By Cléo Fatoorehchi
MARSEILLE, France , Mar 19 2012 (IPS)

Numerous non-governmental organisations used the World Water Forum (WWF) held in Marseille last week as an opportunity to remind the international community about the serious global impacts of large dams all over the world.

Defined as dams higher than 15 metres or with a reservoir volume of at least three million cubic metres, large dams number no less than 48,000 worldwide and present numerous issues, not least of which is a considerably negative impact on the livelihoods of local populations.

Three organisations – the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and IRAM, a French institute for research and application of development methods – recently released a study entitled “Sharing the water, sharing the benefits”, which focused on six large dams in West Africa to highlight various population impacts.

Jérôme Koundouno, one of the report’s authors, told IPS that when large dams are built they result in massive displacement of communities, which is a complex process.

He said that the land area required for dams necessitated “relocating people, rebuilding houses, and giving new land to people for farming,” which also means providing support and compensation to displaced families.

Yet, most of the dams built in the 1980s and 1990s did not bring any kind of compensation for the displaced, provoking a slew of detrimental societal consequences.

Taking the example of the Sélingué dam in Mali, built in 1981, Koundouno explained to IPS that the displaced families, who received a plot of land on the new perimeter of the dam, had to leave shortly afterwards because they were used to traditional irrigation techniques and could not adapt to the new ones.

“They had to abandon the plots because they were not able to produce enough and to reach their expected output. So those communities have (effectively been stripped) of their plot of land,” he told IPS.

Another problem sparked by the building of large dams, Koundouno claimed, is the creation of a “genuine growth centre around the reservoirs, whose water is shared by multiple users, leading to conflicts over the (scarce resource). This is because water management is unfortunately often not equitable.”

The conflicts appear on one hand between the fishers, farmers, and breeders, and on the other hand between the native population and migrants, who are lured by the promise of employment in this new growth centre.

The World Commission on Dams estimates that 40 to 80 million people have been displaced by the construction of such dams worldwide.

Large dams also generate environmental impacts such as flooding, deforestation, reduced pastureland, and a fall in the number of large mammals – all of which threaten the food security of local populations.

Jane Madgwick, CEO of Wetlands International, told IPS the flow reduction of the Niger River foreshadows a negative impact on the livelihoods of people downstream who are dependent on fishing.

The conviction is thus spreading that large dams should not be considered a “green energy alternative” if they are not planned in a sustainable way.

Jeremy Bird, soon-to-be director general of the International Water Management Institute, stressed the need for increased awareness on the sustainability of hydropower energy.

With this aim, the International Hydropower Association published the Hydropower Sustainability Assessment Protocol to define good practices and try and impose them on new construction projects.

Alternatives to large dams do exist

Many experts are now starting to believe that the problems posed by large dams outweigh their benefits – namely providing water and energy – and should thus be replaced by other forms of renewable energy, such as solar power and wind energy.

“In Latin America and primarily in Chile, for instance, the potential for solar power is infinite,” Juan Pablo Orrego, president of the Chilean NGO Ecosistemas, told IPS, adding the Chilean government should invest in this form of energy.

Alternative solutions were also debated intensively during the Alternative World Water Forum (known by its French acronym FAME), held last week alongside the WWF. In particular, the option of the “mini- hydro”, or small-scale hydropower, was highly promoted.

Focusing on the needs of local populations, experts who attended FAME pointed out the effectiveness of small turbines and small dams.

Ronack Monabay, an activist with Friends of the Earth, commended the decision of the Nepalese government to open the energy market to small producers, in order to implement small- and medium- scale dam projects, capable of generating up to 100 megawatts.

This decision followed a campaign spearheaded by many environmental NGOs and pressure from civil society to halt the World Bank-sponsored project ‘Arun III’, a large dam that would have ravaged the Himalayan forests.

Such a process of heeding the voices of small producers and local communities grants the stakeholders more autonomy in the decision-making process and allows communities to agree what is best for them.

On Mar 14. International Rivers, along with other environmental organisations, campaigned against the “corporate green-washing of dams”.

They told IPS all that is needed now is more political will from decision-makers to implement these alternatives, instead of promoting the large dams projects that represent huge profits for multinational corporations.

The sand dam alternative

In order to avoid the social and environmental problems created by large dams, and with the aim of providing water for everyone, semi-arid areas use another technology, called sand dams.

The NGO Excellent came to the WWF to raise awareness on this effective way of tackling food insecurity and lack of water around the world, particularly in regions where rainfall is intense but over very short periods of time.

Sand dams are able to store enough water for one thousand people to subsist for an entire lifetime. Moreover, sand dams are built and managed by local communities, which is a very cost-effective solution.

Simon Maddrell, CEO of Excellent, told IPS, “The thing about sand dams is that they keep water where the people are, where people need it. Now, the fundamental principle of a large dam isn’t to keep water where people need it, and it certainly is not a method of providing water for people in rural areas.”

While sand dams do not provide populations with energy as a large dam does, Maddrell believes this is not a priority for the affected communities, who first need water and food.

Excerpt:

1.1 billion people in developing countries have inadequate access to water, and 2.6 billion lack even the most basic sanitation. Credit: Mantoe Phakathi/IPS

By Cléo Fatoorehchi
AIX-EN-PROVENCE , Mar 7 2012 (IPS)

Back in 2001, Gérard Mestrallet, CEO of the transnational water giant GDF- Suez, highlighted his company’s “commitment to fight for better access” to safe water and sanitation throughout the world, in order to put an end to all deadly water-borne diseases, from children’s diarrhoea to parasitic diseases to dysentery.

Over a decade later, roughly 1.8 million children continue to die each year as a result of diarrhoea, and some 443 million school days are lost annually due to water-related illnesses, according to the latest data provided by the United Nations’ 2006 Human Development Report.

In addition, over 1.1 billion people in developing countries have inadequate access to water, and 2.6 billion people lack even the most basic sanitation.

A week ahead of the World Water Forum (WWF), slated to run from March 12-17 in the Mediterranean city of Marseille, France, organisers told a press conference that they were determined to bring “concrete solutions” to the problem of water distribution and scarcity.

Even though commitments made in the past may not have been followed with concrete solutions, sponsors of the event defended the Forum as a necessary space in which to debate and raise awareness on various water crises.

But as plans forge ahead for a convergence that has, since its inception in Marrakech, Morocco in 1997, failed to bring about lasting solutions to the world’s water problems, activists are gathering a few kilometers away from Marseilles to articulate a different agenda.

Organisers of the Alternative World Water Forum (known by its French acronym FAME), which will take place simultaneously as the WWF, see the Forum as an outmoded apparatus, lagging woefully behind a growing movement for “water justice” around the world.

“If the right to water was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly on Jul. 28, 2010, it is not thanks to the (WWF). Rather, it is thanks to our fight and to social movements,” Jean-Claude Oliva, water expert and active participant in FAME, told IPS.

He criticised the failure of the 2009 WWF in Istanbul to include “access to water” as a basic human right in its final declaration, a formula demanded primarily by a block of Latin American states.

Though it has been announced that the upcoming Forum will officially recognise this right to water in its next declaration, many believe that this is simply a media strategy, designed to co-opt the idea as its own and appear more inclusive of civil society.

The image of the WWF as a democratic space has also been mounted on the Forum’s ‘Platform of Solutions’ and through its ‘Grassroots and Citizenship’ commission.

However, these moves have done little to change the Forum’s reputation as “a Davos of Water”, said Laurent Flety, local organiser with FAME, referring to the World Economic Forum that is notorious for being a talking shop, resulting in little concrete action.

Indeed, one of the primary objections to the WWF is that its decision makers often defer to private companies to make critical decisions about water distribution; numerous CEOs, including the heads of multinational titans like Coca-Cola and Nestlé, have been invited to address attendees at high-level panels.

“They (WWF) calls upon the private sector to solve the problem and we refuse this because (corporations) will privatise and monitor water all over the globe,” Kim Lê Quang, a Belgian representative of FAME, told IPS.

In contrast, FAME will gather over 1000 people from at least 50 countries around the world to share their experiences of public management of water resources. They aim to pressure governments to include the right to drinking water and sanitation in national constitutions, as a means to ensure the implementation of the right to water as a basic human right.

Their primary goal is to promote public management of water, especially through “public-public partnerships” (PUPs), which they see as benefiting all stakeholders. Establishing a non-commercial relationship, the municipality can provide a transparent and accountable service, involving grassroots civil society and thus enhancing the whole community by building management capacity at the local level.

In order to assist communities from the developing world to repossess their water service, the sewage authority for Paris, SIAAP, developed a partnership with the city of Hue in Vietnam, to empower locals to renovate and plan the future design of the sewage system.

Likewise, the public water authority for Paris, Eaux de Paris, worked with the engineering school of Sfax in Tunisia, to share techniques and best practices.

FAME commends such partnerships, and calls on governments to spread those ideas worldwide.

According to the geopolitical expert Daniel Van Eeuwen, if such momentum keeps up it could eventually allow communities to set affordable prices for everyone, instead of relying on market- and profit- dictated prices.

Though the movement is still nascent in France, the overtly political battle for water as a public good and a human right began in earnest with Bolivia’s water wars in 2000, when local communities waged fierce protests against the privatisation and commodification – and the soaring prices that immediately followed – of water.

As a result, Van Eeuwen explained, there is strong awareness of the evils of privatisation in Latin America, which has the strongest public ownership of natural resources of any region.

The Bolivian model of expelling transnational corporations that tried to control local water supplies was emulated across Latin America and elsewhere, because “these companies did not keep the promises they made (to the people) when signing contracts,” explained Oliva.

“The privatisation model is failing, and advances neither the right to water politically nor concrete access to water for people (in need),” he concluded.

FAME hopes to address these issues by being an alternative voice loud enough to drown out the din from the WWF next week.

Excerpt:

Months of protest across the European Union, sparked by ‘indignant’ youth demanding an end to the brand of free market capitalism that has blighted the continent with an unemployment epidemic, finally bore fruit on Jan. 30 when Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, proposed an ambitious jobs scheme.

Protesters at an anti-G20 rally in Nice, France, in November 2011 demanded an end to Europe's austerity programme. Credit: Cléo Fatoorehchi/IPS

“We cannot accept that almost a quarter of Europe’s young people are unemployed,” he stressed during the last informal EU summit, referring to Eurostat’s Dec. 2011 proclamation that 22 percent of the youth labour force – roughly five and a half million young people in the region – are without work.

The details of the estimates are alarming: youth unemployment stands at 48.7 percent in Spain, 47.2 percent in Greece and 35.6 percent in Slovakia.

Barroso sent a letter to the eight member states with the highest levels of youth unemployment – Spain, Greece, Slovakia, Lithuania, Italy, Portugal, Latvia and Ireland – requesting their special cooperation with the Commission’s proposal.

“I will be proposing the creation of joint ‘action teams’ comprised of the Commission, member states and national social partners, to come up with targeted plans by April to help tackle youth unemployment. I also want member states to commit to a ‘Youth on the Move’ pact to ensure that all our young people are either in a job, in education or in training within four months of leaving school,” he said at the EU summit.

Though many consider the proposed solutions inadequate compared to the magnitude of the problem, ‘los indignados’ nevertheless commended the move as a long-overdue acknowledgment of the crisis.

“They (the decision-makers) understood they cannot continue to overlook this burning issue of youth unemployment,” Kim Le Quang, a young Belgian “indignado,” and one of the country’s coordinators, told IPS.

He explained to IPS that the movement is motivated by the change in policies and actually sees it as a sign of hope.

Since the Anti-G20 Summit in Nice last November, the indignados met regularly to discuss and devise new strategies for mobilisations against the austerity plans in Europe that gutted – and continue to slash – public spending.

Many hope that Barroso’s announcement is only the beginning of greater change.

“As soon as March arrives, and with it spring, we will go into the parks again to put into place (people’s) assemblies,” Kim said, adding that numerous actions will take place throughout May in commemoration of the one-year anniversary of the 15-M movement in Madrid.

Meanwhile, plans for an international activist conference, scheduled for February at the European Central Bank headquarters in Frankfurt, are well underway. The conference will double up as a platform for protest against “austerity measures dictated by the profiteers of the financial and economic crisis,” according to a Jan. 22 press release.

Though these preparatory meetings still gather at least a hundred of activists from all over Europe, Kim acknowledged that the movement’s lack of organisation might hinder its growth.

He recalled a mobilisation in Brussels becoming too technical and suffering from faulty translation, thus driving most of the attendees away early, though he hastened to add that the horizontal mode of operation was key to the movement’s success.

“There is the will to make this the most horizontal and the most democratic movement possible; and democracy takes time,” he said.

He justified these organisational problems as a result of careful attempts to guard against co-optation by a union or political party. The protesters believe that change will come from the people themselves and have refused to let the occasional lack of clarity impede their momentum.

“The movement has been built on a long-term basis,” a Parisian ‘indignado’ named Gary, told IPS. “We are waiting for results to come. For now, we are focused on some core issues,” such as expanding the mobilisation and fight against economic austerity in Europe.

Gary, though not one of the most active indignados, has not abandoned the movement.

“For the moment, this is the only alternative we have,” he said.

Another French activist, Zum, insisted: “to protest, to demonstrate to political leaders that society does not agree with them …is the only way to change the world.”

Both are convinced this is the main reason why the movement could go on for years, until governments take the necessary measures to dress deep social wounds.

Kim also believes that the movement’s success is derived partially from its global scope.

Still going strong in over 1000 cities around the world from the Occupiers to the Arab Spring activists, the persistence and successes of each movement seem to fuel the others.

The next issue the indignados plan to fight is the privatisation of water, at the next World Water Forum in Marseille from March 12-17.

For two years, organisers have been planning an Alternative World Water Forum, which will take place during the same week as the official meeting, just a few kilometres away. The people’s convergence plans to draw together numerous associations, experts and citizens to address the critical water issues that, Kim concluded, governments and international organisations have so far failed to solve.

By Cléo Fatoorehchi and - -
AIX-EN-PROVENCE, Nov 10 2011 (IPS)

Last Friday Benoit Miribel, President of Action Against Hunger, delivered a strong indictment of the outcome of the Group of 20 (G20) summit in the south of France: “The G20 meeting in Cannes has been a missed opportunity.”

Sylvia Meltina, a Kenyan woman, says her family can no longer afford regular meals because of rising food and fuel costs. Credit: Peter Kahare/IPS

Olivier De Schutter, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the right to food, told IPS, “The food crisis and (questions of) food price volatility were overshadowed by the Greek crisis and the Eurozone crisis.”

But “unless decisive action is taken now, vulnerable populations will grow hungrier, food markets will be increasingly unstable, and the world will remain completely unprepared for the challenge of feeding nine billion people by 2050,” he added.

G20 leaders ended the summit declaring they fully understood that “Promoting agricultural production is the key to feeding the world’s population.”

But Michael Klosson, vice president of policy and humanitarian response at Save the Children stressed to IPS that the problem is not about the quantity of food supplies but the quality.

He regrets the G20 leaders did not agreed on bolder actions, such as collectively promoting the SUN (Scaling Up Nutrition) Movement, already supported by a handful of nations and U.N. agencies since its launch in 2009.

In a nod to the increasingly vociferous movement for food justice and sovereignty, the G20’s final communiqué last Friday promised actions “in the framework of the Action Plan on Food Price Volatility and Agriculture agreed upon by our Ministers of Agriculture in June 2011.”

A key component of the Action Plan is the creation of the Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS), to reinforce transparency in agricultural markets.

Carmel Cahill, senior counsellor of the directorate for trade and agriculture at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), believes that AMIS is critically important to prevent the world from enduring food crises as devastating as those in 2008-2009 and 2010.

Indeed, “one of the major deficiencies in 2008-2009 and again in 2010 was a lack of timely or accurate information about the market situation, resulting in hasty and uncoordinated policy decisions,” Cahill told IPS.

“Some of the worst problems might have been avoided had there been better market information,” she added.

The G20 also agreed to the creation of food reserves to assist in the fight against poverty and hunger but experts believe this, too, is a largely symbolic gesture.

According to De Schutter, “the Action Plan refers to food reserves only in the context of humanitarian emergencies or as a response to humanitarian crises,” when it should be done to reduce food price volatility.

“If we buy from the poorest farmers and release the food stocks when prices go up to make food affordable to the poorest segment of the population, these food reserves can be a useful way to reduce volatility at the local level of food commodities; yet it is apparently not a step the G20 is ready to take,” he told IPS.

He believes this lack of political will in the G20 is a result of strong commercial interests, particularly in countries producing biofuels.

Back in 2008, a note released by the World Bank’s development prospects group spotlighted how biofuels were responsible for a full 75 percent of the then skyrocketing food prices.

But in spite of strong evidence that biofuels and agrofuels are “one of the major drivers of speculation on the commodities markets and one of the major reasons why we have such high pressure on land in developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa,” according to De Schutter, the G20 completely bypassed the issue.

The issue of biofuels also raises thorny questions about speculation, a practice many experts believe needs to be terminated altogether.

The G20 made some inroads here by endorsing the International Organisation of Securities Commission (IOSCO)’s recommendations about improving regulation and strengthening market infrastructure.

But De Schutter is pessimistic, believing that powerful financial actors will continue to adopt a ‘herd mentality’, mimicking each other in the realm of speculation and paving a path towards a future of fragile ‘bubbles’ on commodity markets.

According Matt Davies, head of international policy and advocacy at ATD Fourth World, a necessary step towards food security, especially for the most vulnerable populations and low income countries, requires “states to set up mechanisms which enable the participation of extremely poor people in policy making, as they possess the knowledge of what works best for the most vulnerable.”

If the G20 adopted this approach, they could move closer to the grassroots call for “people first, not finances.”

Excerpt:

By Cléo Fatoorehchi
CANNES, Nov 4 2011 (IPS)

While the Greek bailout and stimulus package dominated discussion among the Group of 20 (G20) major industrialised and emerging market economies at the high-level summit in Cannes, France, this week, the proposed financial transactions tax (FTT) received meagre attention.

Heads of the Group of 20 (G20) major economies meet at this year's summit in Cannes, France. Credit: UN Photo/Evan Schneider

Back in February, French President Nicolas Sarkozy nudged Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to prepare a report on the enourmous potential of such a tax to jump-start development in poor countries, particularly after the 2008-9 crash pushed many donor nations to slash their official development assistance (ODA) to the global south.

A ‘technical note’ from the report, released at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund spring meetings in Washington D.C. in September, claimed that the adoption of an FTT by the G20 or even the European Union could generate “substantial resources.”

According to the note, “Some modeling suggests that even a small tax of 10 bp (basis points) on equities and two bp on bonds would yield about 48 billion (dollars) on a G20-wide basis, or 9 billion (dollars) if confined to larger European economies. Some FTT proposals offer substantially larger estimates, in the 100-250 billion (dollar) range, especially if derivatives are included.”

Eyes on Europe

However, fears about potential ripple effects of massive instability in the Eurozone pushed the FTT further and further down the G20 agenda over the last few days.

Many experts were fearful that if the EU crumbled further, the global impacts, especially in developing countries, would be severe.

Alan S. Alexandroff, director of the Digital20 Project at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, told IPS that the current global economic architecture meant that any regional crisis posed grave threats to other, interdependent parts of the world.

“Since China’s major export market is Europe, it is going to be a very difficult problem for China if they cannot export because the economy in Europe is under stress,” he said, adding that India and Brazil were also vulnerable to shock waves emanating from the Eurozone.

Samuel A. Worthington, President and CEO of the U.S. umbrella organisation InterAction, told IPS, “The Greek crisis, the broader euro crisis, as well as the fiscal crisis in the U.S. have a direct negative effect on the developing world.”

“It decreases remittances; it decreases bank investments around the world, particularly with European banks in Africa; and it makes the overall prospects of global growth lower,” he added.

Strong push for financial transactions tax

Luckily, the release Thursday of Gates’ long-awaited report, entitled ‘Innovation with Impact: Financing 21st Century Development,’ shed light on alternative methods of boosting ODA, even under economic pressure, through innovative development financing schemes.

Touching on a broad range of issues, the report stressed, “well designed aid reduces poverty right now, and accelerates poor countries’ progress toward the moment when they will no longer need it.”

It outlined the proposal of a tobacco tax, an idea promoted by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and also suggested taxes on aviation and bunker fuels, which would serve the dual purpose of addressing environmental concerns about pollution and over-exploitation of natural resources, as well as generating substantial revenue.

Finally, the report called outright on the G20 governments to commit to the FTT. According to the report, even taxing financial transactions at the minimal scale of 0.001 percent would mobilise billions of dollars towards developing countries.

Various international and development NGOs warmly welcomed Gates’ support on these issues.

Luc Lamprière, Oxfam’s spokesperson at the G20, said in a statement on Thursday, “Gates’ enthusiasm for an FTT and a carbon charge on shipping and aviation should encourage champions like France, Germany, and Brazil and convince sceptics like Canada, UK and the U.S.”

But as Worthington pointed out, “unfortunately, the trend seems to be going in the opposite direction.”

While some G20 countries have already implemented their own versions of an FTT at the national level – namely South Korea, South Africa and Brazil – influential countries like France are looking for a coalition, or collective agreement on the issue. Worthington believes that “France is afraid to act in isolation” for fear of putting Paris’ markets at risk.

Sarkozy eventually closed the G20 meeting in Cannes on Friday with the announcement that ten out of the twenty countries support the implementation of the tax, though no concrete action plan was put in place.

The U.S. and the UK refused to agree to the FTT, but were convinced to mention it in the final communiqué – a significant step forward, according to Khalil Elouardighi, a relentless advocate of the tax through Coalition Plus.

With a strong coalition of countries throwing their weight behind the FTT, NGOs expect that nothing will keep it from being implemented.

Last Friday, the Leading Group on Innovative Financing and Development published a draft treaty on the FTT, complete with a blueprint for action beginning in September. The group plans to meet in Madrid on Dec. 29, at which point many hope that the leaders will be true to their word, and sign a concrete treaty on the tax.

Excerpt:

By Cléo Fatoorehchi and - -
CANNES, Nov 4 2011 (IPS)

While the 20 heads of state of the Group of 20 (G20) industrialised and emerging countries gather in southern France to deliberate on the future of the global economy – particularly the crises unfolding in the Eurozone – pockets of activists are amassing around the summit to make their voices heard.

French honour guards at the G20 Summit at the Palais des Festivals in Cannes, France. Credit: UN Photo/Evan Schneider

At a protest rally on Tuesday, John E. Ruthrauff, international advocacy director of InterAction, an umbrella organisation of close to 200 U.S.-based NGOs, expressed his doubts that the G20 would put people first.

“The G20 leaders will look at the European crisis first, and the people second,” he told IPS.

Experts like Marica Frangakis, an economist at the Nicos Poulantzas Institute at the University of Athens, believes that fiscal consolidation and debt relief for countries like Greece will likely have a negative effect on society, leading to even tougher austerity measures that will result in “high unemployment, high poverty, high inequality, and will prolong the pain of the crisis for the vast majority of people.”

The EU leaders’ decision to boost the coffers of the European financial stability facility, or financial fund, from 440 billion to one trillion euros in order to strengthen banks and provide fresh aid to struggling Greece, has been widely criticized.

Frangakis blasted the move as a “halfway measure” and called for a total restructuring of the euro architecture.

“Right now the European Central Bank acts as a bank for other banks; we need it to become a government’s bank and we need a community budget that can help member states when there is a crisis or a downturn,” she told IPS.

She also identified a lack of commitment by the banks to implement decisions made by governments.

Lidia Canha, from the Portuguese association UMAR, an organisation of women working to end gender- based and domestic violence, stressed that the prioritisation of finance capital over social welfare is detrimental to a country, since it breeds a precarious labour environment and effectively dismantles the public service infrastructure.

In a huge push against these risks, swathes of civil society are striving to inject their perspectives and demands into the G20 process.

Peter Bosshard, policy director of International Rivers, told IPS, “Civil society groups want to have access to G20 meetings so we can ensure that social justice, environmental protection and the fight against climate change remain part of the official agenda and that the deals agreed upon at these exclusive meetings don’t just benefit the richest one percent.”

Incremental efforts

French president and summit host Nicolas Sarkozy promised this week that he would prioritise stimulating employment and improving social protection mechanisms.

Sarkozy also met with heads of various NGOs and labour unions on Wednesday in an effort to include more civil society voices in the debates currently underway.

In a statement released Thursday, Samuel A. Worthington, president of InterAction, applauded the joint effort by Sarkozy and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates to drum up support for the controversial financial transactions tax (FTT), which activists have dubbed the ‘Robin Hood Tax’, as a potential fresh source of development aid for the global south.

“The G20 is in a unique position to use its leadership to not only achieve economic recovery but also to ensure that it is done in a way that is inclusive and helps the poor to improve their lives,” Worthington added.

However, the ongoing crisis in Greece suggests that even efforts to reform the G20 will likely do little to prevent future financial meltdowns.

Changing the system

Referring to the crisis in Greece and throughout the Eurozone, Mamdouh Habashi, vice president of the World Forum for Alternatives, told IPS, “The only way to save the euro is to change the system.”

He stressed that the “cosmetic” solutions agreed upon in response to the global recession in 2008 would do little to ease the cyclical problems of the financial system, adding that much deeper, structural changes were required to address the issue.

“Contradictions within the system itself are now too great for the system to adapt to,” he said.

Given that the destructive impacts of transnational capital, like poverty and inequality, are no longer relegated to the ‘third world’ but have spread also into the global North, Habashi believes that the time is ripe to foster “a new consciousness of solidarity” across borders.

According to Habashi, the dominant economic ideology of free market capitalism is unable to bring an end to the crisis, no matter the outcome of the numerous late-night meetings in Cannes.

“They will only increase the ‘financialisation’ of this world, or reform it instead of fundamentally changing it,” he concluded.

Having co-founded the Egyptian socialist party and witnessed first hand the Egyptian revolution, which successfully overthrew Hosni Mubarak’s regime in February, Habashi is convinced that systemic change is not only possible, it is necessary.

He also stressed the need to simultaneously imagine and construct a new system, even while dismantling the old one.

For this reason, he strongly advocates for social movements from the ‘Occupy’ protests in the U.S. to the ongoing demonstrations in Tahrir Square to “coordinate, exchange views and look at the system as a common enemy.”

Excerpt:

By Cléo Fatoorehchi and - -
AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France, Oct 27 2011 (IPS)

Anti-globalisation and anti-capitalist groups are gathering ahead of the G20 meeting in Cannes in the south of France next week.

Cannes will be under tight police security Oct. 31 to Nov. 4, and the People’s Forum has negotiated permission from local authorities to meet in Nice, 20 miles from Cannes. The Forum will gather countless organisations, from Attac to Oxfam France, from Greenpeace France to Action against Hunger.

With their slogan “People first, not Finance!” they are determined to generate strong mobilisation against the G20 and its policy of financial supremacy.

“With strong mobilisation, we can overthrow the strength ratio,” Valérie Brulant, member of Attac (Association for the Taxation of financial Transactions and for Citizen Action), told IPS.

Commending Spain’s indignados movement in May and the Occupy Wall Street still under way in New York, with widespread support around the world, she believes that with this momentum people around the world are eventually realising that “the (financial and economic) crisis was produced by the banks, but that people are paying the bill.”

Antoine Lupera, member of the executive committee of the French Communist Party (PCF) in Aix-en- Provence told IPS the PCF will join the People’s Forum in Nice because they share the same beliefs.

“One of our main fights is the fight for men and women’s emancipation, so we believe that the system, and especially the system that is instituted with the G20, is totally inadequate for our idea of emancipation,” he said.

“(This system) empowers a small group of people, and a small group of countries (the G20) that have the financial and economic power to basically do whatever they want with it, and whatever they want with their money – to refinance the banks, to promote the capitalist system that we live in, instead of wanting a change.”

Above all, “they are against one of our main principles,” he told IPS. “Humans should come first, and that won’t be the case with this kind of meeting.”

Brulant said that given the last G20 conclusions, this group is about communication and never about concrete action. One of the main reasons for such hypocrisy is it lacks the means to apply its decisions, and to sanction countries that do not implement them, Brulant said.

“The G20 is not only illegitimate but also harmful,” she said. It is illegitimate because while the financial, economic and social crises affect all countries around the world, “only 20 are gathering to solve the problem, and 174 others cannot say a word. This is unacceptable.”

It is harmful, she said, because “the G20 does everything to perpetuate the system and to support the financial markets, and so the dictatorship of finance. The race to short-term benefits is detrimental to people, to social rights and to environmental rights, Brulant said.

Gildas Jossec, an expert on financial regulation and lobbying transparency at AITEC (the International Organisation of Technicians Experts and Researchers, which will take part in the People’s Forum), told IPS that the bank system must focus on financing the economy. Then it would “speculate less on the financial markets…thus taking less reckless risks.”

He also supported implementation of the financial transactions tax, which could generate a considerable amount of money for development financing and the fight against climate change. But, he said, the financial lobby, which led to the economic crisis, is an obstacle.

Activists are taking heart from the new challenges arising now to such dominance. “There definitely are populations who are getting informed, conscious, politicised, and who think of the society we live in from what affects them locally,” environment expert at AITEC Maxime Combes told IPS.

“The anti-G20 mobilisation in Nice will be an important moment to show the world that we refuse their system through an international protest, but also that we have propositions, recommendations, requirements, and alternative ways already into place, all of them being presented at the People’s Forum.”

Excerpt:

When Saoul decided to take the risk of leaving Chechnya for France, he could not imagine how much trouble protection could mean once he got here.

The danger of leaving was great, balanced against the perhaps greater danger of staying. Saoul’s brother was an active combatant during the first war between Chechnya and Russia, before being imprisoned. Saoul (not his real name) followed his brother into prison, but a bribe got him out – for a while. He was captured again a few months later, and let out on condition he came back to give names.

Through those two periods in jail he was tortured repeatedly. He still carries signs of injury, and serious cognitive and memory trouble.

Leaving behind one brother in prison and another dead, Saoul left Chechnya illegally with his family and managed to reach France – a country that claims to be a champion of human rights.

He landed in France, and entered a maze. And he was among the luckier ones. He found a place at a Centre d’Accueil de Demandeurs d’Asile (CADA) reception centre for asylum seekers monitored by the association France Terre d’Asile in the south of France. Many are not that lucky, and wander from one service to another for months.

The number of asylum seekers seeking such service grew to 52,762 in 2010, according to the latest report from the Office Français de Protection des Réfugiés et Apatrides (OFPRA) – the French agency for protection of refugees and stateless people.

The Dispositif National d’Accueil (DNA, the national reception plan) provides for less than half as many places, and these are mostly for families, meaning single people are likely to live on the street.

“It is very difficult to balance supply and demand in this field,” OFPRA’s communications director told IPS. “We cannot predict the evolution of asylum seeking.”

Asylum seekers arriving in Toulon port need first to go to Nice 150 km away to secure the right to stay on in France, required before being allowed to seek asylum.

Meanwhile, most people who land have no place to sleep, no money, no way to feed their family, and no help in their struggle to deal with the traumas of their past. Only a few get financial aid.

CADA director in Toulon Virginie Morizot tells IPS financial aid under an Allocation Temporaire d’Attente (ATA) is only 10.83 euros per day. And asylum seekers struggle to fill in exhaustive and detailed forms in French as they apply for refugee status. New cost-cutting measures will mean “professionals workers are not allowed nor paid to help to fill the request.”

The government announced in July that about 400 of a total of 2,000 jobs in social departments helping refugees would be cut as of January next year.

Morizot, who is also departmental director of the association France Terre d’Asile says now charity organisations such as Secours Catholique, a member of the global Caritas network, and the Church- supported Sichem are filling in the gap to provide assistance.

Saoul failed to secure refugee status at first because the language issue and his cognitive difficulties meant he was unable to understand and answer correctly questions before an OFPRA official. He finally managed refugee status following an appeal to the Cour Nationale du Droit d’Asile (CNDA), the national court for asylum seekers. He now gets psychological support, and is proud of his children who are accomplished in school and sports.

“But the majority of the decisions made by the CNDA confirm the one of OFPRA,” the OFPRA communications director told IPS. That means a rejection of refugee status, since both underpin their decision with the same legal documents, starting with the Geneva Convention relating to the status of refugees, the 60th anniversary of which was celebrated in July.

Difficulties do not disappear once an asylum seeker succeeds in becoming a refugee. A refugee can stay ten years in France with the same civil rights as French citizens – except for the right to vote. But financial aid is progressively cut, and CADA facilities withdrawn.

Morizot tells IPS that one of their staff specialises in looking for employment and housing for refugees. Some other organisations have their own specific programmes following a European objective.

Forum-Réfugiés set up in 1982 and partially public-funded, works actively to provide employment and accommodation. Under the 2002 European Equal project, Forum-Réfugiés set up the Accelair programme, under which about 300 refugees a year are housed.

Director of Forum-Réfugiés Jean-François Ploquin acknowledges these are small numbers but says the programme is confined to Lyon region. But in this region “we are currently capable of helping in integration of refugees through employment and housing at short deadlines.”

He says their programme has helped about 5,000 refugees so far. Following a government request, Forum-Réfugiés is now negotiating with other departments to set up other support programmes.

With deforestation claiming 5.2 million hectares annually and governments seemingly incapable of agreeing on a new pact to curb climate-altering carbon emissions, it would be easy to write off the situation as hopeless.

For the 2009 planting season, CCT planted 225 trees on the Marc Antony Gomez farm in Tierras Morenas, Costa Rica. Credit:

But one group, based in Costa Rica, decided that instead of waiting for industry or governments to “fix” the problem, they would offer a way for average people around the world to sponsor trees to be grown and replanted in socially responsible ways.

“Our model is based on seed-collecting networks in communities supported by people of all ages and nationalities, men and women,” Jennifer Leigh Smith, the founder and director of Community Carbon Trees (CCT), told IPS. “Usually, work producing the trees is distributed among families in communities where we work.”

Besides helping to sequester carbon dioxide, promote biodiversity and prevent soil erosion, Smith says these projects enhance local socioeconomic development. “CCT works within communities to spread consciousness about reforestation through hands on, well-paid, socially responsible labour,” she said.

“Communities become excited about collecting seeds and understand in a renewed manner how important it is to preserve the remaining forest for future seeds,” she said. “We see people learning first hand that is better to plant the tree and tend it rather than go into the forest and cut down old growth – which is a common problem in Costa Rica as poor people are burdened with holding forest reserves even when they cannot buy shoes for their children.”

With 2011 designated the International Year of Forests, 2012 the International Year of Cooperatives, and this Jun. 5 World Environment Day, there is a nexus of renewed momentum behind local sustainable development initiatives, particularly as they relate to forests and woodlands.

“The CCT is using the initiative to spread the word out there and help us to get publicity,” Smith said.

Founded in 2000, the CCT has already planted more than 385,000 trees in Costa Rica, mostly to reforest farmland. It participates in private, community-led or corporate projects. Sponsoring a tree costs 25 dollars, which covers planting as well as transportation.

CCT is also working in partnership with the International Year of Forests, in an initiative called “Pacto por la vida” (pact for life), which promotes its work among international sponsors and local communities.

Smith stressed that besides mitigating climate change, reforestation helps replenish underground aquifers and prevent landslides in torrential rains.

According to the U.N. Environment Programme, over 1.6 billion people around the world are dependent on forests for their livelihoods.

“Creating alternative income streams is vital to preserving what rainforest remains as well as planting new stands of mixed native species for the future,” she noted.

Every year since 1972, thousands of people around the world have celebrated World Environment Day on Jun. 5, in an event created by UNEP to raise awareness about the numerous challenges humanity was and still is facing.

According to UNEP spokesperson Nick Nuttall, the challenges identified at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 – climate change, water and forests, among others – continue to be of major concern.

“Every year [World Environment Day] seems to grow bigger and bigger,” he told IPS, conveying the urgency for governments and citizens to become more aware and act to protect their natural environment.

He said UNEP has also focused on greening international events, such as the World Football Cup in Germany in 2006 and the one last year in South Africa. Achim Steiner, UNEP’s executive director, recently went to Brazil to discuss the conditions for the World Football Cup and the Olympics to be held respectively in 2014 and 2016.

UNEP’s goal is for “not only a fantastic sporting event, but also an environmentally friendly event”, Nuttall said. And while these kinds of one-off events – the World Cup, the Olympics, World Environment Day – “are not going to change the world overnight, they are part of a growing awareness among people and communities and business and governments,” he concluded.

Meanwhile, an international coalition of academics and environmental activists has launched a global campaign at the United Nations for a “Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth”.

Maude Barlow, a lead campaigner for the U.N. convention and chairperson of the Council of Canadians, a citizen’s advocacy organisation, told IPS the rights of nature are based on the notion that the natural world is a fully operating system, a community, with its own laws. It is therefore necessary for humans to construct laws that are compatible with the laws of nature.

This means promoting human and community development in a way that protects nature and promotes sustainability, said Barlow, a former U.N. Adviser on Water.

“What might it look like if we created laws to give the earth and other species the right to exist?” she asked. “If we believe that rights are inherent, existing by virtue of our creation, then they belong to all nature, not just to humans.”

By Cléo Fatoorehchi
NEW YORK, May 15 2011 (IPS)

Ninety to 95 percent of victims of clergy sexual exploitation are women, according to recent estimates by the Columbia Theological Seminary’s Rev. Pamela Cooper White, and yet very few studies have been conducted on this issue.

Valli Batchelor Credit: Courtesy of Valli Batchelor

Now, the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF), founded in 1895 and which represents more than a hundred social justice-oriented student movements from around the world, is breaking the silence with the publication of a book entitled “When Pastors and Priests Prey – Identifying, Preventing and Overcoming Clergy Sexual Abuse of Women”.

The book will be launched at the International Ecumenical Peace Convocation (IEPC), held in Kingston, Jamaica May 17 to 25. The IEPC is a gathering of church leaders who will assess the outcome of the Decade to Overcome Violence, an initiative created in 2001.

The book’s coordinator, Dr. Valli Batchelor, came to collaborate with the WSCF after the 2008 Commission on the Status of Women, where she was participating as an Islamic finance expert for the World Council of Churches, which sponsored the book.

She also runs the Journey Towards Hope Dance Project, which helps to educate and engage the public and prevent violence within communities.

Q: Why do you call clergy sexual abuse against women a “silent killer” within families and communities around the globe? A: Clergy sexual abuse of women is a violent abuse of power rather than “an affair”. Most people may recognise that it is an unacceptable abuse of power for a therapist or doctor to have sex with a patient. Yet many fail to recognise that when a clergy – who commits to spiritually nurture and guide a member of the church – takes advantage of his power and authority to have a sexual relationship with her, he is committing sexual abuse and not having an affair.

Clinical research from the Faith Trust Institute indicates that women victims are likely to remain silent, suffering severe consequences from depression to suicide.

Q: What can a woman do to protect herself? A: Women can protect themselves from sexual abuse by understanding that people with power and authority in our society can abuse that power for their own ends. Stopping abuse before it begins is the best method for self-protection. If abuse has occurred, reporting the abuse is empowering because it breaks the silence surrounding the offender who is violating the trust placed in him.

Realisation of the betrayal of trust by clergy – who is believed to be the spiritual representation of God – is devastating and survivors need support to cope. Clergy offenders often use their spiritual authority to violate women, pleading or threatening the victims that they must forgive the offender’s “sins” or risk being rejected by God for unforgiveness. This is spiritual blackmail and can trap victims into silence and suffering for years or decades.

Survivors recover best when they find someone who believes them and helps the survivor to bring the offender to justice and thus reduce the risk of the offender abusing other victims.

Q: How can people fight against such abuse? A: First, the issue needs to be faced honestly: that sexual abuse is a violent abuse of power, not a matter of “an affair” between a clergyman and a female parishioner. Second, church congregations and church organisations need to recognise that clergy are capable of sexual abuse so that the churches can devise safe practices for clergy.

The WSCF and the WCC have jointly played a role of historic significance by pooling together the knowledge, experiences and voices of survivors, advocates, theologians and others to create this book, which will hopefully begin a cultural transformation within the worldwide church.

Q: Where does the law stand on this issue? A: Criminal sexual offences committed by clergy can be prosecuted by the courts. Survivors who take on a criminal prosecution must give a police statement and be prepared to be cross-examined at a trial – and face brutal questioning from defence lawyers. The prosecutor must prove the case beyond reasonable doubt to secure a conviction.

Police are often unwilling to charge an offender unless they are confident of securing a conviction. Survivors of sexual offences by clergy are often embarrassed, trapped in confusion, guilt, shame and self-blame that most victims never make an official complaint to police. Worldwide conviction rates for all sexual assault cases are still very low.

Q: Should the church create some kind of tribunal? A: Church organisations over hundreds of years have internal processes which are not transparent. Offending clergy have been protected by their church organisations for decades which intimidate victims into silence and cover up disclosures of abuse.

Prosecutions by civil authorities are more likely to be transparent and offer a better option than church tribunals.

Excerpt:

Groups peddling the widely discredited notion that gay people can be “cured” of their sexual orientation are encountering staunch resistance to their message, even as converts insist that they are leading happier lives.

In March, 150,000 people signed an online petition to successfully demand that Apple pull an app from the “ex-gay” organisation Exodus International, which claims that “homosexual behaviour is not in God’s will or design”, in the words of Jeff Buchanan, director of the Exodus Church Association.

“We removed the Exodus International app from the App Store because it violated our developer guidelines by being offensive to large groups of people,” Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr told AFP at the time.

Exodus may be the best-known “ex-gay” organisation, but it is far from the only one.

Homosexuals Anonymous, Courage, NARTH (the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality), are PFOX (Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays) are just a few others, while countless Christian ministries share the same ideas and goals.

The United Church of Christ has allowed the ordination of gay people since the 1970s, and in 2003, the Episcopal Church consecrated the first openly gay bishop.

The problem then comes from “fundamentalist sects that take the word of the Bible absolutely literally and do not account for change, or cultural difference or the progress of time,” Carrellas said.

For a member of a fundamentalist church, if “all (he/she) hears is that ‘you’re going to Hell, God hates you, you’re going to be lonely and left, you’re going to be miserable in this life and for eternity,’ (he/she) might want to be convinced that they can change from being gay or lesbian to something else,” she said.

“However, attempts to change people on that level, attempts to create a curriculum of formulas to change people from what they are to what you want them to be, generally just doesn’t work,” she added.

Fear, shame and guilt are usually “required to convince someone that what they are feeling, what their identity is…is fundamentally wrong,” and that can lead to depression and suicide, Carrellas said.

“Anytime we tell somebody that who they are sexually is deviant, perverted, wrong, weird, and that they’re going to have a horrible life… they will probably be in worse shape than they were before the conversion.”

Her position is supported by the American Psychological Association, which has expressed concern about “ongoing efforts to mischaracterise homosexuality and promote the notion that sexual orientation can be changed and about the resurgence of sexual orientation change efforts.”

Still, there is no lack of “ex-gay” people willing to share their experiences and advocate for the “straight life”.

Buchanan, for instance, says he walked away from being gay with the help of the church, which gave him the means “to live a life that was congruent” with his faith.

Married to a woman for eight years now, he told IPS that “the transformation… does bring happiness.”

“I’m content, I’m happy with my life; I would not choose anything else, or want anything else,” he added. “I know others would say the same.”

Buchanan said 3,000 people attend the Exodus ministry each week, and 400,000 reach out to the organisation via phone, e-mail and the web every year.

Wayne Besen, executive director of the LGBT advocacy group Truth Wins Out (TWO), describes the ex-gay movement as dangerous and says his organisation conducts seminars and protests to educate people on the issue.

“I think our information helps kids that they will not go in the first place,” he told IPS.

He emphasised the importance of this awareness work since “people believe in lies, … and (especially when) these lies are being spoken by people they trust, their pastor, their priest.”

“It is a shame that they do this because they are harming a lot of people by doing so,” he added.

According to him, “the best (one) can do is change behaviour, and the significant cost is mental health; but (one is) not going to change homosexual attraction to the (other gender).”

“We can change sexually over the course of our lifetimes,” Carrellas affirmed. But “that someone’s sexual preferences … can be changed by an outside force that wishes it to change is problematic.”

Migrant domestic workers often toil under difficult and abusive conditions out of sight of the world’s eyes. “Individual migrant domestic worker have virtually no possibility to negotiate for better working conditions before moving to the country of employment,” Martin Oelz, International Labour Organization’s legal specialist in the Conditions of Work and Employment Programme told IPS.

“Being heavily dependent on the services of recruitment brokers and agencies, indebtedness due to agency fees and other migration costs, a lack of information or misleading information on the working conditions in the country of employment, and immigration arrangements that bind the workers to a specific employer, all contribute to placing migrant domestic workers in situations of vulnerability to exploitation and abuse,” Oelz explained.

Nisha Varia, senior researcher for Human Rights Watch’s women’s rights division and author of the report ‘Slow Reform: Protection of Migrant Domestic Workers in Asia and the Middle East’, enumerated the kind of abuses female migrant domestic workers can suffer. She was speaking at a panel discussion focusing on ‘Good Practices on Protections for Domestic Workers’.

These women, often prohibited from joining or forming unions by their employers, can also be verbally or sexually abused, and at times even beaten, Varia said. Also, they are often not allowed any rest or leisure time by their employers, putting them under great stress.

Opening an e-discussion on this issue sponsored by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and the European Commission-U.N. Joint Migration and Development Initiative (JMDI), Maya Gurung, a Nepalese former domestic worker in the Middle East decided to share her story in order to help other women.

“I had to take care of a big, three-storey house with five family members and many relatives who would stay there,” she said, adding, “My main duties were cleaning, washing and ironing clothes, preparing food and taking care of children from early in the morning to late at night – 5am to 1am.”

Migrant domestic workers are often isolated in private households – and not allowed to leave the house. Employers often take the migrant’s passport, creating dependency on the employer that further increases vulnerability.

Varia explained that migrant domestic workers are vulnerable due to many factors, including unfamiliarity with the local language and lack of knowledge of local laws.

There are 112 million migrant domestic workers worldwide—and the international community has only recently begun to notice them, and more importantly, the lack of effective national labour laws protecting them. In addition to “increasing public awareness about any reform” and employers and migrant workers knowledge of their rights, Varia suggests “to train the appropriate authorities on how to identify such cases and try to investigate them and follow up,” in order to better protect migrant domestic workers.

While she pointed out to IPS the importance of creating unions to strengthen a migrant domestic workers movement, more apt to protect their rights, she also stressed the difficulty to do so in places where domestic workers rights are not yet recognised.

“(Because) there has been a huge increase of the number of migrant domestic workers in the last twenty years (in the Middle East and Persian Gulf countries), it is a much newer issue to really be looking at the different human rights abuses and risks involved for domestic workers” than in Latin America, she told IPS.

The International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1990 and entered into force in 2003, does not explicitly mention domestic workers, partly because of their invisibility and the nature of their tasks.

“(Since) the tasks performed by domestic workers mirror work traditionally performed by women in their own households and families, (domestic work) is perceived as not requiring any sort of formally acquired skills or qualifications,” Oelz underlined , giving it as a reason why “domestic work continues to be undervalued and underpaid” and has not been taken into account for a long time.

Following countless discussions held between the main stakeholders, namely governments, workers and employers’ organisations, for three years as part of a preparatory process, an ILO Convention for Domestic Workers should finally be agreed on at the next ILO Conference, planned to take place June 1-17 in Geneva.

“At its 100th Session this June, the ILO Conference thus has a historic opportunity to create global standards and guidance as a timely and needed reference for on-going and future initiatives at the national level,” Oelz concluded. The Philippine’s Magna Carta, a great accomplishment?

After languishing for a decade, the implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in the Philippines has finally been signed in 2008, under the name of the Magna Carta of Women, thus underlining the solemnity of the act.

During the panel on “Good Practices”, Emmeline Verzosa, executive director of the Philippine Commission on Women, pointed out how the Magna Carta of Women asks every employer to establish a contract with the employee, guaranteeing minimum wage, day-offs, social security, etc. Agreements, protecting migrant workers, between the Philippines and the host countries have flourished too.

But according to Gina Esguerra, Secretary-General of Migrante International – an active defender of the rights and welfare of Overseas Filipinos Workers (OFWs)-, “policies and agreements help but by experience host countries tend to violate and disregard the agreement.”

In Saudi Arabia for instance, where more than 14% of the 968,000 female OFWs migrated to in 2008, “we have an agreement … that the wage of domestic workers should be US$400, … but in reality the wages sometimes even get as low as US$150, or worst (they have) no wage at all,” she told IPS, before adding that it may not be forgotten that the OFWs often experience physical and/or sexual abuses.

Though Migrante International provides information, education and training to migrant workers, and guides them to embassies or to the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration when their human rights are violated, Esguerra told IPS the genuine solution to protect them has to come from the government. “The Philippine government should have the political will to address the root causes of forced migration instead of promoting labour export,” she said.

Especially since “there are more hazards in working abroad, the jobs being given to Filipinos are what we call the 3D jobs– dirty, dangerous, difficult jobs,” she explained. Before highlighting one of the main reasons for labour migration, “if it weren’t for the desperate economic condition in the Philippines the OFWs would not risk their lives working in a country the culture, the laws they are not so familiar with.”

She went on criticising the Philippines economy, emphasising that “the Philippines is heavily OFW-remittance-dependent, thus, putting into primary consideration first OFW deployment/importation over protection and much-needed basic services.” Then bitterly concluded, “The present Aquino administration, for instance, has no clear and concrete programs for job generation, wage hikes and land reform here in the Philippines – the majority of OFWs come from the worker and farmer sectors – and (thus) continues to facilitate the deployment of OFWs en masse.”

When Malika, 21, fled her parents’ house in the U.S. state of Virginia three years ago to escape a forced marriage in Iran, she did not expect to end up homeless and living in shelters.

“When I came to New York City, I had contact with a lady who used to live in Queens,” she told IPS.

The woman promised to take care of her, but kicked her out after three weeks and kept all the money Malika had given her. “That’s how I came to be on the streets,” she told IPS in a choked-up voice.

Malika went from shelter to shelter. She stayed two and a half months at Covenant House, then spent a short time at Sylvia’s Place, before coming to the Ali Forney Centre for four months. From there, she applied to get a bed at Green Chimney, which has housed her since 2009.

Meanwhile, she also went to Callen-Lorde, a community health centre for LGBT people, which helped her with hormone treatment. As “a woman of transgender experience,” Malika is statistically more likely to become homeless and faces greater dangers than other homeless youth.

The LGBT youth community has “extraordinarily high rates of attempting to commit suicide,” he said, adding that while 29 percent of heterosexual homeless youth attempt suicide, the rate is 62 percent in the LGBT homeless community.

“Most of them have no way to support themselves other than prostitution, and that puts them at very high risk of HIV infection,” Siciliano said. “Twenty percent of the young people that come to the Ali Forney Centre for help are HIV- positive.”

Malika is one of the relatively lucky ones, since she benefits from one of the 300 beds for youth on offer in the city.

There are nearly 4,000 young people living on the streets in the Big Apple, according to a 2008 report by the Empire State Coalition of Youth and Family Services.

Despite this tiny number of shelter beds, Governor Andrew Cuomo reached an agreement on Sunday with state legislators to cut funding to the State’s Runaway and Homeless Youth Programme, as part of a plan to reduce the deficit in the 2011-2012 budget agreement.

The budget cuts, which will be voted on Thursday, are “reckless and irresponsible”, according to Siciliano.

“We need more beds and more support, [but] the support for the runaways and homeless youth shelters [would be slashed] from the current amount of 4.7 million dollars to 2.35 million dollars – and it has to be understood that in 2007 this amount was actually 6.7 million dollars,” he pointed out.

Rachel Lloyd, executive director and founder of GEMS (Girls Educational and Mentoring Services), told IPS that “Young people who were vulnerable before this law came into effect are going to be 10-fold more vulnerable upon this.”

Under the new law, GEMS would be forced to abandon some of its 13 beds. Green Chimney, a national non-profit organisation that provides care to children, fears that the law would likewise affect some of its 22 transitional living beds.

Teresa Nolan, the group’s division director of New York City programmes, explained to IPS that state funding is relatively indirect. “We don’t get funding directly from the state. It goes through the NYC Department for Youth and Community Development,” she said. But the cuts would still trickle down, she said.

Lloyd, a former homeless youth herself, recalled “sleeping on people’s couches and at the train stations.”

“Having a home, having somewhere to live, is the most basic of all your foundation to live,” she told IPS.

“It’s very easy to forget how awful it is to be homeless,” she said. “I have to remind myself sometimes how incredibly blessed I am to have somewhere to live.”

She acknowledged that homelessness is self-perpetuating, since no address and no shower hamper the ability to find a job, and no job means no way to pay rent.

The budget law is “scary for anybody who’s working with young people, and frankly for young people who are aware of what’s about to happen,” she said.

GEMS is currently working in an advocacy coalition that includes the Ali Forney Centre, Green Chimneys, The Door, Covenant House, Inwood House, Safe Space, Good Shepherd’s Chelsea Foyer and the Empire State Coalition of Runaway and Homeless Youth.

Together, they demonstrated in the state capital of Albany on Mar. 15 to convince legislators to drop the cuts, since the only result would be more young people on the streets.

“The people of New York State [need to put pressure on the governor to make him understand] that this is not something humane, it’s not something that reflects our values as a people,” Siciliano said.

“I don’t think that people want to see homeless kids turned away from the shelters and thrown into the streets,” he said, adding he is nevertheless optimistic given the high mobilisation of people who signed petitions on the website Change.org – over 20,000 people – and Care2 – almost 10,000.

“Even if they approve … the budget, I’m still going to fight to get this funding source,” he told IPS. “I’m not going to give up.”

In their 2010 book “Half the Sky”, Pulitzer Prize-winners Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn write about a disturbing but not uncommon problem in Southern Africa – male teachers who trade good grades for sex with students.

There’s a word for this – “sextortion”.

The main characteristic of sextortion cases is that they involve a perpetrator in a position of influence or authority, Joan Winship, executive director of the International Association of Women Judges (IAWJ), told IPS.

This includes teachers, but also policemen, priests or employers, for example.

“There is (also) an element of quid pro quo, where, if you agree to have sex, then I will be able to give you a promotion, or a raise, or your visa, or I will not give you a traffic ticket. So there is an element of exchange there, which can be either explicit or implicit,” she explained.

These elements of exchange and power imply consent from the victim, and “that makes it a challenge (to prosecute),” said Winship. “It’s part of the problem why it hasn’t been defined, and this is what we’re trying to do.”

With the annual meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women taking place this week in New York, the IAWJ is using the opportunity to shed light on sextortion.

Sextortion is a widespread phenomenon found in all countries of the world. But since it is mostly unreported, impunity is common for perpetrators.

It is with the goal of ending this impunity that IAWJ launched a programme entitled “Stopping the Abuse of Power for Purposes of Sexual Exploitation: Naming, Shaming, and Ending Sextortion” in March 2009 in The Hague.

Aided by the government of the Netherlands through its MDG3 Fund, the programme pulls together three of IAWJ’s partners from Tanzania, the Philippines, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The concrete outcome of this initiative will be the creation of a toolkit by June 2011, which will provide judges with a range of current laws that can be applied to cases of sextortion.

As Hon. Teresita de Castro, from the Supreme Court of the Philippines, highlighted during a panel on the issue this week, when people understand that sextortion is a crime, then justice can be done.

Victims of sextortion also need to see it as a crime and overcome their fear of speaking out, even though “when they do come forward, there are other obstacles (for prosecution),” said Nancy Hendry, IAWJ senior legal advisor.

“She or he stands alone not only against the individual defendant, but also against the entire institution that the defendant represents – and historically, the community that has invested its trust in the defendant,” Anne Goldstein, IAWJ human rights education director, told IPS.

IAWJ is not advocating for a new legal framework on this issue, either at the country or international level. “The problem is not an absence of law, the problem is the absence of will to enforce [existing] laws,” Goldstein said.

IAWJ considers sextortion “a form of corruption”, where it is not money but sex that is at stake. But while reparations can be made for financial corruption, sextortion brings psychological and physical damage, and overall is much more dangerous, Hon. de Castro underlined.

IAWJ is lobbying to have existing anti-corruption laws used to prosecute sextortion perpetrators. Goldstein told IPS their purpose is to “draw together in one place both the anti-Gender Based Violence laws and the anti-corruption laws that are generally looked at separately but – IAWJ believes – need to be integrated.”

“A successful strategy against sextortion would mainstream anti-corruption efforts into gender – and vice versa,” she said. And for Winship to conclude: “we want to change the thinking, that the currency does not have to be only money; the currency can be asking for sex.”

By Cléo Fatoorehchi
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 23 2011 (IPS)

The two-week Commission on the Status of Women at United Nations headquarters draws together a wide array of civil society leaders as well as policy-makers and U.N. development experts to compare notes on the many facets of women’s empowerment.

Joan Winship Credit: Courtesy of IAWJ

Joan Winship is the executive director of the International Association of Women Judges (IAWJ), a non-profit group founded two decades ago. With more than 4,000 members hailing from 90 countries, IAWJ has designed and implemented numerous programmes to empower women judges – and through them, the societies in which they live.

With nearly 10 years at the helm of IAWJ, Winship has a long and distinguished career in the fields of human rights, rule of law, and international issues. She spoke to IPS about gender bias in the courts and the new U.N. Women agency.

Q: What’s the importance of the judicial element in women’s situations? A: You can have all the advocacy and grassroots movements, and the encouraging of legislation on issues of violence and discrimination against women. But once you get the law passed, it’s not going to be effective and impact women unless it is both implemented and upheld. And so it is ultimately the courts that should be the ones to make sure that the law is implemented and women get equal justice in a society.

Q: What real successes in women’s rights have you seen since the creation of IAWJ? A: Over the course of the 20 years we’ve been in existence, we have focused much of our work to create more opportunity for access to justice for women. Through our members and through the associations that they form within their own countries, we do training with men and women judges to make sure that they are issuing decisions in [accord] with international conventions on human rights, CEDAW [the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women], and regional instruments like the African Charter or other such agreements.

What we try to do is not only the training but then follow up by collecting case decisions where magistrates and judges are actually using the international human rights legal tools, [and] issuing decisions that will protect a woman in an inheritance case, for a property rights case, for divorce, and custody case for her children.

The other thing that judges have had a role in doing is identifying where there are gaps in legal and judicial systems. Many of our members [lobby] to see that domestic violence legislation is passed, that federal offenses acts are passed, that such things as family courts or juvenile courts are established where there haven’t been any. So we have seen considerable progress, albeit there is still much more to do.

Q: Could you give an example of your work? A: The IAWJ is just completing a programme in partnership with the Tanzanian Women Judges Association, and the community-based organisation called the Society for Women and AIDS in Africa. This project was called Jurisprudence on the Ground.

It really came out of a presentation at the IAWJ made on a panel at the Commission on the Status of Women meeting in 2007, when we were talking of how women judges were identifying the links between HIV/AIDS and the issues of discrimination and violence against women.

The project brought together the women judges in Tanzania with the community-based leaders. Together they created a discussion for both sides, so that the community-based leaders could understand better what rights women have, what information they could pass on to the members of their community, on such issues as how to file a case, why she should write a will, how to file a complaint if she does not feel she was fairly treated by court personnel, other issues like that.

In return, the community women shared with the women judges what they saw as barriers and obstacles that women faced when they tried to go to court. Together they agreed on what training community leaders needed to understand these issues, the judges developed and implemented this training programme and then the community leaders conducted trainings throughout their network, so that they could ultimately reach people at the village and ward levels. Together they produced brochures in Swahili that have been distributed in villages and wards in different parts of Tanzania.

Q: Do you think the new U.N. Women is a positive step for women’s rights? A: We have worked with and received funding from the U.N. Trust Fund against Violence against Women through UNIFEM, and we have been a participant in the CSW and other meetings, so we have been active in different entities that have come together to form U.N. Women.

We think that having one entity is a very positive step, rather than having the roles and responsibilities divided in different parts of the U.N. U.N. Women should certainly heighten both the effectiveness and the opportunity for an agency like the U.N. Women to bring gender issues and programmes more effectively throughout the U.N. system.

Q: How could you define the effectiveness of the CSW? A: Each year the CSW brings issues to the fore that wouldn’t be there otherwise. Certainly the role both of governments and non-governments organisations are key to keeping that gender as an issue out-front at the U.N. It’s always our hope that the CSW makes a major impact on programmes and issues that U.N. faces and to which the U.N. should respond.

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By Cléo Fatoorehchi
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 1 2011 (IPS)

Working with grassroots organisations is the only viable way to genuinely help people, according Yifat Susskind, the newly appointed Executive Director of the New York-based women’s organisation MADRE.

Yifat Susskind. Credit: Courtesy of MADRE

Susskind, born in Israel, became a women’s activist in the Israeli Women’s Peace Movement – witnessing first-hand the important role women play in bringing peace to their societies.

We “build long-term relationships with women’s organisations, and by doing that, build the long-term viability of the global women’s movement,” Susskind told IPS.

Excerpts of the interview follow:

Q: How do you face unexpected disasters, like the earthquake in Haiti? A: MADRE actually has been working in Haiti since 1994. Part of the reason why our work after the earthquake was so effective and so strong, is that we were not just flying into a crisis… starting to build something from nothing – we were able to respond when the earthquake happened the way you respond to a friend that is having a crisis.

These were women that we worked with for many years and we had ongoing progress with them, and so we were able to activate those networks that we’d built over many years and respond immediately and very effectively considering the size of our organisation, which is small.

Our intention is to continue to work in Haiti for many more years. So we tend to not just jump from one crisis to another, we build long-term relationships with women’s organisations, and by doing that, build the long-term viability of the global women’s movement.

Q: How exactly do you help your partner organisations? A: We do a combination of things. One of the things that we do is that we try to raise money, but that’s only one part of our programme. What we do is, work with community-based women to build the programme that they want to have. And we do that because we recognise that women at the grassroots level have a kind of expertise and a first-hand understanding of the crisis that they face. Outside experts don’t have that knowledge.

Not only do women have that understanding of the situation they are in, they also understand very well what they need to change that situation. It’s not that they don’t know, it’s that they don’t have the power to make that happen. That means that they don’t have the money, or they don’t have the training, or maybe they never were sent to school, so they don’t know how to read. They have a lot of obstacles to accessing policy-makers, accessing media, accessing police.

One of the things that we are doing for example is advocating to make sure that there is a seat at the table for grassroots women to represent their own issues in the community policy-making arena. For example in Haiti, we made sure, and this was a very hard battle.

Q: What is MADRE’s source of income? A: The majority is from small foundations. But what’s more interesting I think about MADRE… is that a very large proportion of our income is not from grants. That is unusual for an international organisation like MADRE, as the most important part of our funding comes not actually from foundations, but from individuals. That is, mostly women but also men, in the USA and around the world, who see what we are doing and understand the power of what MADRE’s work is, and who send money – sometimes it’s a little bit of money, 10 dollars a month, 50 dollars a year, and sometimes more. But really that’s the most valuable part of our income. It’s the part that comes from individuals who see themselves as part of MADRE and part of the social movements that we are supporting.

Q: What do you think of the creation of the new U.N. Women? A: I think the U.N. Women is a good idea. We were happy to see the agency created. The question that everyone has right now is whether U.N. Women is going to be just a shell, that governments can point to to say that they address the problem, or whether it is going to actually have the capacity to address the problem. And having the capacity to address the problem depends first of all on funding.

I’m sure you know that right now the budget for UN Women is about 500 million dollars, and that they haven’t even been able to meet those pledges.

Meanwhile the World Bank is estimating that it will take, I think the number is 83 billion dollars, to meet the MDG3 [Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women] target, which is only one part of what needs to happen to promote gender equality in the world.

The disparity between the resources that everyone knows are needed, and the resources the governments are willing to commit, is very very great. And I think it’s a reflection of the fact that there is not a lot of political will on the part of governments to address gender inequality and women’s human rights. So it will continue to be a fight. We have one victory, they have agreed to create the agency, that’s good. But it’s going to be an ongoing battle to get the resources that are needed.

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By Cléo Fatoorehchi
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 22 2010 (IPS)

This past September, world leaders meeting at the United Nations vowed to spend $40 billion over the next five years to save the lives of more than 16 million women and children dying of deadly diseases or lack of medical care, particularly during and after pregnancy.

Dr. Marie-Paule Kieny Credit:

Known as the Global Strategy for Women’s and Children’s Health, it involves commitments from 35 governments, 15 charitable institutions, seven U.N. agencies, 13 private corporations and more than 50 non- governmental organisations (NGOs).

So how to track who is giving, and whether the money is getting real results?

On Dec. 16, the U.N. launched a new Commission on Information and Accountability for Women’s and Children’s Health, tasked with ensuring transparency and effectiveness in aid programmes. Its work includes identifying new information technologies to promote awareness in low- and middle-income countries of the available resources.

The commission is co-chaired by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete. As vice co-chairs, Margaret Chan, the director-general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), and Hamadoun I. Touré, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), bring technical expertise to the commission.

Dr. Marie-Paule Kieny, a specialist in vaccines and the WHO’s new assistant director-general for innovation, information, evidence and research, spoke with IPS about the commission’s mandate and how it can support the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), an ambitious set of anti-poverty objectives that include reducing by two-thirds the mortality rate of children under the age of five, and slashing maternal mortality rates by three-quarters.

Q: Do you think a lack of accountability has impeded greater success for the MDGs, and is a reason why the international community may not achieve them by 2015, as was hoped for in 2000? A: While difficulties to reach the MDGs are multiple and multifaceted, we expect that the framework for global reporting, oversight and accountability on women’s and children’s health proposed by the commission will help countries to achieve the MDGs.

Every year, still around eight million young children die of preventable causes and more than 350,000 women die from preventable complications related to pregnancy and childbirth. The absence of birth and death registration systems in low- and middle-income countries, and the resulting weakness of vital statistics on births, deaths and causes of death, has hampered efforts to build a reliable evidence base for improving women’s and children’s health and measuring progress towards the health-related MDGs.

If it is known where and why women and children are dying, resources can be targeted to where they are needed most.

Q: Will the new commission push donors to keep their promise of 40 billion dollars? A: The U.N. Secretary-General’s Global Strategy for Women’s and Children’s Health, launched during the U.N. summit on the Millennium Development Goals in September 2010, sets out how we can work together to save women and children by making available cost-effective, evidence-based interventions and services for every woman and every child and by increasing the investment in women’s and children’s health.

Over $40 billion has been committed to improving women’s and children’s health over the next five years. This commitment comes not only from governments, but also from the private sector and civil society. It will integrate service delivery and funding platforms, involve a wide range of stakeholders, and promote innovation and research. Countries and partners called for greater accountability to ensure newly pledged resources achieve the expected results.

The accountability framework to be developed by the commission will bring greater transparency to the flow of resources. This transparency will most certainly help in ensuring that promises are kept.

Q: Would the commission, or any other U.N. body, take sanctions against countries if they do not keep their promises? A: The accountability framework to be developed by the commission will allow expenditures to be tracked and linked to the results of programmes. The Global Strategy asks that commitments made as part of the strategy be tracked every two years. The recommendations of the commission are not legally binding and not linked to a sanction scheme.

Q: After the release of its first report in May 2011, what’s next for the commission? A: The commission has a very focused agenda and will be time-limited. The commission will produce an accountability framework to ensure that available resources and results are identified, recognised and reported on and develop a plan of action for taking its recommendations forward.

A consultation on the accountability framework will be held during the World Health Assembly in May 2011. A report on the outcome of the commission and subsequent progress will be provided to the G8 Summit taking place in Deauville, France in June 2011 and the final report will be presented at the U.N. General Assembly in New York in September 2011.

Q: What can the international community expect from the first meeting of the commission at the end of January? A: The first meeting and launch of the commission is scheduled for Jan. 26, 2011. The main objectives of this meeting include the agreement on the scope of the accountability framework and the development of a work plan.

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By Cléo Fatoorehchi
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 15 2010 (IPS)

At the start of this month, the U.S. Senate unanimously adopted the ‘International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act’. Women’s rights groups are now urging the Congress’s lower chamber to pass it before adjourning at the end of the year.

Jennifer Redner Credit: Courtesy of IWHC

Jennifer Redner, a consultant to the International Women’s Health Coalition on U.S. foreign policy issues related to the health and rights of women and girls, explained that the act is an opportunity to shed light on the worldwide plague of child marriage, which undermines both efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the effectiveness of U.S. development programmes abroad.

For example, in many developing countries, the leading causes of death for teenage girls are complications related to pregnancy and childbirth. For girls married at age 14 and younger, their chance of dying in pregnancy or childbirth is five times greater than for those aged 20-24.

Marriage can also put girls at higher risk for contracting HIV/AIDS. A study of girls aged 15 to 19 in Kisumu, Kenya found that nearly 33 percent of married girls were HIV- positive, compared to 22.3 percent of their sexually active, unmarried peers.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: How does child marriage affect girls’ futures? A: Whether it occurs in developed or developing countries, child marriage undermines the health and human rights of girls. Worldwide, more than 60 million girls between the ages of 20 and 24 were married before the age of 18 – often at the encouragement of their parents and often to much older men – with no say in the decision.

Child marriage can often lead to death during pregnancy and childbirth, and young brides also are more likely to experience gender-based violence, and are highly vulnerable to sexually transmitted infections, including HIV. Every girl deserves a choice and the chance to chart the course of her life, and this legislation will help make this a reality for girls worldwide.

Q: How can the United States enforce the act in other countries? A: The International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act has several key pieces that together will provide a range of tools and support for addressing the issue of early/forced marriage.

Through its Human Rights Report, the State Department will report on the practice in countries where the practice is prevalent. This will send a signal to country governments that the U.S. considers this practice to be a human rights violation.

Currently, the U.S. invests billions of dollars in foreign assistance programmes, such as health, education, and poverty alleviation – much of which is administered through USAID. In areas where the practice is prevalent, implementation of the legislation will ensure that the issue of child marriage is integrated into current U.S. programmes.

Currently, the U.S., primarily through USAID, supports some programmes aimed at working with communities to address this issue and prevent more girls from being married before they are physically or emotionally ready. Yet, there is no overarching strategy or action plan to address the issue in a comprehensive way. Therefore, a critical part of the legislation is that it calls for the White House to develop a strategy to end this practice.

Q: Some governments have adopted laws in recent years to raise the minimum age of marriage to 18. How effective are such progressive laws? A: Countries that have a minimum age at marriage and are looking to enforce this law must work with communities to find lasting solutions. Working with fathers, mothers, and community leaders is critical to end child marriage and change the perceptions and value placed on girls. Raising the minimum age at marriage is important, but it is definitely not the only piece that is needed to succeed in these efforts.

Q: Child marriages seem difficult to stop because they are part of the private sphere, and because of the burden of tradition. A: Early and forced marriages are considered to be a form of violence against women. The idea that violence against women is also part of the private sphere, and therefore should not be broached, is an argument we have heard before.

We believe in the right of every woman and girl to a healthy and just life, and when violence of any kind is occurring we as an international community have the responsibility to respond by working with communities to transform norms and behaviour that implicitly or explicitly condone these human rights violations.

Many families see girls as an economic burden, some see no value in girls compared to a boy. Some are so concerned their daughter might get pregnant before marriage they see early marriage as a safe haven, when in fact, the opposite is the case. Changing these perceptions and myths requires education, including comprehensive sexuality education programmes that stress human rights and gender equality, including the right to refuse marriage. So education in its many forms is necessary, as is building up the economic and social assets of girls so they have alternatives to marriage available to them.

Our partners in Asia, Africa and Latin America are working with local communities to help prevent or eliminate early and forced marriage.

In Cameroun and Nigeria, for example, IWHC’s partners are creating incentives and promoting campaigns for the elimination of child marriage among community leaders and organisations. These local leaders stress the benefits to girls’ health and human rights, as well as the health of entire communities. Through education and awareness, local communities are ending the harmful practice; they recognise that child marriage inhibits a girl’s ability to pass safely into marriage and adulthood.

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By Cléo Fatoorehchi
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 8 2010 (IPS)

In countries around the world, small farmers are trapped in a vicious circle – hard-pressed governments don’t invest enough money in local agriculture, and local producers find themselves driven off their lands and into urban slums, where they sink even deeper into poverty.

Olivier De Schutter, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Credit: UN Photo/Jean-Marc Ferré

This is doing nothing to ease the problem of global malnutrition; worldwide, 925 million people continue to suffer from chronic hunger, according to the latest figures released in September by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

Olivier de Schutter, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, says the most sustainable solution is to increase agricultural investments in developing countries, thereby raising farmers’ incomes and bringing greater stability to the sector.

De Schutter, who is independent from any government or organisation, was appointed in May 2008 by the U.N. Human Rights Council based in Geneva. Since then, he has visited Nicaragua, Guatemala, Brazil, Benin and Syria.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: How important is agriculture in the economies of developing countries? A: A number of developing countries rely too heavily on a narrow range of raw commodities, such as cotton, coffee, tea, tobacco or sugar. This makes them very vulnerable to price changes for these commodities, and it also means that they have a tendency to overinvest in these export crops, and to under-invest in producing for local consumption.

That’s the case for almost all Sub-Saharan African countries. I therefore encourage these countries to do two things: First, to reinvest in domestic agriculture to feed themselves, and be less vulnerable in the future to price increases for their food security. Second, to diversify their economies, in order to develop a secondary (industry) and tertiary (services) sector that can absorb the surplus labour and diminish the dependency on a limited range of export crops for their revenues.

Q: Will increased agricultural productivity bolster the economies of some of the poorest countries in Africa and Asia? A: Increases in agricultural productivity can be key if these increases benefit small farmers, who are the poorest – 75 percent of global poverty is still in the rural areas. Better incomes for these rural poor means that they will buy more from local producers and service providers, with important multiplier effects on the local rural economies and also for the benefit of the manufacturing and services sectors in the country concerned.

Q: What kind of investments do you recommend? A: Both public and private investments are needed. States simply do not have the budget required, many are cash- strapped. But I would emphasise two points.

Certain investments in public goods probably need to be done by the state, because there is no – or only a weak – incentive for the private sector to step in. For instance, states should develop extension services, rural infrastructures and agricultural research. They should encourage farmer field schools and support the organisation of farmers in cooperatives.

As far as investment from the private sector is concerned, it is important and can complement public investment. But it should not take the form of large-scale acquisitions or leases or land, which can cause tremendous social and political disruption and are a step backwards in improving access to land for the poorest farmers, who are often poor in part because they have too little land to cultivate.

So what is the alternative? I believe certain forms of contract farming can provide important benefits to the farmers, allowing them to be supported by investments without depriving them of access to their land. At best, in such a scheme, the buyer has a reliable source of supply, the farmers have a reliable buyer for their crops, and the land rights are left untouched.

Q: How much, exactly, does agriculture need? And how much is already invested? What is the shortfall? A: It is estimated that, in order to relaunch agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa – and to make up for 30 years of neglect – between $35 and $45 billion per year will be needed over a period of five years (2010-2015). That’s more than has been promised to date, and in fact, very little of the money that has been promised has been in fact delivered.

Q: What are some solutions to this lack of accountability? A: The involvement of national parliaments and civil society organisations, including farmers’ organisations, can be very important to ensure that governments will make decisions in the areas of food and agriculture that are well informed, based on an adequate understanding of the needs of the poorest.

I recommend the adoption of strategies that are developed in participatory settings, and through which governments set benchmarks for themselves within a specified timeframe, and allocate responsibilities across various departments for the adoption of the measures required to achieve these targets. This increases the accountability of the government, since it will have to justify not taking action and explain its failure to comply with the goals it has set for itself.

Q: Is food likely to be used as a weapon of war? A: It can. Interrupting the transport of food aid to war- torn zones under the pretext that this can support guerilla troops in those zones, starving a population to punish it for being hostile to the central government, or destroying crops and thus depriving a population from its ability to feed itself, are all serious human rights violations — in some cases, they may constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity.

What, however, is more frequent, is the use of food as a political tool – to reward your partisans while punishing those who oppose you. It is this, for instance, that Human Rights Watch has alleged in a recent report on the use of aid money in an Eastern African country, but that is not an isolated example. It is precisely against this kind of abuse that the right to food, with its requirements of non- discrimination and accountability, should guard against.

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By Cléo Fatoorehchi
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 3 2010 (IPS)

For two decades, women around the world have marked “Sixteen Days of Activism Against Gender Violence”, which fall between the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women on Nov. 25 and International Human Rights Day on Dec. 10.

Radhika Balakrishnan Credit: Courtesy of CWGL

From Argentina to Ghana, and Japan to Georgia, this year, women’s groups worldwide are focusing on the linkages between militarism and violence against women.

For example, the incidence of rape in conflict areas has only increased in the past few decades, from 200,000 rapes in Rwanda in the early 1990s to over 250,000 in the Democratic Republic of Congo since 2003. According to the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), one out of three women has been raped, coerced into sex, beaten, or otherwise abused in her lifetime.

IPS correspondent Cléo Fatoorehchi spoke with the executive director of the Centre for Women’s Global Leadership (CWGL), Radhika Balakrishnan, who is also a gender and women’s studies professor at Rutgers University in the United States.

Q: Regarding civilian women raped by armed forces, do you think that increasing the number of women in armed forces could have a positive impact? A: I think stopping rape is to stop the violence that the military is based in. So many of the women in the military have also been raped, so our advocating for increasing the number of women in the military might actually increase the number of women being raped. I think [the important thing] is to have a real education campaign amongst the men in the military about the impact of violence and the militaristic culture.

Q: Nevertheless, many argue that more women in peacekeeping and armed forces is the best solution. A: No, I don’t think it would be. I think we should have more women in peacekeeping, that is not a bad idea, but I don’t think having women there is going to stop violence. Actually, it depends on what kind of power they have, what kind of role they have, what the reason is for being there. If the reason for being there is to work with women’s organisations, to try to make sure that there is attention brought to this, yes, but just having de facto women there doesn’t mean it is going to change.

And I think there needs to be a reconstructive effort to do education on the impact of militarism on violence, and to talk to peacekeeping forces and educate them on what it means to be there, and also so they can expose the level of violence against women. One of the things our campaign is trying to do is to really bring attention to how much violence actually takes place. And very few people actually talk about it.

Q: When you speak about education, what structures do you refer to? A: I think everywhere. One of the problems with militarism is that it is a violent culture that is perpetuated, so we need to oppose militarism in the first place, because it is that culture that creates violence, but we also need to really bring much more attention to the issues of violence. I think it has to be in the school system, I think we need to really bring it out at a very local level.

Q: What do you think about quota systems, both in the economic and political spheres? A: In India, there is a policy system in Parliament. On one level it works, but on the other level, it depends on how trained women are to participate politically, and not just sort of bring women for the sake of having more numbers. But there is a lot of education, training and empowerment, so that they can hold those political places, and have a voice and power, so that they can reinforce policies.

Just because women are in politics doesn’t mean that they are going to do the right thing, they have to be the right women in politics, with the right ideas or education on where to go.

Q: What do you expect from the 55th session of the Commission on the Status of Women, taking place next February? A: It is hard to say. The focus is on science, technology and education, and we are going to be very involved. One of the issues that we are looking at is the new agency, U.N. Women, and trying to really talk to that agency and influence what kind of issues they are going to work on. We want them to have a very strong part of U.N. Women to look at economic policy overall, and so that’s one of the things we are going to be advocating for this session.

It is not just women being economically independent, but for women to be able to talk about economic policy. Not individual women, but that we can talk about macro policy, monetary and fiscal policy, the IMF [International Monetary Fund], we can talk about all the current international economic policies, which women are often left out of.

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