Nov. 14. “It will all depend on the political will of developed countries, if they are going to take action to assume responsibility for the emissions they historically produced.”

When it comes to the Green Climate Fund, meant to assist developing countries with adaptation and mitigation and on whose set-up and financing progress is expected in Warsaw, the U.S. position writes, “We’re also working to intensify our coordination in the context of the Green Climate Fund board to shape an institution that could leverage private investment more effectively than any other multilateral climate fund.”

Yet some developing countries are extremely wary of financial assistance promised by developed countries being translated into private investments as opposed to grants and aid.

“Already in the pre-COP summit organised by Poland, one and a half days out of three were dedicated to companies which were there to present to developing countries technology which they could buy to help with mitigation,” said Rene Orellana, head of the Bolivian delegation, on the first day of the COP. “Linking markets to the financial provisions [under UNFCCC] means a diluted responsibility for developed countries.”

Finally, the U.S. position might turn out to pose problems to the European Union as well, because when it comes to post-2020 emission reductions, it says, “There is divergence [among the parties negotiating] on when Parties will put forward initial commitments and the timing of the conclusion of the future agreement, with the U.S. pushing for early 2015 while the EU wants commitment on the table in September 2014.”

COP19 in Warsaw is supposed to advance negotiations both when it comes to setting up a mechanism for post-2020 emission reductions by countries across the globe and to tightening current emission targets of developed countries (2020 targets are deemed insufficient to keep the world on track for two degrees as a target maximum temperature rise).

On post-2020 emissions, a consensus is emerging that countries would present emission pledges before COP21 in Paris 2015 (when a new international climate agreement is expected to be signed) which would then be assessed for appropriateness in light of what is needed to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius.

Coming forward with emission pledges in early 2015, for which the U.S. is pushing, would mean giving less time for an international review of the appropriateness of the pledges, especially a review that could happen at the COP20 in Peru, a host that could potentially be tougher on developed countries.

Responding today to the leaking of the draft, the U.S. delegation in Warsaw told the Indian newspaper The Hindu: “The U.S. is dedicated to achieving an ambitious, effective and workable outcome in the UNFCCC and in Warsaw, and our positions are designed to further this goal. We are engaging with all countries to find solutions that will give momentum to the effort to tackle climate change.”

The coal-fired thermoelectric plant in Belchatow, Poland, the largest of its kind in Europe. Credit: Pibwl de Pl:Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Nov 12 2013 (IPS)

These are busy days in the Polish capital Warsaw, even if it doesn’t show. The United Nations Climate Change Conference COP 19 has opened at the National Stadium, while on the other side of the river Wisla the Polish far right gathered for their annual march on Independence Day on Monday.

But bar a large banner on the National Palace of Science and Culture in the centre of the city, one of the venues for the COP, hardly any signs inform local residents that an important meeting about the fate of the planet is taking place these days in their city.

Poland is organising this year’s COP because it is the only country in Central and Eastern Europe interested in the job when the region’s turn came to host the U.N. conference. Yet many question Poland’s ability to play a constructive role in the negotiations given the country’s recent history of blocking EU progress on climate targets.Poland is this year hosting COP because it is the only country in Central and Eastern Europe interested in the job when the region’s turn came to host the UN conference.

In the spring of 2012, Poland single-handedly blocked the adoption of an EU low-carbon roadmap for 2050, meant to introduce across the bloc a 40 percent cut in carbon emissions by 2030, a 60 percent cut by 2040 and an 80 percent cut by 2050, compared to 1990 levels.

This fall, Poland announced its intentions to also prevent Europe from setting 2030 climate goals. A bigger emissions cut commitment from the EU could play a positive role in the advancement of climate negotiations.

The reason for Poland’s stance is coal. Almost 90 percent of the electricity used in Poland comes from coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, and the country’s energy strategy does not envisage a significant shift away from this source of energy.

Speaking in September at a mining fair in the southern city of Katowice, Prime Minister Donald Tusk famously said, “The future of Polish energy is in brown and black coal, as well as shale gas. Some wanted coal to be dispensed with, but energy independence requires not only the diversification of energy resources, but also the maximum use of one’s own resources.”

Controversially, the Polish Economy Ministry is organising Nov. 18-19, in parallel to the COP and together with the World Coal Association, an International Coal & Climate Summit. The Warsaw Communique, a document co-authored by the coal lobby group and the Polish ministry, will be delivered to U.N. representatives during the event; it contains a call to invest public resources in ’clean coal’ technologies in order to maintain high coal use around the globe.

Despite sticking strongly to its pro-coal agenda, the Polish government insists it is not opposed to the progress of climate talks. “I am not sceptical about climate change, I am sceptical about some European ways to address it,” twitted Polish Environment Minister Marcin Korolec in the run-up to the COP.

The Polish government’s current attempts to prevent the EU from heightening its own climate ambitions is much to the liking of the Polish and European far right, it was revealed Nov. 10 during an ’anti-climate summit’ organised in Warsaw by the Polish far-right party Ruch Narodowy (Polish National Movement), the Solidarity trade union and the U.S. climate-denialist think tank Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).

According to Greenpeace research, CFACT has been receiving almost half of its funding over the past years from the Donors Trust, a secretive funding vehicle which between 2002 and 2011 has channelled 146 million dollar to climate denialist groups.

While many of the figures financially propping up the Donors Trust are unknown, Greenpeace has been able to establish that two foundations linked to Charles Koch, the oil and chemical industry baron infamous for bankrolling climate sceptic voices, have been putting money into the Trust.

During the Warsaw conference, CFACT representatives Craig Rucker and David Rothbard made presentations arguing that climate change is not caused by human activity and claiming that climate policies would mean further impoverishment of the poor around the world.

Against this background, the Polish far right represented by Ruch Narodowy outlined their vision of Poland’s climate and energy policy, having at its core a concept of sovereignty understood as rejection of EU and U.N. policies and a reliance on domestic coal.

“We are against de-carbonisation because the Polish economy is a carbon-based economy and we are against climate regulations in the EU,” Michal Putkiewicz, an energy expert at Ruch Narodowy, told IPS. “The Polish government first signed the EU climate and energy package and now they want to prevent the EU from making it more ambitious. The policy of the Polish government now is correct, but we think it should go further and get rid of any EU regulations on emission reductions.”

The EU’s climate and energy package stipulates that by 2020 the block must reduce emissions by 20 percent compared to 1990 levels, give renewables a 20 percent share in the energy sector and improve energy efficiency by 20 percent. Poland’s two biggest political parties, the governing Civil Platform and conservative Peace and Justice party, have been recently engaged in a public game of throwing responsibility on to one another for committing to the package.

On Nov. 11, far-right groups attending the anti-climate conference joined the Independence March organised by two of the most important far-right organisations in Poland, the All-Polish Youth (Młodzież Wszechpolską) and the National-Radical Camp (Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny), which in 2011 joined to form Ruch Narodowy. Over 10,000 people joined Monday’s march. The demonstration has become a yearly show of strength by the Polish far right.

Some of the participants got involved in scuffles with one another and the police; a squat in the centre of Warsaw was attacked by participants; and a rainbow flag symbolising diversity was burnt.

“Climate change denialism is becoming a new part of the identity and narrative of right-wing extremists in Poland,” Polish climate activist Michalina Golinczak told IPS. “So the Polish climate movement should start to collaborate not only with trade unions but also with other progressive social movements, anti-fascist, anti-war, LGBT, feminists etc., to push back the alarming rise of right-wing extremists.”

Eugen David, former miner turned farmer and inhabitant of Rosia Montana, speaking to protesters in Piata Universitatii in Bucharest. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS.

By Claudia Ciobanu
BUCHAREST, Sep 17 2013 (IPS)

Street protests are snowballing in Romania against a Canadian-led gold mining project in the Rosia Montana area in the Apuseni Mountains. More than 20,000 people joined a protest march in Bucharest on Sunday, and thousands in other Romanian cities took to the streets.

The Sunday marches represent the third major countrywide weekend mobilisation to oppose the project since Sep. 1. They drew the biggest numbers of participants so far. Smaller numbers of people have been protesting daily in Bucharest, in the western city of Cluj, and in others cities.

The protests erupted after the Romanian government proposed a draft law Aug. 27 that gives extraordinary powers to the project promoter, Rosia Montana Gold Corporation (in which Canadian group Gabriel Resources is the majority stakeholder). “It is also about the right of people to keep their properties, about our duty to safeguard a patrimony that belongs not only to us, but also to the world and to future generations." -- Claudiu Craciun, an active participant in the protests

According to the text, the company can relocate people whose homes are on the perimeter of the mine. Additionally, the law asks state authorities to grant the company all necessary permits within set deadlines regardless of national legislation, court rulings or public participation requirements.

Gold Corporation plans to build Europe’s largest gold mine at Rosia Montana to extract 300 tonnes of gold and 1,600 tonnes of silver over 17 years. The operation would involve the destruction of three villages and four mountains.

In all, 12,000 tonnes of cyanide would be used yearly and 13 million tons of mining waste produced each year, according to a project presentation submitted by the company to the Ministry of Environment.

The proposed law is meant to give the project a definitive green light after over 14 years in which Gold Corporation has not been able to secure all necessary permits.

In 2004, the Romanian Academy of Science – the most authoritative scientific body in the country – called for the project to be scrapped because environmental and social costs far outweigh benefits. Apart from environmental risks and displacements, the large-scale mining proposed by Gold Corporation would threaten the cultural heritage in Rosia Montana, a mining area since Roman times.

Hundreds of people in the 3,000-strong village have been opposing the project for years, setting up the NGO Alburnus Maior and successfully battling the corporation and state authorities in courts.

Contributing to the growth in public sympathy for the movement has been the seemingly close alliance between Gold Corporation, politicians across the political spectrum and mainstream media.

Political arch-rivals, such as centre-right President Traian Basescu and Socialist Prime Minister Victor Ponta, have at various points declared themselves in favour of the project.

Most major media outlets in the country have run Gold Corporation advertisements while failing to cover arguments against the exploitation. In a country where corruption is a big feature of public life, this consensus in favour of gold mining at Rosia reeked of backroom deals.

The predominant discourse about Rosia Montana in the public sphere has been that gold mining would create employment and enrich state coffers. According to the most recent agreement between the Romanian government and the company (annexed to the Aug. 27 draft law), Gold Corporation would employ 2,300 people during the two-year construction phase and 900 during the 17 years of exploitation. Over the duration of the operation, the Romanian budget is set to win 2.3 billion dollars while other benefits for the Romanian economy are estimated at 2.9 billion dollars.

The popular mobilisation now targets the Parliament, whose vote will effectively decide the fate of Rosia Montana. If the law is approved, even if it is challenged as unconstitutional in the Constitutional Court (the premises for such a procedure exist since a judicial committee in the Senate issued a negative opinion on the draft law), construction could begin immediately, pending the supreme court ruling.

“We cannot tell what will happen with this project, but all that we can say is that we keep fighting, that united we will save Rosia Montana,” Eugen David, leader of Alburnus Maior told IPS. “We are under siege right now in Rosia Montana, but in the end we will manage to lift it.”

The protests that began on Sep. 1 are remarkably strong for Romania. Since their start, misinformation in the public space has been abundant: the main television channels originally failed to cover the protests despite their size; on Sep. 10, media wrongly announced that the draft law had been rejected by the Senate; and Ponta declared that the project could not go ahead against popular will, only to later express again support for the project.

In spite of this, protesters – who function according to a non-hierarchical structure and have no official leaders – have skillfully kept the public informed and engaged via Facebook. The weekly hours-long marches go through neighbourhoods with the goal of spreading the word about opposition to the project and showing that protesters are not hooligans as depicted on TV.

Their strategy seems to have worked since numbers this Sunday were bigger than ever. The first days of mobilisation brought mostly youth to the streets, but older participants and youth-parent couples are increasingly visible. After two weeks of well-mannered street actions, police presence on Sunday can be considered symbolic.

“It is very interesting that such a revolt began with a case of protecting the environment, but this is not only about the environment,” Claudiu Craciun, an active participant in the protests, told IPS. “It is also about the right of people to keep their properties, about our duty to safeguard a patrimony that belongs not only to us, but also to the world and to future generations.

“The Rosia Montana case – in which you see legislation custom made to serve the interests of a corporation – highlights some failures of both democratic institutions and of the economic system, capitalism in a broader sense,” Craciun added.

“Rosia Montana is the battle of the present and of the next decades,” the activist said. “It illustrates the end of post-1989 cleavages [communist vs anti-communist, European vs. non-European] and the emergence of new ones. People today confront a corrupted political class backed up by a corporation and a sold out media; and they ask for an improved democratic process, for adding a participatory democracy dimension to traditional democratic mechanisms.”

French support for the protests in Bulgaria has inspired street scenes to recreate the iconic painting by Eugene Delacroix to mark the revolution in France in 1830. Credit: Vassil Garnizov/IPS.

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Jul 29 2013 (IPS)

For more than six weeks now, Bulgarians have been on the streets demanding an end to oligarchy and corruption.

Under the label DANSwithme, inhabitants of Bulgarian capital Sofia have been taking to the streets every day since Jun. 14. The protests were sparked by the Socialist government’s decision to appoint 32-year-old media mogul Delyan Peevski head of the national security services (DANS).

Despite Peevski’s snap removal following the public outcry, Bulgarians have continued protests to demand resignation of Prime Minister Plamen Oresharski. On peak days, crowds are in the tens of thousands.

Urbanites, often youth and professionals, have vented their anger and also celebrated the rather new experience of street action. They are a colourful bunch, bringing along kids, often wearing theatrical costumes, using art installations to send political messages, and broadcasting it all on social media.They’re a colourful bunch, bringing along kids, often wearing theatrical costumes, using art installations to send political messages, and broadcasting it all on social media.

As if to reflect participants’ desire for a well-functioning society, people have gathered in the centre of Sofia in the mornings “to have a coffee with parliamentarians” (coffee cups were collected as proof of participant numbers) and then gone to work. In the evening, they have returned to the streets, for more elaborate marches and performances.

Remarkable for their endurance, size and creativity, the protests represent the culmination of public resentment with a political class perceived to be closely tied to business and crime groups, and with dysfunctional democratic institutions.

In Bulgaria more than in other post-socialist members of the European Union, a nexus between organised crime, businesses and the political class cemented in the early 1990s remains a feature of public life. The country is also the poorest of EU member states.

Over the past years, Bulgarians have been reacting. Environmentalists often took issue with the sell-off of natural parks or pristine beaches for tourism or sports projects by prominent business figures with a murky reputation.

It took until February this year, however, for the discontent to boil over. At the start of 2013, Bulgarians were on the streets for weeks complaining about rising electricity and heating costs, and calling for re-nationalisation of the energy system.

Those protests were led by the poor who could not afford to pay the heavy bills. There were several public suicides in cities across the country during the weeks of action.

The protests were backed by others frustrated with Bulgaria’s ruling class. The centre-right government of Boiko Borisov resigned as a result.

Following elections in May, Bulgaria is now run by a coalition of Socialists and the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (a maverick party representing the country’s Turkish minority which usually allies with winners of elections to form governments). Further support from the far-right party Ataka was needed to form this government.

“The situation is very unstable at the moment, with pressure on the government increasing all the time because recently even trade unions expressed their support for the protests,” Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Sofia based Centre for Liberal Studies tells IPS. “The question seems to be no longer if but when we will have early elections again. This government has clearly lost its ability to govern.”

On Tuesday last week (Jul. 23), the protests turned tense for the first time. Crowds blockaded the parliament in the evening, trapping politicians gathered for an extraordinary session to vote amendments to the budget. Those amendments sought an increase in budget deficit to finance outstanding debts to private contractors and some social spending.

Oresharski is refusing to resign, promising that the government has “a clear plan of stabilisation” and plans “urgent measures to improve the social situation.” No details were given.

President Rosen Plevneliev has meanwhile been expressing sympathy for the protesters.

As have representatives of the EU and its member states, including EU Commissioner for Justice Viviane Reding and the French and German ambassadors to Sofia. Unlike Greek or Spanish protesters targeting the EU as a main driver of austerity measures, many of the Bulgarians on the streets today still hold on to EU ideals.

Thankful for the supportive French and German ambassadors, protesters have been putting on live re-enactments of French painter Eugene Delacroix’s canvas Liberty Leading the People (strongly associated with the French Republic) and of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The French painting became iconic of the July revolution of 1830 in France. In the painting a woman personifying Liberty leads people holding up the French flag. The scene is being recreated in Sofia inspired by French support for the protests.

“In a way, these protests are producing an ideology that fits fully into the master signifiers of the post-socialist transition: anti-politics, technocratic experts, civil society, transparency, anti-communism, free market competition (an economy free from the meddling of the political class which is considered to be conducive to the mafia) – as the timing of the protests suggests,” Jana Tsoneva, a doctoral candidate from the Central European University attending the protests tells IPS.

Tsoneva adds that this mindset that distinguishes the Bulgarian movement from Greek or Turkish protests or the Occupy movement, is not necessarily shared by all participants but promoted by more prominent figures.

“As compared to the protests in February which were much more critical, for example in the stance towards foreign investors, these ones have a much more typical modernisation agenda,” Ivan Krastev tells IPS.

“Unlike in other places, like Greece, where people protested the European project, Bulgarians see Brussels as a natural ally. Therefore, officials in Europe are able to side with protesters against elites, not vice-versa.”

Both caution against symplifying the reading of these protests by linking them to one agenda or one class.

“We see on the streets people who are much more on the left, anti-capitalist, people who in the West would join Occupy, but also people with more classical liberal views who say liberals never got a chance because of the oligarchs,” adds Krastev. “This is an interesting coalition and it is interesting to see on what they agree and disagree.

“It is important that we are witnessing a big process of politicisation of the middle class and youth,” he adds, “even though the weakness of the broad, classical civic agenda of the protests is that it is unclear whether any political party can emerge from them.”

Villagers from Zurawlow protesting in Warsaw. The banner says "Shale gas = the death of farming". Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS.

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Jul 24 2013 (IPS)

Since Jun. 3, inhabitants of the village Zurawlow in Grabowiec district in southeastern Poland have been occupying a field in their locality where the U.S. company Chevron plans to drill for shale gas. The farmers’ resistance is just the latest blow to shale gas proponents in the country.

Chevron, one of the world’s top five publicly owned oil and gas companies (the so-called “Big Oil”), owns four out of the 108 concessions for exploration for unconventional gas currently awarded by Poland (data from Jul. 1, 2013).

Over the past years, Poland has been perceived as one of Europe’s most promising locations for shale exploration. The U.S. government’s Energy Information Administration estimated two years ago that the country holds 187 trillion cubic feet shale gas resources, 44 trillion of which are in the Lubin Basin where Zurawlow lies. This year, the body revised those estimates downwards, to 148 trillion cubic feet for the country and nine trillion for the Lubin region, after applying tighter methodology.“If they go ahead with drilling thousands of metres underground, our water will be affected and there will be no more life in our fields." -- villager Stefan Jablonski

Given Poland’s annual gas consumption (currently over 600 billion cubic feet annually), the original EIA estimate has been translated to mean that shale gas resources would be enough to meet the country’s needs for 300 years, a figure often quoted by media and politicians.

The Polish centre-right government headed by Prime Minister Donald Tusk has been depicting shale gas as a way to both reduce Poland’s dependency on Russian gas imports (two-thirds of Polish gas demand is covered from Russian imports) and to make a transition away from dirty coal, which at the moment covers 60 percent of energy demand in the country.

Past the political rhetoric, facts on the ground are less rosy. Despite around 40 wells being drilled in the country since 2010 (including by Halliburton contracted by Polish state company PGNiG S.A.), no company has to date announced that it can extract gas for commercial purposes.

Over the past year, ExxonMobil and two other companies, Marathon Oil and Talisman, announced they would withdraw from Poland, doubting the gains they could make. The government appears to be in damage control mode, telling international media that Exxon still holds on to one out of six concessions and that Marathon has not yet submitted official requests to pull out.

Tusk’s team is also working on legislative changes to make the companies’ lives easier: in addition to tax breaks until 2020, firms would have the possibility to turn exploration licences into production licences automatically as well as to increase the depth of drilling without extra permits.

Yet the shale gas lobby thinks changes do not go far enough. According to the Polish Exploration and Production Industry Organisation (OPPPW), clearer wording is needed to ensure those who explore can automatically exploit (without the fields being put up for tender if gas is discovered), longer exploration permits are necessary, and too big a role is envisaged for a state company which is planned by Poland to have a stake in all exploitations.

“OPPPW members all wish to progress their projects in Poland,” Marcin Zieba, the industry group’s executive director told IPS. “But, as demonstrated by ExxonMobil, Talisman and Marathon stopping their operations. they can change their minds. We have yet to see a project in Poland that has demonstrated commercial flow rates – so this activity remains high risk, with no guarantee of success.”

Meanwhile, local opposition to fracking (pumping water and chemicals into the underground to release gas from rocks) is posing unexpectedly strong obstacles.

In 2012 already, Chevron had to stop operations in Zurawlow because locals successfully argued in courts that the company’s operations at the time were breaching the EU Birds Directive.

The occupation this year started when the company renewed attempts to begin work, beginning with trying to fence off one area. Protesters say that Chevron is treating the concession like private property while according to them “the concession was awarded for public purposes – searching for hydrocarbons – and activities in the area must be conducted with the knowledge and acceptance of society.”

In a controversy that might be telling of the murkiness of the Polish legislative framework, villagers argue that while Chevron has the concession, it has not received supplementary approvals from local authorities to do anything more than seismic testing in the region. Chevron retorts that they do have all necessary approvals.

In a response to protesters, the ministry of environment says the right to build (including wells) on the concession land must be further regulated by state authorities and does not derive automatically from the concession.

The legalistic battle, however, is just a facet of the fundamental conflict between villagers and Chevron: in the predominantly farming area of Zurawlow, people fear fracking will forever destroy their water and lands, endangering their livelihoods.

“If they go ahead with drilling thousands of metres underground, our water will be affected and there will be no more life in our fields,” villager Stefan Jablonski told IPS during a protest in Warsaw last week. “Not to mention that we might end up with no gas and no water too.”

Villagers complain that an assessment of environmental impacts for shale exploration has not been conducted for Zurawlow. According to Polish legislation, state authorities can decide on a case by case basis if such an assessment is required.

Asked to respond to the claims of the protesters by IPS during a press conference Jul. 15, Polish Minister of Environment Marcin Korolec said: “Shale gas constitutes an enormous opportunity for Poland. The majority of environmental issues are extremely emotional, as we see with the people of Zurawlow, but we have to keep our route and realise our policy.”

“Unfortunately, our ministry of environment is behaving like a representative of companies,” Agnieszka Grzybek from the Polish Green Party told IPS. “In the legislative pack discussed at the moment, there is a proposal that says that new NGOs cannot send comments and engage in the debate unless they have existed for more than a year. This would effectively exclude groups like the farmers from Zurawlow from having a say on shale gas.”

Antonio Onorati. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Claudia Ciobanu
ROME, Jun 21 2013 (IPS)

The International Planning Committee for Food Security (IPC) is the largest organisation of small food producers in the world, representing 300 million people, including La Via Campesina with its 200 million members.

It has been keeping an eye on FAO for over two decades. According to Onorati, the U.N. body has made significant progress in this period.

“In the 1980s, you couldn’t have imagined entering to the conference of FAO as civil society unless you maybe knew someone who brought you to a reception,” he tells TerraViva. “Now we are participants in the World Committee on Food Security and we are starting to have a say in the FAO technical committees. It is another world.”

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Why did IPC focus its work on FAO?

A: At FAO, the decision is made according to one state – one vote rule, which is very important, because in other places, such as the World Bank, the rule is one dollar – one vote.

In places like the World Bank or the World Trade Organisation, if you are a small producer, you have no chance: you can be an expert, you can be an observer, but when it comes to deciding you have no chance. Here, at least, you have a voice, you have the opportunity for conflict, because our members from organisations all over the world get to speak to their elected representatives.

Q: What important changes do you note in the organisation?

A: One interesting change we are seeing now is the increase in financial contributions from BRICS countries [Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa]. More important than the money they put into FAO is the fact that large developing countries are breaking the powerful dominant position of the OECD countries.

And this is important because the model of OECD countries is not able to bring new solutions, while we are seeing interesting things coming from developing countries: Brazil’s Fome Zero programme is famous, but what is less known is that China too has managed to cut the number of its food insecure people to half.

Another welcome change is that regional conferences are coming before the international one in Rome, so regions have a bigger word to say in setting priorities.

Q: What do you think of Da Silva’s programme for reforming FAO?

A: The reform is a necessity. Reducing staff and establishing clear chains of command was welcome. The food systems approach proposed by FAO is something we very much favour but might be resisted by some of the member states.

When it comes to the money, it is important to pay attention to the distinction between the regular budget made up of obligatory contributions, and the voluntary contributions, or the trust funds. The regular budget is the only money whose use is decided by the plenary, that is, democratically.

Trust funds, on the other hand, are a way for governments to condition FAO’s work: when a donor gives an amount, that donor can indicate the use of the money [the regular budget was 1.005 billion U.S. dollars for 2012/13 and voluntary contributions stood at a similar level]. It would be important to break the conditionality between the donor money and FAO’s work, but we are far from that step.

Q: How substantial do you feel is FAO’s engagement with civil society?

A: The real breakthrough was becoming participants in the World Committee on Food Security [the Committee is the part of the FAO structure focused on food security policies]. When it comes to FAO itself, the technical committees represent the essence of the work and there is where we have to have more space. In the biennial conference, we get to speak at the end of the end of the end and as NGOs.

FAO was set up after Yalta, which was a deal between big powers and big men, and in the spirit that peasants do not understand anything. But the reality is different and there is an increased recognition now that we have to be a part of the decision-making process because we are a part of the solution. If you don’t speak to the peasant, with whom do you speak?

The current DG and the previous one have been very supportive of this change. Governments too must understand that they should not be afraid of the small food producers, who are their citizens.

Excerpt:

Marcela Villareal, Director of the Office for Communication, Partnerships and Advocacy, FAO. Credit: ©FAO/Giulio Napolitano

By Claudia Ciobanu
ROME, Jun 20 2013 (IPS)

Under the leadership of Brazilian Director General (DG) José Graziano da Silva, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has been engaged in a process of deep reform meant to make the organisation leaner and more effective in the fight against hunger. 

“One transformational element in the vision of the new DG is to seek  synergies among the various aspects of our work, so that we can be more focused and efficient in eliminating hunger,” explains FAO’s Marcela Villarreal, director of the Office for Communication, Partnerships and Advocacy. “I have been working for this organisation for 16 years and I can say that we are best when we take a multi-sector and multi-disciplinary approach: it is this kind of approach that will allow us to find innovative ways to solve age-old problems.” Excerpts from the interview follow:

Q: What are the core elements of the programme of work proposed by Graziano da Silva for FAO?

A: We are proposing five strategic objectives, the first of which is the elimination of hunger – we are no longer speaking just about reducing it. It is important to note here that, if years ago we thought that by increasing food production we could eradicate hunger, today we know that it is not only about production levels but also about access to food.

The second objective refers to increasing food production in a sustainable manner and the third calls for the eradication of rural poverty.

A strategic thinking process laid down the foundations of the current programme of work.  The MDG targets and indicators are very much focused on urban areas, despite rural poverty being one of the main challenges today.

In FAO’s work on rural poverty, we will focus on three rural populations at risk of poverty: the smallholders, whom we will help become more productive; those who sell their labour in rural areas, for the benefit of whom we will help countries generate decent employment increasing incomes and  access food; and, finally, for those who get left out altogether we need to advise countries on the creation of social safety nets, but in a way that is not just giving out of money but that eventually supports production and /or employment."If we in the U.N. systems can make [big corporations] be more mindful of their impact on the environment, labour, on issues around gender, then we have come a long way." -- Marcela Villarreal

Finally, last two strategic objectives refer to offering farmers better and more equitable access to markets and, respectively, building people’s resilience, thus lowering vulnerability to threats and crises.

It is our member states that will have to meet these objectives. Our role will be to contribute in a strategic and measurable way to their meeting of these objectives.

Q: How much leverage does FAO actually have on member states that might not be fully behind this vision of sustainable food systems proposed by the organisation?

A: We are very optimistic that we can implement this vision. We already see big progress happening: on Sunday, 38 countries were awarded for halving hunger levels, so the fact that we already got halfway gives us a good indication that we can work to achieve the real target, which is zero hunger.

At this conference, it is clear that governments across the board support the vision and the programme of work of the DG. Of course, a good measure of political will is to see budget allocated to these issues.

Q: Over the past years, FAO has expressed an increased willingness to engage with civil society. Have they been involved in the drafting of the five strategic objectives?

A: We cannot achieve any of these objectives without partnerships with civil society, the private sector, farmer’s organisations, cooperatives, research institutes and others.

The involvement of civil society is crucial in national policy dialogue processes, where their voices need to be heard and we are helping to facilitate their participation.

When it comes to the international level, civil society has been fully  involved in the World Committee on Food Security [the Committee is the part of the FAO structure focused on food security policies].

If we speak about partnerships, it is important to say that the private sector is also very important to us, from the smaller producers to the bigger ones, as they are the biggest investors in agriculture in the world, bigger than governments, international development aid, or foreign investors. Private actors can bring to the table a lot of knowledge and innovation.

Q: When it comes to the private companies, are you selective in choosing the ones you deal with, to make sure you avoid those whose business models hurt small farmers or the poor for example?

A: Yes! We have very clear mechanisms for assessing risk and dealing with it. When it comes to companies, we first run a due diligence process to see whether they have had problems with labour, human rights issues, environmental protection or other issues. Then we have a subcommittee on partnerships that analyses all the possible risks, and finally we have a committee on partnerships headed by the DG in person. So we take this issue very seriously.

We cannot ignore big corporations, they are big players in the world, but if we in the U.N. systems can make them be more mindful of their impact on the environment, labour, on issues around gender, then we have come a long way.

Q: When it comes to governments and national policies then, how can we expect FAO to react when a government allows for problematic practices to take place on its territory (e.g., land grabbing) or when it engages in problematic practices itself?

A: We are an intergovernmental organisation belonging to the U.N. system, so we work with governments who are our members. Our role is to ensure that they have the best knowledge and the best technical assistance so that they can meet the objectives set out above.

We promote good governance, which involves transparency, participation and accountability. Here, let me quote the words of Amartya Sen, who said that “by generating a public discussion, we have a part of the solution”.

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Nepal has one of the highest rates of malnutrition in the world. Over 41 percent of the country’s children suffer from chronic malnutrition, predominantly in rural areas. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Claudia Ciobanu
ROME, Jun 19 2013 (IPS)

In addition to the world’s 870 million hungry, many others are suffering from inadequate nutrition that does not allow them to live full lives, or find their fates highly vulnerable to price shifts on global food markets.

Published during FAO’s 38th biennial conference taking place Jun. 15-22 in Rome, Italy, the FAO Statistical Yearbook 2013 combines national statistics from all over the world to paint a global picture of food security and nutrition.

It is already well known that 12.5 percent of the world population, or 870 million people, were undernourished in 2010-2012, 852 million of whom live in developing countries.

Even though significant progress has been made in combating hunger over the past decade, the global economic crisis has put a break on this positive transformation in many places around the world.

While the focus of the first Millenium Development Goal is halving world hunger by 2015, FAO’s Yearbook draws attention to the need to look beyond the number of undernourished, to the number of those who suffer from “food inadequacy”. These are people who might not be considered undernourished under normal circumstances, but do live on a diet that prevents them from adequately conducting physical activities that require significant effort.

Countries such as Bangladesh, India, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Swaziland or Kenya have large populations suffering from food inadequacy while not being on the list of states where chronic undernourishment is widespread.

To take India as a case in point, undernourishment reached 17.4 percent in 2010-2012, or 217 million people, while the food inadequacy rate was 27.5 percent in the same period.

As many of the less-well-off people rely on physical work for survival, governments need to pay attention to this additional indicator, argues FAO.

The statistics compilation also makes it clear that increasing food production will not necessarily bring about a decrease in hunger, unless accompanied by other policies, as Nobel prize winner Amartya Sen stressed in his lecture kicking off the FAO Conference.

While in many countries and regions high food availability is positively correlated with proper nourishment, this is not necessarily the case everywhere. For instance, Egypt’s dietary supply adequacy (indicative of the caloric value of the food available in the country) is 45 percent more than what is deemed necessary for proper nutrition. Yet 31 percent of children under the age of five suffer from stunting, often the result of prolonged periods of inadequate nutrition.

Similar situations occur in Benin, Malawi, the Niger, Kazakhstan or Nicaragua, proving that ensuring adequate nutrition depends significantly on the ability to distribute available resources equitably, without allowing for pockets of poverty to be created.

The world’s poor are not only constantly struggling to meet their nutrition needs, but they are also the most likely to be affected by fluctuations of food prices. This is because the poor spend the highest share of their disposable incomes on food, making them very vulnerable to sudden food price increases or decreases in revenues.

The FAO Yearbook notes several countries around the world are particularly exposed to world food markets: Mexico when it comes to maize, the Philippines for rice, Egypt for wheat and bread.

In many places, food price increases have led to increased hunger rates over the past years: for instance, in Uganda, food prices increased by 25 percent between 2003-2005 and 2010-2012, which came together with a rise in undernourishment rates of 30 percent.

But this is not always the case: rising food prices brought reductions in hunger rates in countries such as China, Nepal and Pakistan. The difference is made by the extent to which the vulnerable populations are net food producers or consumers, and by national policies which may buffer domestic markets from price changes on international markets.

Water scarcity features among FAO's five new strategic objectives. Credit: Bigstock

By Claudia Ciobanu
ROME, Jun 19 2013 (IPS)

The Middle East and North Africa is the region most affected by water scarcity in the world, and for the moment, the situation seems set to worsen.

“In Yemen, we do not have many sources of fresh water and rain water is certainly not enough for our needs,” Gunid Ali Abdullah, planning director at Yemen’s Ministry of Agriculture, tells TerraViva in Rome. “We are all the time having to dig deeper and deeper to get water from aquifers.”"The potential of the region is not being met." -- FAO's Mohamed Bazza

In Yemen’s capital Sana’a, tap water is rationed, and farmers close to the city have deepened their wells by tens of metres over the past decade but are nevertheless extracting less water than before.

Yemen is certainly not unique in a region where per capita water consumption in many countries stands well below the U.N.’s water scarcity mark of 1,000 cubic metres yearly. To compare, the global water consumption average is above 6,000 cubic metres.

Countries in the region are already tapping non-replenishable water resources, or fossil aquifers.

“At the end of this year, we should be able to start using water coming from the Al-Disi Basin, at the border with Saudi Arabia, which we hope will come a long way in meeting the needs of our capital, Amman, which hosts 3.5 million people, almost half of our total population,” Feisal Alargan, deputy permanent representative of Jordan to FAO, tells TerraViva.

The Al-Disi aquifer is thought to be about 320 kilometres long, the largest of its type in the Arabian peninsula. It has already been exploited by Saudi Arabia, and its resources are thought to be non-renewable.

Jordan is ranked third in the world when it comes to water scarcity, relying mostly on rain and underground water as well as on a supply quota of the river Jordan agreed with Israel.

In such conditions, figuring out how to use non-replenishable water resources, despite the unsustainability of the solution and despite some doubts over the quality of the water, seems like a miraculous way out for Jordanian leaders and others in the region.

Yet such approaches resemble a race to the bottom: a NASA report published in March this year showed that, between 2003 and 2009, the Middle East lost a quantity of water equivalent to the volume of the Dead Sea.

And things might get worse: the World Bank predicts that water demand in the region is expected to grow by 60 percent by 2045.

The region’s water problems are caused by a natural lack of water resources combined, according to experts, with poor management of the existing resources at both the national level and regionally.

The lack of intra-regional cooperation is most noticeable when it comes to sharing water from transboundary rivers: outdated accords make it so that Egypt uses most of the Nile’s potential; Turkey, upstream from other countries on the course of the Euphrates and the Tigris, is sucking up most valuable resources via its intensive use of dams; the use of river Jordan remains an issue of controversy between Israel and neighbouring Arab countries.

Governments in the region are of course struggling to find solutions to the problem of water scarcity.

“We’re working on the construction of small dams in the highlands in order to harvest water,” explains Yemen’s Gunid Ali Abdullah. “We’re also trying to modernise irrigation methods in order to use less water for agriculture, which currently takes up about 90 percent of our precious water resources.”

But the challenges are high and cooperation is key to overcoming water scarcity in the region.

International organisations have been trying to tackle water issues in the region in the past with technical assistance programmes and grants, with limited success.

This year, the U.N. FAO is attempting to change the approach to the issue: throughout 2013, it is conducting a thorough assessment of water resources and use in the whole region, trying both to treat the region as a whole and to pay close attention to the multiple interactions between water and all other aspects of human life.

“The Near East region has to meet half of its food needs via imports because of lack of water to produce enough food itself,” explains Mohamed Bazza, FAO’s focal point for national drought policies.

Bazza stresses that the central role of water for achieving food security makes water scarcity issues crucial for FAO, which explains why water scarcity features among the five new strategic objectives to be pursued by the institution.

“Numerous efforts have been made in the past to improve food security in the region on different aspects, including water use, but something has not been working, meaning that the potential of the region is not being met,” Bazza says.

FAO’s comprehensive assessment will this year look for the reasons behind the region’s water crisis, as well as try to identify what should be priority areas of action to address these problems.

Solutions not emphasised much until now could become more prominent: for instance, shifting  agricultural production towards less water-intensive crops or even reducing food waste on the fields as wasted crops also mean wasted water.

Soybean field near Eldorado in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. Credit: Gerson Sobreira/IPS

By Claudia Ciobanu
ROME, Jun 18 2013 (IPS)

“We do believe that it’s perfectly possible to end extreme poverty in Brazil by 2015,” Antonino Marques Porto, Brazil’s ambassador to FAO, tells TerraViva in Rome.

Brazil is currently implementing the Brasil Sem Miséria programme — a continuation of the successful Fome Zero— which aims to do just that, Marques Porto says. Initiated in 2003 by former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Fome Zero is credited with having taken 30 to 40 million Brazilians out of poverty.

“It involved among others cash transfers to the poorest families, conditioned on children going to school and getting vaccines,” the ambassador says,” but also rural credits and investments in small farms.”

One of the core actions of the programme was providing poor children with free school lunches, which were purchased by the state from family farms. In this way, support to local small farmers was provided at the same time as offering quality nutrition to children from low-income families.

According to Marques Porto, supporting family farms – which currently provide 70 percent of the food eaten by Brazilians – is central to poverty alleviation.

The success of Fome Zero was due to three elements, thinks Oxfam International’s Luca Chinotti: the strong leadership provided by President Lula; the broad partnership involved in devising and implementing the platform, which included ministries, civil society, representatives of small farmers and rural workers; and shifting most public sector food purchases to family farm suppliers.

Brazil is sharing its experience with family farm produce purchases for poverty alleviation with other countries around the world, as part of the World Food Programme’s Purchase for Progress framework, says Marques Porto.

Over the past decade, Brazil has been deriving much of its wealth from food exports. Yet its large-scale soy and beef production for export are also responsible for deforestation and biodiversity loss in the Amazonian region. Furthermore, clearing of land for industrial agriculture is threatening livelihoods of local communities.

“Across the world, rural communities rely on land, forests and fisheries for their food security,” says Oxfam’s Chinotti. “If policies and projects reduce their access to those natural resources, the outcome will be more hunger.”

Last year, FAO published a set of “Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries, and Forests in the Context of National Food Security”, offering guidance to countries around the world on just systems of tenure, that are compatible with every person’s right to adequate food

Oxfam and other NGOs are now calling on all countries around the world to implement those guidelines in order to secure smallholders’ access to land and natural resources.

This year, the U.N.’s High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda proposed that clear targets on land tenure are included in the development framework that will replace the Millennium Development Goals after 2015. If adopted, such targets could play an important role in preventing land grabbing and protecting the food security of local communities.

Ambassador and Permanent Representative of France to FAO H.E. Bérengére Quincy. Credit: ©FAO/Alessandra Benedetti

By Claudia Ciobanu
ROME, Jun 17 2013 (IPS)

Closing the gender gap between women and men on agriculture and food security could free over one hundred million people from hunger. 

Women represent 43 percent of the global agricultural workforce yet they have access to disproportionately less land and productive resources, according to FAO’s report The State of Food and Agriculture 2010-2011.

Not only are they discriminated against in terms of access to credit and land, but they also are burdened with more house and family care chores and are more likely to be in precarious and low-paid employment.

During this week’s biannual conference in Rome, FAO announced the mainstreaming of gender across all its policies and put its gender policy for discussion in front of the national delegations.“In order to close the gender gap, it is not enough to adopt the gender lens." - ActionAid International’s Alberta Guerra

Observers of FAO’s work on gender argue that the organisation has made very good progress over the past years, and that the basic necessary documents and normative frameworks needed for closing the gender gap are now in place.

But care must now be paid to implementation.

“Gender mainstreaming is necessary but not a guarantee,” Berengere Quincy, France’s representative to FAO, tells TerraViva. “The mainstreaming needs to be backed up by better knowledge and expertise and followed up with clear objectives and indicators of progress.”

In many places around the world, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen pointed out in his speech given in Rome at the kickoff of the FAO biannual conference, women are also discriminated against when it comes to nutrition, with men systematically getting the best food. In turn, this weakens women’s chances of meeting their full potential.

FAO’s report quoted above further points out that granting women equal access to land and resources as men would increase yields on their farms by 20 to 30 percent, which in turn would lead to raising agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5 to four percent and saving 100 to 150 million people from malnourishment.

In response to these realities – and to pressures from civil society – FAO has over the past two years made significant progress on turning itself into an organisation focused on closing the gender gap when it comes to food security.

The 2010-2011 State of Food and Agriculture report was for the first time focused on women’s role in the global food system. Importantly, it brought quantitative data to support the idea that empowering women contributes significantly to FAO’s mission of defeating hunger, which in turn contributed to gender issues being embraced across FAO departments.

In 2012, the organisation published a Gender Policy which aims to both prioritise gender issues in the FAO’s own structure and programmes and to increase capacities for promoting gender equality in the countries where FAO operates.

Several countries (Switzerland, Norway and the United States) as well as the European Union warned that clear targets and implementation mechanisms, alongside a sufficient budget, are crucial to add to the current plans if FAO is serious about gender equality.

This year’s conference is expected to endorse a budget for 2014/2015 that would leave the amounts for gender issues unchanged from the previous budget period 2013/2014, that is, 21.8 million dollars.

This amount represented a doubling of the 9.8 million dollars corresponding to the 2010/2011 following pressures of gender rights supporters within and outside FAO, and represents a 2.1 percent of the overall net appropriation. Over the next years, FAO is expected to set a target for gender spending which could even exceed the 2.1 percent.

ActionAid International’s Alberta Guerra, whose group has been advocating for a gender policy and gender mainstreaming at FAO for years, says that it is important that the organisation keeps up the momentum of promoting gender equality.

That would mean paying attention to implementation of the current commitments and making sure that a solid budget comes together with the objectives stated out in the policy documents.

“In order to close the gender gap, it is not enough to adopt the gender lens. It is essential that, in addition to that, interventions that target, specifically, women’s needs are put into place,” Guerra says.

“The policy is very forward looking. It’s not just a policy for FAO, but a policy for its members, a policy which tries to set objectives and goals that everyone concerned about food and agriculture is trying to achieve,” says Eve Crowley, FAO deputy director for gender, equity and rural development.

“It’s important to build a momentum around these objectives and goals among all stakeholders.”

Nigerian Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Akinwumi Adesina holding the FAO award recognising outstanding progress in fighting hunger and attaining MDG One. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Claudia Ciobanu
ROME, Jun 16 2013 (IPS)

Thirty-eight countries were recognised for the first time on Sunday by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation for cutting in half the prevalence of people suffering from undernourishment, one of three targets under the first Millennium Development Goal.

Of those countries, 18 also achieved the tougher World Food Summit Goal of halving the absolute numbers of hungry people: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cuba, Djibouti, Georgia, Ghana, Guyana, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Nicaragua, Peru, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, Sao Tome and Principe, Thailand, Turkmenistan, Venezuela and Vietnam.

“You are the proof that when societies decide to put an end to hunger, when there is political will from governments, we can transform that will into action,” FAO Director General Jose Graziano da Silva told leaders of the awarded countries during the Rome ceremony. “Thank you for showing us that it is possible.”

Twenty other countries were recognised for cutting by half the prevalence of hunger (but not yet absolute numbers): Algeria, Angola, Bangladesh, Benin, Brazil, Cambodia, Cameroon, Chile, Dominican Republic, Fiji, Honduras, Indonesia, Jordan, Malawi, Maldives, Niger, Nigeria, Panama, Togo and Uruguay.

At the Rome World Food Summit in 1996, countries around the world committed to working towards food security for all. In 2000, the U.N. adopted the eight Millennium Development Goals, meant to guide global efforts towards offering all people a decent life.

MDG One, “eradicating extreme poverty and hunger”, is broken down into three targets: reducing by 50 percent the proportion of hungry people, achieving decent employment for all, and halving the number of people living on less than 1.25 dollars a day by 2015.

Received with broad acclaim by the FAO assembly during the award ceremony, the new Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, outlined in brief his country’s path to reducing hunger prevalence from 13.8 percent to 2.4 percent over the last decade, emphasising the core role played by former president Hugo Chavez in this battle.

“We are asking the FAO to assist us in creating a system to safeguard a permanent, stable food supply, which would permit us to confront the covert speculative attacks that Venezuela is currently enduring,” he told IPS TV.

Caribbean small island state Saint Vincent and the Grenadines is another of the countries acknowledged for meeting both goals. Since the early 1990s, it has reduced hunger rates from 20 percent to 4.9 percent, according to Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves, who spoke to IPS on the sidelines of the Jun. 15-22 FAO biannual conference in Rome.

Gonsalves explained that climate change and pressures from international markets on domestic banana production posed significant challenges to his country in the attempt to defeat hunger. And yet the 120,000-person state seems to have found a working mix of solutions.

“We have a history of root vegetables and fruit crops and an accumulated two centuries worth of knowledge resident in the folk which should be mobilised and is being mobilised,” Gonsalves said.

“Secondly, important is the organisation of farmers to engage in cooperative work with the state. Finally, we are implementing targeted solutions such as feeding programmes for school children and the elderly and in general developing a strong safety net.

“We are addressing the production side but also the consumer side through targeted interventions,” the prime minister said.

Georgia, another country recognised in Rome, reduced the prevalence of malnourishment from 60 percent to 25 percent over the past decade, according to FAO figures.

“This was possible because of a number of different measures that we took to generally improve the economy and combat corruption and mismanagement, which allowed us to have double-digit growth for the past years,” Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili told IPS in Rome.

“Growth was combined with implementing poverty reduction programmes helping families to reach subsistence levels.”

Current estimates put the number of people suffering from hunger today at 870 million.

According to the U.N.’s The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2012 report, significant progress has been made on combating hunger since 1990, yet in some areas around the world this was either slowed down or even reversed by the global economic crisis.

The U.N. says that meeting the MDG goal of halving hunger prevalence by 2015 is within reach but only if measures are taken to make up for the negative impact of the crisis.

An estimated half of fresh produce in Papua New Guinea is lost between harvesting and marketing. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Claudia Ciobanu
ROME, Jun 16 2013 (IPS)

Humanity currently needs the resources of one and a half planets to support our lifestyles. But do we really need to burn out the earth in order to feed ourselves?

A definitive “no” is the answer of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), which has partnered with the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) to reduce the pollution intensity of food systems, from production to consumption."In reality, there is never a choice between agriculture and the environment." -- UNEP’s Fanny Demassieux

Launched in 2010, the two agencies’ Sustainable Food Systems Programme has no easy mission: with the world population expected to reach nine billion in the next decades and three billion people predicted to join the global middle class by 2050, food production is likely to erode even more of the earth’s resources unless radical measures are taken.

With this programme, the two U.N. bodies are embracing a new approach to food issues that calls for addressing all food-related activities in an interconnected manner.

What does this mean? For example, when trying to assess levels of waste produced by a retail chain, one must take into account not only the food directly thrown away by stores but also the vegetables abandoned in fields in exporting countries because of the high esthetic standards imposed by the retailer.

Addressing various parts of the global food chain separately only provides us with partial answers, according to this approach, while a more holistic outlook could bring surprising solutions.

At least a third of the food produced today is wasted. The production of this wasted food takes up a quarter of water resources used for agriculture, and results in about as much CO2 emissions as the whole United States is responsible for in one year. This is a sign of system failure but also an opportunity: cutting waste means both increasing food available for the needy and reducing pollution.

The systemic approach was endorsed last year at the Rio +20 Conference in Brazil, when all governments committed to a 10-year framework of sustainable production and consumption programmes.

In coming years, the FAO-UNEP programme could translate, for instance, into assistance provided to authorities on how to make food production more sustainable; informing consumers about how to reduce waste; or “voluntary sustainability standards” (a kind of sustainability certificate) that producers around the world can adhere to.

This U.N. vision of the future of the global food system must now be accepted and supported by governments around the world. The “voluntary” nature of the sustainability standards that are part of the programme already signals one of the potential weaknesses of this U.N. push, namely, that only some will commit to best practices.

“Food systems may be something very obvious when you are in FAO or UNEP, but on the ground people are wondering how to manage trade-offs between the economy and the environment,” UNEP’s Fanny Demassieux tells TerraViva on the sidelines of the Jun. 15-22 FAO biannual conference.

“But in reality, there is never a choice between agriculture and the environment because it is ecological foundations that agriculture is build on and depends on,” she adds.

“The fact that 15 percent of us in the world are still hungry is a collective failure, and this is something we must face up to and this is why it is necessary to try new approaches,” says Demassieux.

Rice is a staple for much of humanity. Credit: Bigstock

By Claudia Ciobanu
ROME, Jun 15 2013 (IPS)

“If there was enough political will to defeat hunger, we would defeat it right now – immediately,” says Enrique Yeves, chief of corporate communications at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

“It is a scandal that in the 21^st century there are still people that suffer from hunger in a world in which we produce more food than we need,” adds Yeves, speaking on the sidelines of the Jun. 15-21 FAO biannual conference opening Saturday in Rome."The crisis of the food system is not only an issue for poor countries in the Global South but for the global elites too.” -- IPC's Antonio Onorati

Almost one billion people do not have enough to eat, yet we throw away one-third to one-half of the food we produce, according to U.N. estimates.

This is one of the paradoxes at the core of the global food system.

The world made progress over the last decade in combating hunger. But a widespread and lingering economic crisis has reversed this trend, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, according to FAO’s own assessments. High and volatile global food prices are putting additional strains on the world’s poor, as is the rapid depletion of natural resources caused by our unsustainable way of life.

This year, FAO’s membership will hit 195, once South Sudan, Brunei and Singapore join next week.

The sense of urgency in addressing hunger in the midst of the multiple global crises is reflected in the current attempt to reform FAO in order to make it more efficient and results-oriented.

“In the 2000s, there was even talk of shutting down FAO altogether, as the mantra of liberalisation of markets as a solution for food security became dominant and the World Trade Organisation became the locus for most food talks,” says Antonio Onorati from IPC, the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty, a platform bringing together around 300 million small food producers from all over the world in order to dialogue with FAO.

“But then we had the economic crisis and the food crises and the governments understood there was a need for a multilateral space for dealing with food issues,” he tells IPS. “They also understood that the crisis of the food system is not only an issue for poor countries in the Global South but for the global elites too.”

FAO’s Brazilian Director General José Graziano da Silva has come up with a set of proposals, including concentrating the organisation’s work around five strategic objectives: contributing to the eradication of hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition; increasing and improving the provision of goods and services from agriculture, forestry and fisheries in a sustainable manner; reducing rural poverty; enabling more inclusive and efficient agricultural and food systems at local, national and international levels; increasing the resilience of livelihoods to threats and crises.

Another important change will be the mainstreaming of gender issues across FAO programmes, a move that is very much welcomed by civil society.

“Women are the majority of farmers yet they have always been discriminated in agricultural policies,” says Alberta Guerra from Action Aid International. “If women are given the resources they need, many will be taken out of poverty. We are happy to see the progress made by FAO on gender mainstreaming.”

Da Silva, who came to FAO after being responsible for implementing the Fome Zero programme in Brazil, said to have lifted 28 million people out of poverty, may indeed have the needed stamina and good reputation to carry the reform package through.

Yet there will likely be resistance from governments gathering in Rome. One contentious issue is a minor budget increase put up for discussion: FAO’s budget was 1.005 billion dollars in the 2012-13 period, and the organisation is now asking for an increase of one percent from its member states for 2014-15.

Some member states may resist this budget hike and these may be precisely the rich countries, as larger developing ones (most notably the BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are already committed to increasing their financial contributions to FAO apart from the one percent: China by an additional 21.3 million dollars, Brazil by 15.3 million and Russia by 9.2 million dollars.

According to Onorati, the changes proposed by the FAO staff entail a “system view” of food issues – that is, looking at all factors together and interlinked – which is welcome. He also welcomes the organisation’s increased openness to civil society.

At the same time, Onorati warns that some of the national delegations coming to Rome may be less open than FAO itself to such changes.

Poland wastes at least 8.9 million tonnes of food every year. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Jun 14 2013 (IPS)

Twenty-nine-year-old Andrzej W. and his partner lived for almost a year off of food found in the trash bin of the upscale supermarket Piotr i Pawel in Muranow, a neighbourhood near the centre of the Polish capital Warsaw. And they ate in style.

“I can hardly name now the expensive cheeses and chocolates we found there, because I never buy them normally, they are luxury goods,” he says. “There was everything in these bins — vegetables, fruits, dairy, sweets, eggs, some close to expiry date, others past, eggs thrown away only because one or two were cracked, just like you see in American movies about dumpster diving.”"Europe ignores the waste it generates abroad just as it ignores polluting emissions created by its outsourced industries.” -- Tristram Stuart of Feeding the 5000

When he discovered Piotr i Pawel, Andrzej had occasionally retrieved vegetables and fruits thrown away at other markets in the city, but this was a whole new experience.

“I felt like Ali Baba finding the secret treasure!” he says. “I was so happy to find all this great food, but at the same time I felt angry that so much gets wasted and sad that I cannot take it all away with me.”

So he told friends, who told other friends, and the bin gradually became the go-to place to get food for squatters, as well as homeless and poor people. When the managers of the store caught on to the practice earlier this year, they locked the bin and refused to discuss its reopening with Andrzej.

The ambit of two categories of people – activists and the poor – dumpster diving is not common in Poland. But the practice probably has a future this country: with a population of 38.5 million, Poland, the largest among the post-socialist states which joined the European Union, already ranks fifth in the EU when it comes to food waste.

According to data from the European Commission, 89 million tonnes of food are wasted yearly in the EU, equalling 179 kilogrammes per person. Poland alone wastes 8.9 million tonnes every year, followed by the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and France. This data, the most recent available, is from 2006 and some food activists argue that it is a gross underestimation.

At the same time, explains Maria Gosiewska from the non-profit Polish Federation of Food Banks, recent years have seen a serious push by the EU to reduce waste levels: at the end of 2011, the EU executive (the European Commission) called for reducing edible food waste by 50 percent by 2020; the European Parliament also passed a resolution setting a reduction target of 50 percent of all food waste by 2025. With time, national governments will have to take on such objectives.

Gosiewska’s organisation coordinates 29 food banks operating across Poland which collect rejected food from producers and intermediaries and pass it to the needy. She hopes activists in her country will be able to use this European wind of change to push through legislative reforms.

For example, her organisation argues for a scrapping of the VAT tax for food donations. While NGOs have been calling for this measure for 10 years, for the moment only producers who donate food are spared the tax, while retailers are not, so the untapped potential is huge.

Tristram Stuart, founder of the UK anti-food waste movement Feeding the 5000, says his group is working in partnership with the U.N. and the EC to replicate their campaign globally, including in Central and Eastern European locations such as Budapest and Prague.

“Food waste in these countries may become more of a problem as consumption increases,” he said, “so it might be a good idea to nip the worst effects of Western food systems in the bud before they take root.”

Consumers in rich countries are wasting as much as 10 times more food than those in poor countries.

According to Stuart’s book Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal (Penguin, 2009), the U.S. and Europe have twice as much food as needed to meet the nutritional needs of their people and up to half of this food is wasted. The approximately 40 million tonnes of food wasted annually in the U.S., claims the book, would be enough to feed the world’s one billion malnourished people.

Irrigation water used to produce food that is wasted globally would be enough for the domestic needs of nine billion people (as many as we are expected to be in 2050).

According to a report by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, between 1.2 and 2.0 billion tonnes of food are wasted annually in the world: in poorer countries, lack of infrastructure and supermarket demands on producers cause field waste, the primary component of food waste there; in rich countries, consumer waste is the greatest culprit.

The report recommends intervening at all levels where waste is produced – on the farm, and on the side of retailers and consumers. It also advises specific technological fixes that could be implemented to reduce waste on farms in developing countries.

Stuart’s group, meanwhile, focuses on Western consumers, businesses and decision-makers. For one, they work on persuading supermarkets to relax their own esthetic standards (i.e., accept for sale products that do not have perfect shapes), which despite public perception are tougher than those imposed by the EU. At the same time, they conduct public awareness campaigns to teach consumers that “ugly” produce has the same nutritional value as the perfectly shaped sort.

Importantly, Feeding the 5000 wants Western countries and commercial actors to take responsibility for producer-level food waste in countries that export to Europe.

“The esthetic standards imposed by Western supermarkets on their suppliers in countries like Ecuador, Kenya and others generate farm waste there, and this is something that Europe needs to include in its food waste accounting,” Stuart tells IPS. “At the moment, Europe ignores the waste it generates abroad just as it ignores polluting emissions created by its outsourced industries.”

Finally, the group is working on changing EU legislation related to animal feed. The focus of a campaign launched Jun. 5 called The Pig Idea is on making it legal again in Europe to feed pigs with catering food waste. The current model, whereby European meat producers import cereals for animal feed (the EU imports 40 million tonnes of soy products annually, most for animal feed) is unsustainable, claims the group.

It is causing deforestation and biodiversity destruction in exporting countries, and contributes to the increase and overall volatility of global prices for staples. In turn, this makes it too expensive for poorer consumers around the world to afford food and for producers outside of Europe to feed their own stock.

From the video “One photo a day in the worst year of my life”. Credit: Courtesy of B92 Fund Serbia

By Claudia Ciobanu
BELGRADE, Apr 26 2013 (IPS)

Up to a quarter of women in Europe have experienced domestic violence at some point in their lives, according to the Council of Europe. But despite the widespread nature of the phenomenon, more often than not we ignore it. A short video launched last month in Serbia managed to break this silence.

At first glance, the clip is just another photo-a-day video popularised on YouTube: photos of a smiling young woman follow one another, offering glimpses of different hairstyles and makeup choices.

But after a while the time-lapse video breaks the pattern. The woman’s eyes start looking sad, scared, and her face is covered in increasingly severe bruises and cuts. In the last image, she holds up a sign that issues a desperate call for help.

Before anyone even knew who the woman was or whether the video was genuine or fiction, it became a hit in Serbia and abroad, reaching two million views in just a few days.

It turned out that the film was in fact part of a campaign by the B92 Fund, a foundation associated with the leading private TV channel in Serbia, to raise awareness about domestic violence in this southeast European country.

In Serbia, over 60 women died as a result of domestic violence between the start of 2012 and today, according to the Autonomous Women’s Centre in Belgrade. And women’s groups claim that every second woman has suffered from verbal or physical abuse at some point in time.

“It is important to talk about this problem so that our society on the whole comprehends that it is not normal to beat women, so that women themselves are encouraged to report violence,” explains Veran Matic, the president of the B92 Fund. “Solidarity, getting people to react, and exerting pressure on authorities to take action on domestic violence are also our goals.”

Matic’s foundation has built five shelters for battered women in six years of work on domestic violence, and plans to open two more this year.

Together with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the B92 Fund also works on lobbying authorities to better implement legislation providing protection from perpetrators of violence and assistance for victims.

B92 tries to harness the popularity and resources of the television station to meet social needs that are not properly fulfilled by state authorities.

For Danijela Pesic from the Autonomous Women’s Centre, which has worked on violence against women for the past two decades, improving the enforcement of legislation already in place is the most important aspect, as it would offer systematic solutions for victims.

She said that shelters, while important, are merely a short-term emergency response.

The other key to combating domestic violence is changing the culture, says Pesic. “The main cause of domestic violence is patriarchal values,” she says. “It is not poverty, lack of education or alcoholism – we are seeing the same rates of abuse in villages and cities, and across educational and wealth levels.

“Men have to stop believing they can be violent, and for this to happen we need to change our perception of gender roles, starting as early as kindergarten.”

Despite noticing some positive changes in Serbia over the past few years – importantly, women are feeling increasingly empowered – Pesic fears that the lack of systematic state support for actors working in the area of domestic violence might jeopardise progress.

Financing is patchy, often coming in the shape of project-based donations from the West, which inevitably run out without being replaced. As a consequence, for example, call centres for victims are forced to close down after only a few years, just as women are starting to rely on them.

Serbia is not yet a member of the European Union. And as a Balkan country, it has a reputation of being prone to machismo.

Yet the approach to domestic violence in this country is not untypical of the situation across many European countries: optimal legislation is adopted to meet EU standards, but state authorities fail to implement it properly; financing for non-governmental groups working on domestic violence is insufficient; and patriarchal values persist.

A 2012 report by the Women Against Violence Europe (WAVE) network shows that only a third of European countries meet Council of Europe recommendations when it comes to a national free of charge helpline for victims of domestic violence.

In terms of shelter availability, the situation is worse: only five of 46 countries studied offer the necessary number of places, with Central and Eastern European countries performing worse than their Western counterparts.

Many post-socialist countries have started taking measures for preventing domestic violence and assisting victims more intensively only over the past decade. In Estonia, for instance, all of the country’s ten shelters opened in the last five years, financed by a combination of governmental and non-profit sources.

But many women’s groups across the region express doubts over whether the centres and other forms of assistance for victims will be able to continue operating in the future. The already precarious sustainability of the financing is being put under severe strain by the economic crisis.

A 2010 report by Oxfam and the European Women’s Lobby, “Women’s Poverty and Social Exclusion in the European Union at a Time of Recession: An Invisible Crisis?”, quotes NGOs across Central and Eastern Europe declaring that an increasing number of women have been calling helplines and requesting access to shelters since the crisis began.

This information (not yet quantified at the European level) is in line with the general view that economic turmoil leads to an increase in frequency and intensity of domestic abuse.

The same groups are also reporting negative impacts of austerity measures implemented across Europe in response to the crisis: from the closing of shelters in Romania and complaints by Slovakian NGOs that they have been hurt by the withdrawal of foreign donors to Estonian groups arguing they cannot plan for the long term because of a lack of support from local authorities.

EU funds, primarily in the form of the Daphne Programme, which offers financing to many of the women’s rights initiatives across the region, are also under question. The EU’s seven-year budget is getting renewed at the moment and the austerity wave in Europe has already led to an announcement of a reduction of its overall size.

While the European Commission told IPS that it proposed that women’s rights and gender equality programmes receive a similar amount of funding as before (the intended amount is approximately 800 million euros for the next seven years), some fear the fund will be significantly trimmed during further negotiations.

“While the recession and austerity measures are having a detrimental effect on the prevalence of violence against women, they are also having a negative effect on women’s ability to escape the violence,” comments Pierrette Pape from the European Women’s Lobby.

“Women’s economic independence is undermined while public services face funding cuts and cannot therefore provide adequate quality services,” Pape adds. “NGO-led services to support women victims of violence are also threatened by the tendering and marketisation of services, which leaves behind and in isolation many women and girls affected by male violence.”

Crossing the Belgian-German border in the heart of Europe should be a smooth experience, with no border controls, since the Schengen free movement area came into existence. Yet identity checks at this border and others inside Schengen are not uncommon, despite the contorted logic applied to prove their legality.

The Schengen area, included in the structure of the EU in 1997, is touted as one of the proudest achievements of European integration. Including most EU countries apart from the UK, Ireland, Romania and Bulgaria, plus non-EU states Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Switzerland, it guarantees people the right to move freely within the Schengen space. It literally means no border checks between these countries.

The checks that happen today at these borders are not border controls, at least from a legal perspective.

They are, rather, national controls of identity documents that take place in areas very close to Schengen borders, sometimes as close as 500 metres.

As an example, as soon as a train enters Germany from Belgium, the German police could be checking documents of some of the travellers, often entire wagons. It is usually a neat affair to which hardened European travelers have gotten used: show your passport or some recognisable national ID and go through.

Occasionally, things get messier: the police might not recognise an Eastern European national ID, so name and birth date have to be verified with police headquarters; more dramatically, travellers without proper IDs are taken off the train, in which case the police also go through the motions of separating the person from other travellers until he or she is removed from the vehicle.

According to the European Commission (the EU executive), two core features distinguish these national checks from border controls: (1) their spirit: “police measures may not be considered equivalent to border checks when they do not have border control as an objective, are based on general police information and experience regarding possible threats to public security and are aimed, in particular, at combating cross-border crime”; (2) their execution: they cannot be systematic, but rather should be spot checks, and they should be subjected to limitations regarding their frequency and intensity.

The German Ministry of Interior, responding to IPS on what distinguishes their national ID checks in border areas from border control, replied that “these police questionings are not associated with the act of crossing the border but determined by the context, knowledge and experience of the controlling officer” and “particularly serve to prevent and stop illegal entry and thus the combating of trafficking.”

According to political blogger Jon Worth, who writes about Schengen breaches, there is one more important distinction that should exist between these two types of checks: the nature of the identification documents that have to be presented.

While in some countries, a driver’s licence would be enough to satisfy the conditions of a national ID check, the police of those countries can insist on seeing passports close to the border. Or Swiss police claiming to do customs controls (the country is not a part of the EU Customs Union) asks to see passports but not luggage or sums of money in possession of travellers.

“The heads of police know very well what national ID checks in border areas should look like to be compatible with Schengen,” Worth told IPS, “but this distinction often gets lost with the officers on the ground.”

Asked by IPS about how the Commission monitors national ID checks, the office of Home Affairs European Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom explained that the EC is currently investigating, either on its own initiative or following complaints from citizens, any potential national checks that are equivalent to border controls, and can take punitive measures if needed.

Moreover, a Commission proposal to update the Schengen legislation would give the EU executive the means to make more systematic controls of national behaviour; the proposal, still to be approved by the other two deciding bodies in the EU, the Parliament and the Council, has so far met with resistance from some member states.

Meanwhile, Jon Worth is preparing to launch a website mapping experiences of travellers that appear to be Schengen breaches.

“The European Commission is aware of the problem and is concerned about such breaches, but for the moment it lacks the data to back illegality claims as well as the capacity to conduct thorough checks,” Worth says. “Our website is meant to provide the Commission with examples of where national ID checks could be used systematically as border controls so that they can be properly investigated by the European executive. We want to make sure EU law is applied correctly.”

Christian Kaunert, an expert in EU Justice and Home Affairs at UK’s Dundee University, explains that such national ID checks may be legal, but they nevertheless go against the spirit of Schengen.

“These types of checks are not new, they have always existed in one form of another since the introduction of Schengen, and have been only one of the manifestations of the dichotomy between the desire for further integration and the wish to maintain sovereignty that is at the core of the EU,” Kaunert told IPS.

“What is happening now, though, is that some of these interventions against Schengen have become very high profile and go very strongly against the spirit of Schengen,” Kaunert says. “This is made possible by the current political climate in Europe in which, because of the economic crisis, populist anti-migration discourses which have been on the rise over the past decade in many European countries are playing very well.”

According to Kaunert, the national controls are just one of the manifestations of the current predominance in the EU of security concerns over more freedom and more integration.

Another relevant example is the continuous postponement of the entry of Romania and Bulgaria, the newest EU members, into the Schengen area, despite the two countries having met all the technical conditions for joining.

Kaunert argues that the refusal of these countries’ entry to Schengen must be seen in the context of a fear that migrants incoming via Turkey, currently blocked by Greece, could find new routes via Bulgaria and Romania.

A Polish official investigation into the existence of a secret CIA prison on its territory is being stalled, according to official sources, while pressure on the country to tell the truth mounts.

Various public sources, from Dick Marty’s 2007 Council of Europe report to the recent Globalising Torture study of Open Society Foundations, claim Poland hosted a secret CIA prison used in the extraordinary rendition programme from the end of 2002. Under this programme, the U.S. detained and interrogated terrorism suspects in Europe.

Evidence comes from official sources. The 2004 CIA Inspector General report, which discusses CIA’s treatment of prisoners thought to be linked to Al-Qaeda in the period 2001-2003, details the case of Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri, alleged leader of Al-Qaeda in the Persian Gulf and suspected of organising the bombing of warship USS Cole. Seventeen US servicemen were killed in the attack on the ship in the Yemeni port Aden in October 2000.

According to the report, by November 2002 Al-Nashiri had been detained by the CIA and enhanced interrogation techniques (EIT) were applied on him “through to 4 December 2002.” A heavily redacted further section reads, “two waterboard sessions in November 2002 after which (…) Al-Nashiri was compliant. However, after being moved (…) Al-Nashiri was thought to be withholding information.”

These fragments show Al-Nashiri was moved immediately after Dec. 4 to a new location, where EIT were applied on him again.

Poland seems to be this new location. Documents disclosed by the Polish Border Guards to the Polish Helsinki Foundation show that flight N63MU landed at Polish Szymany airport on Dec. 5, 2002, coming from Thailand (where CIA prisoners were thought to have been taken at first) via Dubai with eight passengers and four crew members; it left Poland with only the four crew.

No other flights – but N63MU to Poland – on which Al-Nashiri could have been moved have been discovered: “We have comprehensive data for 200-300 planes suspected or known to have done renditions – all U.S. registered private jets,” Crofton Black, investigator at UK NGO Reprieve, told IPS. “Having surveyed all these planes, it does appear there is no other relevant movement from Thailand on or around Dec. 5.” Black, however, adds that relevant flights might still be discovered.

In addition to such evidence (which can be brought for other terrorism suspects too), officials from governments and intelligence services of various countries, including Poland and the U.S., interviewed by UN and EU bodies, NGOs and journalists, point to the fact that the Polish site was key to the CIA scheme.

Those sources continue to speak under the condition of anonymity because both Poland and the U.S. refuse to officially reveal details about how rendition functioned.

In Poland, a prosecutors’ investigation started in 2008 has recently taken a dubious turn.

Until a year ago, the investigation was conducted by the Warsaw prosecutors’ office, under two successive prosecutors. In 2011, Poland’s main daily Gazeta Wyrbocza reported that the first prosecutor reached the point of asking legal experts about the implications of Poland hosting a site where foreign agents tortured prisoners.

In 2012, Polish media reported that the second prosecutor assigned to the case told Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, Poland’s head of intelligence services between 2002 and 2004, that charges would be brought against him for violating international law by allowing the unlawful detention of prisoners in Poland. Siemiatkowski confirmed the charges.

After this news came out, the case was moved to Krakow.

Mikolaj Pietrzak, the Polish lawyer for Al-Nashiri, has won the right to be updated on the investigation since his client was granted victim status by Polish authorities in 2010. Pietrzak told IPS that he had enjoyed good cooperation with the Warsaw prosecutors, having even been granted access to the entire file (including to classified information) by the second investigator. Since the case moved to Krakow, he has seen solely non-classified information and only after significant pressure from his side.

“It is extremely irregular that a case be shifted to three different prosecutors,” Pietrzak said. “And the fact that in the last year nothing has gone forward apparently is a very sad statement about the investigation.”

Piotr Kosmaty, a Krakow prosecutors’ office spokesperson, confirmed to IPS that the case which was supposed to be finalised this February has received a set extension, but the new timeline is not public.

According to Adam Bodnar, head of the legal division at Helsinki Foundation, “all the steps to prolong the investigation are meant to avoid making a formal and conclusive decision in this case.”

“This is a hot potato situation for Polish prosecutors and politicians,” Bodnar told IPS. “They cannot just redeem Poland, that would cause an outcry, but pressing charges against Siemiatkowski or Leszek Miller (former prime minister of Poland between 2001 and 2004) is also impossible in the current political configuration. So they try to prolong it as much as possible.”

Yet sweeping this case under the rug might be impossible for Poland.

Al-Nashiri opened a case against Poland at the European Court of Human Rights, and lawyers for Abu Zubaydah, the first “high value detainee” in the CIA programme who was also allegedly brought to Poland on the same N63MU flight, are preparing a similar case.

According to Pietrzak and Bodnar, even if Poland does not disclose any information to the ECHR (it has refused to do so until now), there is enough evidence to prove the country violated the Geneva Conventions, for not having offered protection to these individuals on its soil and for allowing them to be transferred to the U.S., where they are vulnerable to the death penalty.

Pietrzak, who has at one point seen the full file of the Polish investigation, claims: “This case is going to be very difficult to overturn, becase there is a lot of evidence, and you simply cannot pretend that what is there in the prosecutors’ file doesn’t exist.”

The lawyer says that in case the Polish investigation is closed with no result, as a representative of a victim he has the procedural right to appeal in front of a Polish court. In that case, he can bring all the confidential information he has seen as evidence. (end)

Bulgarian prime minister Boiko Borisov of the ruling centre-right Citizens for the European Development of Bulgaria (GERB), announced his resignation Wednesday, following two weeks of sustained protests across the country which were sparked by rising electricity and heating costs.

Borisov, a populist politician whose party has been in power since 2009, announced his resignation to the parliament with the words, “It is the people who put us in power and we give it back to them today.”

“Most people see Borisov’s resignation as a way to desert the sinking ship of the Bulgarian state amidst the crisis previous cabinets started and he deepened,” writes Mariya Ivancheva, a Bulgarian sociologist from the Central European University.

The prime minister’s resignation could well be meant to prevent the further downfall of GERB, whose public support eroded during the years in government and which was expected to lose the upcoming July elections. Following the resignation, it is likely Bulgaria will see early elections, no sooner than mid-April.

Bulgarians were not appeased by the gesture: people continued taking to the streets after the announcement, and a big protest is scheduled to take place Sunday in Sofia.

Rising electricity and heating prices were what got the protests started: in this poorest of EU member states, salaries average 350 euros monthly and pensions 150 euros, while energy bills are around 100 euros and often higher.

In the weeks preceding these nation-wide street actions, isolated protests had occurred in various municipalities during which people gathered in front of the energy providers headquarters and burnt their monthly bills. Two men set themselves on fire in Varna and Veliko Tarnovo.

Unlike other Eastern European countries like Romania, Hungary or Latvia, Bulgaria started the economic crisis with a balanced budget and saw no pressure to contract a loan from the IMF and the EU; but poverty levels here are higher than in neighbouring countries, and people whose salaries and pensions were frozen by the Borisov government can hardly weather the rising costs brought by the economic crisis. Sudden increases in energy costs this winter worked as ‘the last straw’.

One of the main calls of the protesters has been for the re-nationalisation of the electricity distribution system, which was privatised in 2004, with three players currently controlling the market: Czechs from CEZ and Energo-Pro and Austrians from EVN. The three companies exercise regional monopolies over parts of the network.

In a series of interventions before resigning, Borisov promised to decrease electricity prices by 8 percent (without explaining how that would be possible) and to withdraw the licence of CEZ. He went on to fire several officials, including the finance minister.

The protesters did not respond positively to those announcements; instead, they gradually started taking issue with corruption and disrespect for the rule of law in the country, and ended up decrying the functioning of representative democracy in Bulgaria as a whole.

Coordinators of the demonstrations told Bulgarian media that demands of the protests include: the rewriting of the constitution with citizen involvement; reducing the number of parliamentarians and restricting their immunity; getting citizens involved in analysing how electricity and heating bills are calculated; and giving 50 percent of shares in the energy regulator to citizens so they can participate in the management of the electricity and heating companies.

“The main sentiment during all the protests has been a critique of representation and a call for direct democracy,” says Georgi Medarov from the New Left Perspectives magazine, who participated in some of the protests. “But a total unmediated direct democracy with 100 percent national unity against the foreign oppressors (represented by the foreign companies). There are voices calling for a reduction in the number of parliamentarians because they see the parliament as the main evil, as it is full of political parties which destroy national unity.”

While a nationalistic taint has been noted in the messages of the protesters, this comes more in the form of a strong desire for self-determination and a rally behind the notion of ‘Bulgarian people getting attacked from all sides’. Attempts by far-parties such as Ataka to appropriate the protests have failed, with participants rejecting association with any political faction.

The Bulgarian protests share many features with anti-austerity protests seen across Europe since the crisis began: they started from immediate economic woes (in Bulgaria, energy prices; in the case of very similar protests in Romania last year, the privatisation of the medical system; elsewhere, cuts in salaries and social benefits, or tax hikes); participation comes from all social categories, including a middle class that feels threatened by increasing economic instability; and one of the core messages is a deep criticism of the entire political class and a call for more citizen involvement in decision-making.

Like elsewhere, the heterogeneity of the protesters presents a challenge: with participants from the middle class to the very poor, including far right and far left groups, even seeing police trade unions joining the ranks – it is difficult for the movement to coalesce and present a series of targeted demands which could be pursued in a strategic manner.

Lack of experience with using protest as a democratic tool adds to that in Bulgaria: “Many of the protesters have a low level of political culture and they don’t have their own language in which to frame their problems,” Medarov tells IPS. In this, Bulgaria differs from places like Greece, Italy and Spain, in which an old protest tradition and repertoires can be resorted to.

“Broad frustrations are being expressed in these protests, and what makes things different this time around is that there is no light at the end of the tunnel,” says political scientist Ivelin Sardamov from the American University in Bulgaria. “My real worry is that not only the political class but also Bulgarian public institutions have been delegitimised beyond the point of no return.

“But Bulgarian protests may be a part of a bigger trend of anti-systemic protests worldwide,” Sardamov tells IPS. “The events and processes which have unfolded over the last few years are truly unprecedented, and I don’t think anyone knows where we are headed.”

Migrants picked up by the Greek coastal guard in the Mediterranean just in time after destroying their boat to make sure they get arrested. Credit: Nikos Pilos/IPS.

By Apostolis Fotiadis and Claudia Ciobanu
ATHENS/WARSAW, Jan 11 2013 (IPS)

Publicly funded research is paying towards security systems that the EU is inviting major multinationals to put together to keep unwanted migrants out.

The new EU approach to border security started to be implemented in 2004 with the setting up of the European Security Research Programme (ESRP). This went on to become a part of the EU’s 7^th Framework Research Programme (FP7) under the current seven-year EU budget for 2007-2013.

The ESRP and FP7 have been increasingly used to finance research for the development of EUROSUR and ‘Smart Borders’ – two critical measures to toughen EU borders.

EUROSUR is the European External Border Surveillance System meant to enhance cooperation between border control agencies of EU member states and to promote surveillance of EU’s external borders by Frontex, the EU border agency.

‘Smart Borders’ will put in place an ‘Entry-Exit System’ (EES) to identify visa over-stayers, and establish a Registered Traveller Programme (RTP) to enable pre-vetted individuals to cross borders faster. The system would rely heavily on use of biometrics and on the collection of a huge database of personal information.

Major weapons and security equipment manufacturers have been members from the start of boards advising the European Commission on research to be financed from ESRP and FP7.

According to ‘Borderline’, a critical study of the EU’s new border surveillance and control system published by the Heinrich Boll Foundation, the corporations Finmeccanica, Thales, EADS (a European corporation including Airbus, Astrium, Cassidian and Eurocopter), and Sagem, as well as industry lobby groups have been members of successive European Security Research advisory boards, alongside Frontex and national border control authorities.

In 2006, the European Security Research Advisory Board was co-chaired by an EADS director Markus Hellenthal, who then went on to work for Thales.

In 2007, the European Security Research and Innovation Forum brought industry and European policy makers together again, this time to create a 20-year vision for the ESRP, according to the Borderline report. This ‘Working Forum 3’ was chaired by Frontex, with Italian producer Finmeccanica as Rapporteur.

The Forum developed the integrated borders management concept and advised that the development of affordable equipment for this task be a priority for EU member states.

According to the European Commission, industry was not predominant on these boards: the FP7 advisory group, the EC wrote in an email response to IPS, included representatives from the German and Polish civil protection services, national authorities, universities and research institutes, and the Israeli Red Cross.

But companies on the advisory board benefited from the security research funds from FP7 programme. These funds allocated significant sums to EUROSUR and to the ‘Smart Borders’ development.

PERSEUS (Protection of European Seas and Borders through the intelligent use of surveillance) worth 43.6 million euros is implemented by EADS and Boeing subsidiaries among others; OPARUS (Open Architecture for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-based Surveillance System), worth 1.4 million euros, has as its beneficiaries Sagem, BAE Systems, IAI and two Thales subsidiaries; SEABILLA (Sea Border Surveillance) worth 15.5 million euros benefits Thales, Sagem and BAE subsidiaries.

Approximately 200 million euros were allocated to “intelligent surveillance and border security” from FP7. The security branches of major producers such as Thales, BAE, IAI or EADS usually benefited from these funds, in partnership with research institutes among other actors.

As the research projects were being implemented, Frontex has been creating opportunities for national border control authorities, European Commission representatives and industry players to meet routinely and to exchange views on what equipment may be necessary to member states to implement EUROSUR and ‘Smart Borders’.

“We do not do any research ourselves,” Edgar Beugels, Director of Research and Development at Frontex told IPS on the sidelines of a business-end users conference on ‘Smart Borders’ in September in Warsaw.

“We rely on research done by others – international research agencies, industry, universities, member states – we try to find out what they are doing and pass this to our end users (national border authorities and the Commission). Meanwhile, we collect a wish list from end users and transfer that back to the research community.”

At the Warsaw event, national authorities spoke about their border control plans in the main conference room while companies presented technology suited for those plans on the sidelines. Apart from such exhibitions, Frontex – which is the coordinator for EUROSUR – organises demonstrations where bigger equipment can be tested.

Frontex spokespersons interviewed by IPS did not deny that ideas for research projects submitted later to FP7 could be born during the conferences they sponsor, but said the agency does not play an active role in this process.

Responding to questions from IPS whether convergence between industry and the Commission on security equipment research and promotion and acquisitions by member states constitutes a conflict of interest, the European Commission said: “Industry representatives are quintessential for a technology oriented theme such as the Security Theme. It is not possible to get an expertise on the technical feasibility of a research project without industry representation.

“The implementation of a research project is not feasible without a company that can turn the theoretical analysis into a functioning technology,” stated the office of Marco Malacarne, head of Security Research and Industry in the Directorate General Enterprise at the European Commission, in a written response to IPS. “Initiating security research without technological partners would be an inexcusable waste of public money.”

But others doubt that this link between EU institutions and business is useful or necessary. “What we are witnessing here is an unholy alliance between business interests and political hardliners,” Ska Keller, member of the European Parliament told IPS. “Surveillance technology is the wrong answer to migration challenges. The way forward is not drones but improved, Europe-wide standards for asylum seekers and more solidarity and burden-sharing among member states.”

The European Commission clarified in a letter to IPS that the way Frontex is involved in the creation of EUROSUR and the promotion of market ready security equipment is entirely within the limits of European legislation.

The industry’s participation in the new border regime does not have a military aspect, the Commission letter says. Instead of any conflict of interest in the convergence of the industry with the Commission and Frontex over the development and production of security-oriented equipment, the Commission sees a legal obligation of the European Union to support its industry (although some of the companies are not entirely or at all European).

The full EU response to an earlier draft of this report can be read here.

Excerpt:

Immigrants in the Biala Podlaska detention centre say that living conditions, food and medical treatment are inadequate. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Dec 18 2012 (IPS)

Twenty-two years ago today, on Dec. 18, 1990, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families.

Today, “As budgets tighten, we are seeing austerity measures that discriminate against migrant workers, xenophobic rhetoric that encourages violence against irregular migrants, and proposed immigration laws that allow the police to profile migrants with impunity,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a message commemorating international migrant’s day.

As the world attempts to deal with this increasingly common phenomenon – the number of international migrants has gone from an estimated 150 million in 2000 to 214 million today, making migrants “the fifth most populous country in the world”, according to the U.N. – the spotlight is on the European Union, whose migration policies have recently elicited criticism from various corners.

Since joining the bloc in 2004, Poland has had to guard a 1,200-kilometre-long border with non-EU members, Belarus and Ukraine. Given that this stretch has been one of the main land entry points for migrants flocking to the EU, Poland has been forced to play its part in ‘securing’ the Union.

In preparation for becoming an EU member, Poland recanted old ‘free movement’ agreements with former Soviet republics: in 2003, visas for Russians, Ukrainians and Georgians were reintroduced after 24 years of free movement.

Warsaw is also toughening up on the number of asylum requests it accepts. Since the 1990s, the country has seen a gradual increase in asylum seekers, from 3,400 in 1998 to over 10,500 in 2009.

Since 2009, however, numbers of asylum seekers have decreased, with roughly 6,500 applications for international protection being lodged in 2010 and around 6,900 in 2011.

In 2010, the numbers of people receiving international protection dropped as well: according to the the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Poland recognised only 82 people as refugees in 2010, a 38 percent decrease compared to 2009. In 2012, by the middle of November, 83 people had received refugee status and 372 had gotten a secondary form of protection, although application numbers grew again this year.

In 2008, one year after joining the Schengen Area, Europe’s free movement space, Poland modernised or opened the six detention centres for migrants it is now operating.

Despite new barriers, migrants desperate to get out of their countries still find ways to enter Poland, often at high costs. It is estimated that around 150,000 migrants perform illegal construction work in Poland during the prime season, most of them Ukrainians.

Numbers for those working in agriculture or doing domestic work are tougher to estimate. Rights are equally difficult to guarantee for these people.

Georgians and Russians of Chechen nationality currently constitute the largest groups applying for asylum in Poland and 2012 has seen over 4,800 asylum applications from Russian citizens, most of them Chechens, and almost 3,000 applications from Georgians.

Blamed for seeking a better life

Asylum seekers, especially from the East, are met with little sympathy from Polish authorities. No Georgian has to date received refugee status in Poland.

According to officials, migrants are often ”guilty of lying” when they ask for political asylum, because in fact they are pursuing jobs in Western Europe.

“If the migrants come here for purely economic reasons, it is better to provide as best as possible for them in our centres and then return them to their home countries, otherwise they can put their lives and health at risk trying to move further to the West,” Colonel Andrzej Jakubaszek, director of the Department for Aliens at the Polish Border Guards Headquarters, told IPS.

“We always get them back in days, a week, a month. And then we are asked by the EU what we do to protect the Union’s external borders.”

The EU Dublin II Regulation – which requires migrants to be fingerprinted as soon as they enter the EU, and returned to the first country of access if caught in another place – is on the minds of all Polish authorities dealing with migration.

Detention before alternatives?

But immigrants’ rights activists have criticised the government’s use of a sweeping detention policy before exploring alternatives.

According to Aleksandra Chrzanowska from the Association for Legal Intervention, a non-governmental organisation working with migrants, detention should only be used as a last resort.

She believes that for populations entering Poland in search of work, as seems to be the case with most Georgians, the Polish state ought to consider issuing work permits.

The hype about migrants coming to ‘steal Polish jobs’ is largely a result of scaremongering, activists say. In a country with a population of 40 million, the thousands of migrants entering the country annually could hardly make a significant difference to employment rates.

Detention, meanwhile, takes a huge toll on migrants’ lives. Migrants detained in various Polish centers told IPS that food is of inadequate nutritional value, basic medicines are missing, and they also lack much needed psychological care.

In addition, they say they have no access to information about their rights in languages they understand, and that the one or two hours of time allowed for walking outside are insufficient.

“One of the most important things for us would be to receive proper medical treatment,” says Osman Rafik, a Pakistani who has been detained at the Bialystok detention center since March.

“I receive calcium tablets for both the flu and my stomach ulcer. But perhaps even bigger than this is the need to change the border guards’ behaviour and to put an end to detention, at least to very long detention.”

The management at camps like Biala Podlaska, located close to the border with Belarus, and Lesznowola, 15 kilometres south of Warsaw, deny most claims.

Major Wojciech Rogowski, director at Biala Podlaska, told IPS, “We are aware that the people (detained) here have committed only administrative offences and are not criminals and we do our best to improve the conditions, but we must take into account security concerns.”

Yet these so-called ‘security concerns’ can be invoked too often, especially when detention is the primary means to address migration: they are used to deny migrants the right to use mobile phones or the internet; to justify a policy of round-the-clock monitoring of all corridors; to restrict outside visits; and to reduce time spent outside the rooms.

Rights groups warn that the economic crisis in Europe is leading to a backlash against migrants.

In Central and Eastern European countries like Poland, which are keen to follow EU trends but lack the capacity to implement more complex migration policies, there is a risk of increased use of detention.

“More and more asylum-seekers are being detained (in Central and Eastern Europe), whether through tougher policies at national levels or through the inadequacy of open accommodation facilities through which asylum-seekers are sent to detention centers,” the UNHCR noted in a 2011 report.

“This is, after all, European politics,” Chrzanowska said. “Detention centres are built with EU money and there is huge pressure to (secure) European borders. But all of this should not prevent us from seeing that these people are not criminals and from continuing to look for alternatives for them.”

*This story is the second of a two-part series on immigration in the European Union.

The immigration detention centre of Lesznowola, situated in a forest about 15 kilometers south of the Polish capital Warsaw in a former military compound, is notorious for its poor conditions. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Dec 16 2012 (IPS)

A recent hunger strike, involving over 70 migrants detained in heavily guarded centers across Poland, is forcing the country to face its new responsibilities as a migration hub within the European Union.

Poland currently has six detention centres, which host ‘irregular migrants’, or foreigners caught living illegally in Poland, awaiting deportation after their asylum claims have been rejected or after getting caught trying to cross the Polish border that leads deeper into the EU.

At the end of October, an estimated 375 migrants were being held in these centres. Among them were 33 children, including at least one year-old baby; three of the children were unaccompanied.

Georgians and Russians of Chechen nationality currently make up the bulk of migrants in Poland, though more recently Syrians, too, have had a significant presence in detention centers.

The hunger strikers, mostly Georgians and Chechens, were demanding better conditions in the camps, but also disputed the use of detention as a means of addressing the thorny issue of migration.

The protest was coordinated across four camps: Lesznowola, Bialystok, Biala Podlaska, and Przemysl. It lasted only a few days, ending when humanitarian organisations visited the camps and promised to work with the institutions’ management on improving living conditions.

The detention camps in Poland have functioned under the authority of the National Border Guards since 2008 and conditions inside vary widely.

Lesznowola, situated in a forest about 15 kilometers south of Warsaw in a former military compound, is notorious for its poor conditions. Biala Podlaska, located in the eastern town by the same name, close to the border with Belarus, is a modern facility constructed in 2008 and funded almost entirely by the European Union.

At first glance, the two camps could not differ more. The narrow corridors at Lesznowola are replaced by shiny, freshly painted spaces in Biala Podlaska.

The non-English, non-Russian-speaking management staff at Lesznowola stand in stark contrast to a highly communicative management team – equipped with translators – at Biala Podlaska, where staff in perfectly pressed uniforms roam around the corridors wearing professional smiles.

Biala Podlaska is equipped with a green football field, while Lesznowola only has plans to eventually build one on part of its cemented courtyard surrounded by barbed-wire-topped walls.

But upon entering the halls of either institution, it quickly becomes clear that, for those living behind bars almost round the clock – with the exception of mealtimes, exercises and the occasional educational activity – the situation is exactly the same.

At the first sound of visitors approaching, adults and children stick their heads out of the cells that line the hallway, their hands and faces pushed against the bars, curious, waiting. Even a mundane visit becomes a noteworthy event in a place where nothing happens.

Kicked around “like a ball”

Thirty-six-year-old Iranian Leila Naeimi, who was released in early October after spending two months in Lesznowola, has harsh words about the conditions there.

“Everywhere you see only walls, everywhere the guards are with us, they treat us like animals,” she told IPS, adding that guards make daily inspections at 6 a.m., entering the rooms without even knocking on the door.

Naeimi, who she fled Iran fearing prosecution for her work as a women’s rights activist, says that she has often been the target of sexually abusive comments from border guards, both when entering Poland and also in the detention centre.

She claims basic hygiene products were never sufficient and that the food served in the centre was of poor quality.

Her greatest grievance, however, has to do with the EU’s attitude towards migrants in general.

“They can send you from country to country whenever they want, they think they can play with people’s lives…as if I was a ball they can just kick around.

“We need normal lives, we wouldn’t have left our countries if things had been good there. I’ve had too many problems just because I’m Iranian, just because of my nationality,” Naeimi lamented.

Osman Rafik, a 33-year-old Pakistani man who was detained in Bialystok at the time of this interview, has already spent eight months in the camp, but decided against joining the migrants’ hunger strike, claiming its goals were too “ambitious” and “diverse”.

While he did complain about conditions in the camp and even asked IPS for help with securing medicines, his primary concern was not with everyday life in the camp but with the arbitrary nature of migration policies.

“We keep being asked why we came to this country if we are from Pakistan, but they must understand that we are not criminals just because we crossed the borders into Europe.

“I would like to stay here in Poland if I (am) released,” he continued. “After all, it has been almost one year since I have been in this country and life is not so long, people live about 50 years on average. They (the immigration authorities) have already taken away one year of my life.

“We cannot go back to Pakistan, we have problems there, but authorities here do not understand that, they treat us all the same, whether we have problems back home or not,” he concluded.

*This story is the first of a two-part series on immigration in the European Union.

New HIV infections among Romanian drug users have grown exponentially over the past couple of years, from three to five cases annually between 2007 and 2009, to 98 just in the first half of 2012.

The year 2011 saw 129 new cases of HIV among injecting drug users after 12 new cases had been registered in 2010. Injecting drugs has now become the second most common way to contract the virus in Romania (the first is heterosexual transmission), after being a negligible cause of infections for most of the post-socialist period.

International and national groups working for HIV prevention expect the emerging epidemic to expand over the next years, despite causes for the rise in cases being relatively easy to pin down.

For one, there has been a significant change in drug consumption patterns. In Romania, the vast majority of injecting drug users live in capital Bucharest. There were over 19,000 so-called problem drug users (who inject drugs or regularly use opioids, cocaine or amphetamines) in the city in 2010, in a total population of almost two million.

Bucharest users had been traditionally injecting heroin but have more recently switched to amphetamine-type stimulants – mostly synthetic cathinones such as mephedrone. In 2009, 97 percent of users reported heroin as the main drug of injection; in 2010 already 30 percent of users were injecting synthetic amphetamines.

Since 2008, Romania has seen a boom in the market for legal highs. While the authorities were struggling to understand the phenomenon and outlaw the synthetic substances one by one, numerous injecting users had switched already from heroin to the new drugs because of the perceived safety behind their legality and easier availability. A ‘heroin drought’ hitting Europe in 2010 because of lower opium production in Afghanistan may have played its indirect role as well, though causality is difficult to establish.

The injecting synthetic drugs available on the Romanian market require on average twice as high frequency of injection as heroin, meaning that users need more syringes and are likely to share more.

Importantly, while this change was happening on the drugs market, the number of syringes distributed through needle exchange programmes halved between 2009 and 2010 and remains low to date. In 2009, organisations working with drug users distributed 1.7 million syringes to Romanian users, while in 2010 only 965,000 were given out. According to the European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), 3.6 million syringes would be needed in Bucharest only to keep the risk of infectious diseases spread low.

In Romania, needle exchange programmes were set up and funded by international donors such as the United Nations, the Global Fund (to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria), or the Open Society Foundation. But as Romania started to be categorised as a better off country by donors, foreign funds dried up. For instance, the halting of grants from the Global Fund in 2010 was directly related to Romania’s being classified as an upper middle income country by the World Bank.

European Union regional funds, still used by local NGOs for some programmes, reportedly come with bureaucratic burdens often too big. For one, groups accessing these funds say that administrative tasks keep staff away from social work on the ground; additionally, disbursement of these EU funds requires submitting personal data of the beneficiaries, which may deter some users from seeking help in a country where drug use is heavily criminalised.

While international funding is getting increasingly harder to access, Romanian authorities are not stepping in to fill the gap.

The Romanian Ministry of Health is at the moment in charge of detoxification programmes in the country. The Ministry and the National Anti-Drug Agency also run in total seven opiate replacement centers across the country, which handle around 1,200 patients; in 2011, in Bucharest, only 9 percent of injecting drug users were covered by the available opiate treatments. However, authorities have so far failed to recognise the importance of financing syringes.

“The spike in HIV in Romania demonstrates a troubling dynamic we are expecting to see across Central and Eastern Europe, which is the withdrawal of international support for HIV programmes without any assurance that national governments will pick up the slack,” says Daniel Wolfe, director of the International Harm Reduction Development Programme at the Open Society Foundation.

“There was a fantasy that EU accession would help ensure the same kind of health protection and social support in countries like Romania that the richer EU countries have,” Wolfe told IPS. “But while some small support for programmes for drug users have come from EU social funds, these have been inadequate to the need and excluded support for the sterile injection equipment that is the core of HIV prevention efforts.”

Neither the Ministry of Health nor the Municipality of Bucharest, which share responsibility for HIV prevention among and care for drug users in Bucharest, responded to requests from IPS to comment on how they plan to deal with the emerging epidemic.

According to Valentin Simionov from the Romanian Harm Reduction Network, an advocacy group working on HIV prevention and care, while HIV prevention policies in place in Romania look well on paper, implementation has been disastruous.

“Romanian authorities are ignoring public health,” says Simionov. “When they say that they do not have money for needle exchange programmes, we would rather answer that this is a case of bad management of public resources.

“We have estimated that it would cost the Romanian state four million euros annually to fully support needle exchange programmes covering 9,000 injecting drug users, from purchase of syringes to their safe disposal,” Simionov told IPS. “It’s common knowledge that this is the price that the Romanian state pays for one kilometre of highway in some cases, so how can they say the money does not exist? In reality, it is all a matter of setting the right priorities.”

The Bristol pound. Credit: Mark Simmons.

By Claudia Ciobanu
VENICE, Oct 17 2012 (IPS)

Bristol, the eighth most populous town in the UK, has launched a local currency – the Bristol Pound. That makes it one of the largest localities to embrace a complementary currency among more than 2,500 worldwide.

In all, 125,000 Bristol Pounds were put in circulation at the launch, to be purchased by Bristol inhabitants at a parity of 1:1 with the national currency, the pound sterling. They can be spent in one of the 300 local, independent businesses that have committed to accepting the new currency.

The new pounds have denominations of 1, 5, 10, and 20 units, and have been designed by inhabitants of the town, which has a population of about 400,000.

Local currencies are one of the alternative exchange mechanisms through which communities try to complement – not replace – the use of national currencies when they are thought not to meet people’s needs. Other popular mechanisms are local exchange trading systems (LETS), usually online systems of exchanging goods and services valued in virtual currency, and time banks in which exchanges are made according to the number of working hours spent on each good or service.

Such alternative exchange systems have existed for over a century but have boomed in the past decade.

“By incentivising spending in independent businesses, the Bristol Pound will help wealth created in Bristol stay here,” says the new currency’s website. Its creators, a group of volunteers, some activists, others entrepreneurs and including a representative of the Bristol Credit Union, will hold sterling reserves to back up the Bristol Pound operations as well as facilitate making payments via mobile text messages.

“With sterling much of the wealth spent in the city is lost to big international business, related management structures, remote shareholders and the boom-bust of the financial banking system,” say the local currency promoters.

The key motivation for issuing local currency is to ensure the survival of local businesses by getting consumers to purchase goods and services produced in the community. Local currencies often report higher circulation rates than national ones – especially when they are designed to expire or devaluate after a set period of non-use – arguably leading to increased demand.

Some of the advocates of local currencies claim that such increased economic activity can lead to reduced unemployment levels locally.

Whether local currencies have a significant economic impact is disputed. What is less controversial is that they guarantee some demand for the local businesses – at least for an initial period – and they create a sense of empowerment in communities.

The multiplication of such currencies over the past years as well as their potential positive impact on local economies has led some commentators to argue that local currencies are a way to help communities weather economic hard times.

One of the favourite examples in this direction is the use of a LETS scheme in the Greek city Volos (population 150,000). Since mid-2010, more than 1,000 inhabitants of Volos (and increasing) have been using the system, which according to Greek media has helped unemployed people get access to products they could otherwise not afford.

In Spain too, time banks have nearly doubled over the past two years to reach almost 300, according to the website Living Without Work that tracks such iniatives. In Italy, time banks have been popular for over a decade, partly because of favourable national legislation. About 250 schemes were already in place in 2002; there are over 320 working now.

“It is true that people turn more to local or complementary currencies during economic crises,” Leander Bindewald, who coordinates complementary currency work for the UK think tank the New Economics Foundation tells IPS.

“In a financially induced economic depression, you have needy people and unemployed people, but what is missing is the currency connecting the two. In Argentina after the crisis of 2001, thousands of people were surviving and thriving on grassroot currencies. In Greece today we are seeing similar problems and similar solutions.

“But I am not sure that what some people today see as the global renaissance of complementary currencies should be attributed to the global crisis,” Bidewald says. “Other factors like lower transaction costs through technological advancements and a more networked society contribute too.”

A plus of local currencies is thought to be their contribution to the reduction of global transport carbon emissions by discouraging imports. But economist Tim Harford counters: “The environmental cost of driving to the shops or growing food on inappropriate local land is far greater than the cost of the carbon emissions of long-range shipping.” To ensure emissions reductions do happen, some local currency schemes only accept for registration businesses which commercialise organic local food whose production processes are sustainable and low-carbon.

For both critics and advocates of local currencies, a key question is the transformative potential of local currencies. According to geographer Peter North from Liverpool University, local currencies need to start “moving from being a means of circulation between existing local businesses to tools for building greater local resilience by stimulating new local production.”

In order to have an impact on the relocalisation of production, the creators of the Bristol Pound are offering incentives to producers located within 50 miles of Bristol to sign up for the scheme, thus ensuring local businesses can purchase local supplies with the Bristol Pound.

Regardless of their wider impact, local currencies seem to constitute at least a learning experience. “The main tangible benefits of a local currency are building a local economy and enabling high levels of community interaction,” Mary Mellor, a social scientist at Northumbria University tells IPS. “But a less tangible yet very important benefit is that it helps us understand how a whole money system works.

“Local money systems make it clear that money does not come out from nowhere, instead it has to be set up and administered,” Mellor adds. “How much money is created and circulated has to be decided.

“What is very important is that no local money system is created on the basis of debt to the issuer even though it certainly represents a pattern of debts and entitlements between people as it circulates. Modern money, on the other hand, is created nearly all as debt. Local currencies show that it doesn’t have to be this way.”