By David Lewis
LONDON, Apr 22 2020 (IPS)

The implications and consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic are playing out before us. Much of the news coverage of the to date in both the Global North and the Global South has understandably focused on the horrifying impact of the disease on urban communities, where it is clearly hitting people, and economies, hardest.

David Lewis

We should not be in any doubt that rural livelihoods are being and will continue to be severely affected. The chief executive of US NGO Catholic Relief Services (CRS) is today reported as saying ‘Lockdowns are hampering people from planting and selling crops, working as day labourer and selling products, among other problems. That means less income for desperately hungry people to buy food and less food available, at higher prices.’

The immediate response challenge is to provide humanitarian support to those people most at risk, drawing on and adapting existing social protection systems as much as possible. This needs to be a cooperative effort in which governments, non-governmental organisations, inter-governmental agencies and business work together with local communities to ensure an effective, rapid response. Educating people about how the disease spreads is also key. These effortswill need to be locally owned as far as possible. BRAC’s approach in Bangladesh is one impressive model that can be adapted elsewhere.

Following from this, we also need to start thinking as soon as possible about creating more resilient forms of social protection in rural areas by ‘building back better’. These improvements will need to be based on localism and build upon – and strengthen – the decentralised structures that exist in many countries but which remain underdeveloped.

The coronavirus may have been indiscriminate in the way it has infected people from prime ministers to farm labourers, but in reality it has highlighted problems of social inequality, with the poorest people disproportionately affected as a result of weaker health, higher risk exposure and exclusion from services.

The Covid-19 crisis also raises a whole series of higher order challenges around environment, food systems and climate change that must now be addressed. The issue of ‘food sovereignty’ highlighted by movements such as Via Campesina will need to be placed front and centre in the reassessment of how we can create more sustainable and equitablefarming systems.

The production and consumption pressures created by human beings on the natural environment – in the form of deforestation, habitat loss, declining biodiversity, the carbon emissions contributing to climate change – are now there for all to see.

The new priority is to address these environmental pressures more urgentlysince they contribute opportunities for ‘spillover events’ – the spread of zoonotic diseases like coronavirus which cross natural barriers from animals to humans.

Epidemiological studies point to the role of human encroachment into wildlife habitats, hunting and wild animal trades as factors that increase the risk of this, while others also draw attention to the risks contributed by increased levels of factory farming.

One thing that’s certain is the need for multidisciplinary approaches to understanding and managing these risks, such as anthropologists, epidemiologistsan veterinary scientists. One example is Høg et al.’s (2019) researchon understanding perceptions of risk in Bangladesh’s poultry value chains, which points to contradictions in how people think about and manage risk that has important implications for all of us.

The crisis offers an important opportunity to rethink and restructure policy, practice and research if we can take it.

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By David Lewis
LONDON, Apr 17 2020 (IPS)

Contagion is a 2011 film by US director Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brockovich, Traffic, Che) that has proved very popular viewing during the first few weeks of the Coronavirus crisis. Set in a fictional global pandemic – modelled on the outbreak of a bat-borne Nipah virus identified in 1999 that killed around 100 people in Malaysia – the film is a tightly-written topical drama with a great castthat includes Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard and Jennifer Ehle.

David Lewis

When it was originally released, Contagion drew praise for the unusual efforts made by its writers and director to ‘get the science right’. More recently, with the filmmade available on Netflix and shown on ITV, it has attracted further attention for its uncanny parallels with the current crisis.

We argued in our book Popular Representations of Development: Insights from Novels, Films,Television and Social Media, co-edited with Dennis Rodgers and Michael Woolcock, that popular culture provides useful insights into social change and may offer social scientists representations of social reality that can be productive.

I enjoyed the film. It’s well-made and prescient, but perhaps not engaging enough that I’d watch it again. I learned things from it – that ‘social distancing’ has a history, and appreciated the ‘explainer’ that told me what is meant by the ‘R-nought’ of a virus. But what mostly struck me after watching Contagion was how old-fashioned the world it portrayed felt today, and how different the world seemsnow, despite the film being released less than a decade ago.

The movie depicts a post-Cold War international order that is still largely intact. The Global North is in charge, working with the World Health Organization (WHO) office in Geneva, to fight the virus and solve the crisis. US authorities and scientistsare at the forefront of international efforts,in the form of the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention.If they can’t solve the problem, it seems no one can. Villagers in Hong Kong have to kidnap and hold a WHO scientist hostage to ensure they get access to the vaccine.

Today’s world looks different. Countries like China, Singapore and South Korea have deployed their own scientific expertise, mobilised their publics and adapted governance arrangementsin the face of the pandemic – in apparently effective ways. By comparison, the responses ofBritain, US, Italy and Spain have appeared disorganised and fragile. President Trump has suspended WHO funding.

UNDP’s 2013 report The Rise of the South: Human Progress In a Diverse World drew attention to the changing balance of global power, where it was no longer useful to understand ‘development’ throughits traditional framing as the Global North trying to influence the Global South. ‘Increasingly the North needs the South’, the report pointed out.The coronavirus crisis has made this decentred, multipolar world of even more apparent and highlights the urgency with which all countries need to cooperate, share ideas, and learn from each other in ways that transcend the old binaries.

The Covid-19 crisis has dramatically highlighted the extent of inequality and poverty within and between countries that has been allowed to increase under neoliberalism. It also shows us the catastrophic consequences of the extreme pressures that we have placed on the natural environment through our unsustainable food systems and consumption practices.

The world is more interconnected, and many commentators on the current crisis emphasise the need for multilateral action. Recent trends towards populist isolation and protectionism have not only made international cooperation to deal effectively with borderless pandemics more difficult, but have also led to an increased questioning of the value of science, the austerity driven decline of public research capacity, and the rise of a populist distrust in experts.‘One thrill of the movie is its belief in solution-driven competence’, wrote Wesley Morris in the The New York Times, highlighting another way in which the movie highlights how far things have changed.

The crisis may, as some have claimed, reinforce the trend towards isolationism and a retreat from globalization. Yet the coronavirusresponse has also promoted a resurgence of community solidarity, volunteering and mutual support. The challenge now is to press national governments into forms of international cooperation that can support this new localism and build a better future.

There are some who see the chance for the sort of reconfiguration of priorities and institutions that came in Britain after World War 2, with a new progressive domestic role for state intervention and an appetite for rebuilding global institutions. As UN Secretary General António Guterres has said: ‘we must act together to slow the spread of the virus and look after each other.This is a time for prudence, not panic. Science, not stigma. Facts, not fear.’

Contagion is a film that entertains, informs and helps to bring these urgent new priorities into even sharper focus.

This story was first published on the London School of Economics (LSE) blog.

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Karachi's slums interfere with planning. Credit: Muhammad Arshad/IPS

By Josefina Stubbs and David Lewis
SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic and LONDON, Nov 17 2016 (IPS)

As the dust has settled on Habitat III and the summit in Quito, Ecuador, we now have a clear vision and a concrete road map for how to transform our cities into inclusive, safer and more productive environments. The New Urban Agenda comes at a propitious time. Urbanization is growing at a fast pace, particularly in developing countries, where the urban population is expected to double by 2050. In South Asia alone, the urban population grew by 130 million between 2001 and 2011, according to recent World Bank study. Another 250 million are expected to join them by 2030.

A woman at a public water tank in a Bangalore slum. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

But to lead to lasting change and prosperity for all, investments in cities must come hand in hand with massive transformation of rural areas to bring them up to par, if not to make them more attractive than cities. The exponential growth of cities is by and large the result of a growing divide between urban and rural realities, where the endemic lack of basic services and jobs drive rural people away from their rural communities and into cities. In the rush to engage with the challenges of urbanization we cannot afford to lose sight of the rural.

Rural communities are no longer isolated from the rest of the world. Young people all have smartphones with an Internet connection. They know that there are places that offer better services, better jobs and a better life than the one they can hope for back home.

As young women and men leave rural areas in large numbers, they leave the very communities that they should be strengthening and shaping, abandoning their friends, families and culture. They migrate to larger cities in search of work and of a better future, but without formal education or skills, many are confined to the fringes of the society to which they aspire. The exodus of young people threatens the fabric of rural societies and exacerbates the problems the New Urban Agenda is designed to tackle: precarious and insalubrious housing, joblessness, insecurity and overpopulation.

Kisenyi slum, in Uganda’s capital Kampala is believed to be home to a large portion of the country’s almost 12,000 Somali immigrants. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

People migrate when their choices at home are limited. By investing in people’s skills and knowledge, rural business development, technical assistance and by providing financial support, connectivity, quality roads, health services, electricity and connectivity, we can widen people’s options and reduce the pressure on urban areas. I have seen this happen in countries where the creation of a decentralized university network increased the number of highly educated youth in rural communities and contributed to transforming once abandoned rural centers into bustling rural towns. I have seen this happen in communities where small investments in business development and access to financial services allowed rural entrepreneurs to start viable business activities, generating income for their families, jobs for their neighbors and services for their community.

There is another reason why thriving rural areas are essential to the prosperity of urban centers. Smallholder farmers and fisher folk are the primary producers of food in most of the developing world. In Asia, Africa and in the Caribbean, they produce up to 90 per cent of the food people eat every day. As urban populations grow, there will be a need to step up the quantity and the quality of food produced by rural communities. Fresh produce will need to get to the markets faster and in better conditions, and farmers will have to be paid fairer prices for their products to be able to make investments to improve production, safeguard the environment, and build resilience to a changing climate.

Children in a slum in Peru. Courtesy of La República/IPS

Rural and urban communities are highly dependent on each other for sustainable growth. We live in one, interconnected world where inequalities between people, regions and countries drive more and more people out of their communities and into cities in search of a better life. By improving the living conditions of poor rural people and giving them opportunities for growth, we can reduce the pressure on large metropolises and create more balanced, prosperous societies.

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