The King Hussein Cancer Centre, Jordan's premier cancer treatment facility located in Amman, is being expanded to double its capacity as national and regional cancer rates continue to rise. Credit: Elizabeth Whitman/IPS

By Elizabeth Whitman
AMMAN, Apr 10 2014 (IPS)

The concrete skeleton of a twin 13-storey complex towers over surrounding buildings on one of Amman’s busiest streets. The ongoing expansion of the King Hussein Cancer Centre symbolises progress as much as it portends a crisis.

After its completion, expected in 2015, the new buildings will more than double the KHCC‘s current capacity, increasing space for new cancer cases from 3,500 per year to 9,000. Yet even this 186-million-dollar project may be insufficient to shoulder Jordan’s growing cancer burden."We don't have a single medical oncologist or radio oncologist in the south." -- Dr. Jamal Khader

In Jordan, cancer is the leading cause of death after heart disease. Over 5,000 Jordanians annually are diagnosed with cancer, a figure projected to reach 7,281 by 2020, statistics that reflect global trends.

Cancer was once viewed as a first-world scourge. But in 2008, 56 percent of new cancer cases were in the developing world. And by 2030, the proportion will have climbed to 70 percent.

If Jordan fails to actively prepare for a continuing wave of cancer cases, “we won’t be able to cope with the increased number of patients and the increased cost of treatment,” leading to “less treatment and more mortalities,” Dr. Sami Khatib, a clinical oncologist who is president of the Arab Medical Association Against Cancer and former president of the Jordan Oncology Society, told IPS.

Jordan is fortunate to have the KHCC, a non-governmental organisation run by the King Hussein Cancer Foundation that is the country’s only comprehensive cancer treatment centre and the only cancer treatment facility in the Arab world to receive Joint Commission accreditation.

The KHCC has been a pioneer in cancer treatment in Jordan, transforming the process from disjointed visits with various specialists to comprehensive care with a treatment protocol.

But it is merely one centre. About 60 percent of Jordan’s cancer cases are in Amman, according to the latest national statistics in cancer incidence, which are from 2010. Yet according to Khatib, around 80 percent of cancer treatment facilities in Jordan are in Amman.

For the half of Jordan’s population residing in Amman or its outskirts, this location is ideal. For residents of remote areas, reaching these facilities can be a major problem.

“Inequality of access is the major obstacle” in providing cancer treatment in a country where “the whole spectrum of cancer treatment is available,” concluded Dr. Omar Nimri, director of the Jordanian Cancer Registry at the Ministry of Health, in the 2014 World Cancer Report.

An island of care

Sitting on a plain bench in a waiting room at the KHCC one morning were Nisreen Harabi and Sana’ Iskafee, two wives of the same husband. Harabi rocked back and forth as if to distract herself from pain while Iskafee spoke.

To reach Amman from their home in the village of Luban one hour away, Iskafee said, the women had to take one or two affordable public buses or spend 15 dinars (21 dollars) on a taxi ride.

Nisreen has cancer in her lymph nodes, according to Sana’, and must go to the KHCC four times a week for radiation therapy.

“We started coming two months ago,” Sana said. “The hardest part for us is the transportation. We live so far away.”

That morning, they had left their home at 6:30 am for a noon appointment, as a variety of factors can often cause delays on public transportation in Jordan.

“The distribution [of cancer treatment facilities] is not fair, as a whole, for Jordan,” Dr. Jamal Khader, a radiation oncologist at the KHCC and president of the Jordan Oncology Society, told IPS.

Like Nisreen, about 60 percent of cancer patients will at some point go through radiology treatment, he pointed out. But they have to be in Amman daily for a 10 to 15-minute session, making for a lot of extra suffering for those living outside the capital.

“We don’t have a single medical oncologist or radio oncologist in the south” or other remote areas, Khader added. “The ideal scenario for a cancer patient is to be treated in a comprehensive centre,” of which the KHCC is the only one. And specialised doctors and technology are primarily available in Amman.

Although all patients across Jordan receive “almost” the same quality treatment, no matter the health care facility they visit, Nimri told IPS in an interview, poorer patients or those who live far from Amman face extra difficulties.

“They have to rent a place, or stay in a hotel, or stay with relatives if they have any,” he said.

In that sense, Harabi is lucky to live one hour away.

Travel and accommodations require time and money, the latter of which is in especially short supply in a country where average annual per capita income is 5,980 dollars. Although societies and charities may help to cover costs, the system that remains in place is a centralised one that does not cater to impoverished patients living far from the capital.

“We need to build facilities…in the north and in the south of Jordan to better cover all the population,” Khatib said. He said the government had “a plan to start building facilities for the treatment of cancer in the different governorates of Jordan” and that “maybe they will start implementing it… soon.”

The situation is changing, albeit gradually. King Abdullah University Hospital in the northern city of Irbid has plans to get radio therapy machines, so that cancer patients residing in northern Jordan would not have to go to Amman for radiation therapy.

A national control plan for cancer is currently being developed as well, with the goal of outlining guidelines for prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and beyond. Khader, the KHCC oncologist, hoped the plan would be finalised within a year and that it could help identify “what facilities are missing here and there.”

Cancer treatment is divided into several sectors, besides the KHCC. Members of the military and security services, and their families, are treated at military facilities; private hospitals are available for those who can afford them; and those who do not qualify or cannot afford to go elsewhere have public facilities run by the Ministry of Health.

Yet their capacity does not match that of the KHCC, with “variable cancer care across facilities,” a 2011 report by the Harvard Global Equity Initiative noted. Of 29 public hospitals, only one offers chemotherapy, it said.

Furthermore, a difference in quality in treatment does exist between public and private facilities, Khatib allowed. As is generally true in most countries, “I think it’s much better in the NGO and private sectors than in the public sector,” he said.

Most cancer patients have their treatment covered by the Ministry of Health or the royal court, Khader noted, since by law, every Jordanian can apply for free treatment. While this policy eases individual suffering, for the government, it will become a financial “crisis to cope with all the commitments,” he added.

Nimri calculated roughly that with 25,000 – 30,000 cancer patients and the average cost of cancer treatment at 20,000 dollars per patient per year, Jordan is spending annually at least half a billion dollars on cancer treatment.

A multi-factor disease

Forty-eight percent of men over the age of 15 in Jordan smoked cigarettes (compared to 5.7 percent of women), according to WHO statistics from 2009, while 63.3 and 70.4 percent of men and women, respectively, had a body mass index (BMI) over 25, or in other words were overweight.

Tobacco is the biggest risk factor for cancer, and the WHO estimates that its use causes 22 percent of cancer deaths and 71 percent of lung cancer deaths globally.

Another 30 percent of cancer deaths are due to behavioural and dietary risks overall, such as having a high body mass index, poor diet, or lack of exercise.

“Our population is growing and aging… without having embraced healthy lifestyles that may help prevent many non-communicable diseases such as cancer,” wrote Dr. Abdallatif Woriekat, then minister of health, in Jordan’s 2010 national report on cancer incidence.

“The unhealthy diet and potentially lethal habit of tobacco use in particular, unfortunately, remains highly common and acceptable among Jordanians, and will undoubtedly leave a large unwanted print with its strong contribution to the increasing incidence of cancer,” he concluded.

Excerpt:

Urban agriculture is catching on in Jordan. Credit: Qtea/CC BY 2.0

By Elizabeth Whitman
AMMAN, Dec 12 2013 (IPS)

Flowers burst out of old tires and rows of pepper plants fill recycled plastic tubs as herbs pop out of old pipes. As utilitarian as it is cheery, this rooftop array is one of several urban agriculture projects that are significantly improving livelihoods for the urban poor in this sprawling city.

A slowly but steadily growing phenomenon in Jordan, urban agriculture has vast potential for reducing poverty and improving food security, and it has the added benefit of greening and cleaning up more rundown sections of cities.

But the success of urban agriculture depends on key components that are increasingly difficult to secure: land and water. Space for planting is growing ever slimmer in Jordan, and the country suffers froma perpetual shortage of water. While such problems are major, they have also forced those involved in urban agriculture in Amman to devise innovative and efficient ways to work around them.

The more successful they are, the more valuable urban agriculture becomes in Jordan, where two-thirds of the 160,000 people who are food insecure live in cities and 13 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. For them, urban agriculture is not a complete solution, but it does alleviate poverty, and in the long term, its indirect benefits can be even more widespread.

An ideal environment

Unchecked population growth and relatively unplanned development transformed Amman from a village in the 1940s to a vast, 1,000-square-kilometre metropolis in the 21st century. With a population of 2.3 million, the capital has 312 people per square kilometre, more than four times the national population density.

While willy-nilly urbanisation has not created the most functional of cities, the resulting urban sprawl actually jibes quite nicely with the concept of urban agriculture – using empty spaces between houses and on windowsills, balconies, and roofs to plant vegetables, herbs and other plants that families can consume or sell to boost their income.

Amman started its official urban farming programme in 2006, according to Hesham al Omari, the engineer who heads the urban agriculture office at the Greater Amman Municipality (GAM), as part of an initiative by the Resource Centres on Urban Agriculture and Food Security (RUAF), an international network of resource centres.

Although gardening at home was not new in Jordan, GAM’s programme aimed at making it more widespread and efficient by helping people start gardens in their homes – even giving them the materials to do so – and holding trainings to teach them how to grow as much as possible at a minimal cost.

“We choose inexpensive materials for people,” Omari said. Trainings teach people how to reuse materials like metal tins, plastic bags, and old wood for planting. Early projects ranged from planting carob and olive trees in an impoverished area of East Amman to prevent desertification to teaching women in another district to raise drought-resistant and aromatic herbs. The office is currently holding trainings in schools and women’s organisations.

“Fruits and vegetables in the markets are expensive, so if people can produce these things in their home, it’ll save them money,” Omari noted. He estimated that there are at least 400 rooftops gardens in Amman, though he hopes to see that number someday surpass 1,000.

In Arab countries, which import the majority of their food and are expected to import even more in coming decades, food security is linked to food prices, which are steadily rising. As a result, urban agriculture is one way to improve food security, noted a paper for the International Centre for Advanced Mediterranean Agronomic Studies (CIHEAM).

“Although it is a longstanding practice, urban agriculture receives poor recognition from agricultural scientists, policymakers, researchers, and even its practitioners,” said the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), which funded research for the CIHEAM paper, pointing out how undervalued urban agriculture can be.

Tackling challenges

In the third most water-scarce country in the world, expending precious water on household plants may seem like a luxury Jordanians cannot afford. So GAM has also been teaching urban agriculturalists efficient water usage through grey water recycling systems, irrigation techniques, and rainwater catchment.

Khawla al-Amayra, who lives in the village of Iraq al-Amir on the western outskirts of Amman, where GAM held one of its training projects, said that a lack of water is the biggest challenge and that “in the summer, we have very little water.”

Land fragmentation and urbanisation also significantly affect agriculture. In governorates where the drop in cultivated land has been most severe, including Amman, between 1975 and 2007 land for growing grains decreased by 65 percent and for vegetables 91 percent, according to research by the World Food Programme and the United Nations Development Programme.

Land prices have also been on the rise, so if people own empty plots, the incentive to sell is much stronger than the incentive to work the land, Omari added.

Despite these challenges, the IDRC praised Amman, where “strong municipal support has encouraged development [of urban agriculture].” Furthermore, once participants have gone through the training with GAM, they spread their knowledge to neighbours and friends outside the programme, Omari said.

Going national

The success in Amman has paved the way for other cities to take up similar projects. Eighty-two percent of Jordan’s population is urban, which means the vast majority of the population could become involved in urban agriculture and reap the same benefits -extra income, better food security and access to fresh produce.

A final report from RUAF on one of the GAM projects it funded was optimistic about urban agriculture’s prospects not just in Amman but also throughout the rest of Jordan, noting that urban agriculture “has become an integral part of the agenda of the municipality” and that “legislation has become more UA [urban agriculture] friendly.”

Thanks to the municipality, it noted, urban agriculture has garnered support from higher levels of government. Last week, the Jordanian ministry of agriculture decided to start selling fruit saplings to the public at bargain prices, “to increase green spaces in Jordan, especially with crops and trees which are economically feasible,” said Nimer Haddadin, the ministry’s spokesperson.

From Omari’s perspective, however, the government can’t do everything to spread urban agriculture, even as new projects have begun in Jerash, north of Amman, and Ain Al-Basha, northwest of the city. “They need help from the people,” he said with a smile.

Abu Waleed says climate change has increased temperatures, bringing pests and diseases. Credit: Elizabeth Whitman/IPS.

By Elizabeth Whitman
AMMAN, Jordan, Nov 5 2013 (IPS)

Abu Waleed isn’t quite sure where to begin his litany of grievances. Bugs that chomp their way through the mint he grows, or the dry well that forces him to pump water from a half kilometre away? Or perhaps the 160 dinars he spent on spinach seeds only to see scant growth after planting.

For the small community of farmers in the Zarqa river basin east of the capital Amman, industrial development, poor resource management and climate change have converged to create a perfect storm of problems that damage farmers’ produce and livelihoods and ultimately threaten food security in Jordan.

The Jordanian government and organisations from local NGOs to U.N. agencies are taking baby steps to mitigate the effects of climate change, but Abu Waleed and other farmers say these efforts are not enough.

Others suggest that while climate change exacerbates existing environmental problems in Jordan, the core of mitigation lies not in tackling climate change but in improving how Jordan consumes and manages the scant resources it does have.Between 1975 and 2007 grain-cultivating areas decreased by 65 percent and vegetable-cultivating areas by 91 percent.

Among the driest countries in the world, Jordan has an average of 145 cubic metres of water available per person annually (the water poverty line is 500 cubic metres). Its average annual precipitation is 111 millimetres.

Prime areas for agricultural cultivation, such as rain-fed areas, are shrinking, in part because of urbanisation and development. Between 1975 and 2007, according to research by Dr. Awni Taimeh from the University of Jordan, grain-cultivating areas decreased by 65 percent and vegetable-cultivating areas by 91 percent.

Farmers in Abu Waleed’s area have meanwhile noticed changes in weather in recent years. Along with a decrease in rainfall, temperatures have risen, leading to more pests and bugs and shifting growing seasons. They are calling on the government to help mitigate these effects. Some in the government too admit that it needs to do more.

Hussein Badarin from Jordan’s Ministry of Environment has worked in climate change policy for nearly two decades. He told IPS “there’s not enough coordination” among individuals and institutions working on climate change, A government ministry may for example need data that a university researcher has been compiling, yet neither knows the other exists.

Today, what remains of the Zarqa river could pass for a watery landfill. Plastic bottles, plates and trash bags float atop a green surface, and there’s no telling what lies beneath. The water itself is so polluted that farmers cannot use it for agriculture.

Instead, they must pump groundwater to water crops, says Suheib Khamaiseh, field coordinator for the Arab Women Organisation, a local partner for a project run by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) that enhances the ability of local communities in the basin to adapt to climate change.

But underground aquifers from which these farmers pump are being depleted at twice the rate at which they recharge, according to the World Food Programme and the United Nations Development Programme in Jordan.

According to an assessment carried out as part of the IUCN project, illegal “underground water pumping, rainfall shortage and high temperatures” all directly affect “underground water levels, water production quality, and soil quality.”

“Pests, weeds, chemical use, and irrigation all have increased,” the report added. Climate change impacts have also decreased “production area, output quality, and amount produced per cultivated area.”

Abu Yazan, a soft-spoken farmer in Ruseifa in the Zarqa river basin, has installed a drip irrigation system that he says uses water more efficiently and increases production. He estimates that two dunams (.49 acres) of land with drip irrigation yield three tonnes of carrots, whereas the same amount of land with traditional watering techniques yields half that.

Rainfall has decreased, he says, and he has to filter pumped water before using it for irrigation. “We never used electric pumps like this in the past,” he adds as he turns on a pump that shoots water into a holding pool. He believes the government, or the municipality, should come every season and help clean up the area, yet neither does.

“The biggest problem is the water,” Abu Waleed, the farmer from neighbouring Khirbet al-Hadeed, declares. Not only is the quantity insufficient for agriculture, he says, but it also needs some pH (acidity/alkalinity level) adjustments. “You can’t taste it, but you can tell when you grow with it.”

Leading a tour through plots of vegetables, Abu Waleed points out the garlic with which he is experimenting. Certain plants have reacted poorly to rising temperatures, so he wants to test if the garlic can handle the heat.

Fifty years ago, garlic plants grew so high that “you could not walk,” he recalls. Now, they don’t reach past his thigh. From a separate plot he yanks a small radish the size of his pinkie finger out of the ground. Bugs have been eating the leaves of the radish plants, which then die, he says.

The bugs and pests “appear because of the heat,” says Abu Waleed, and they ruin both plants and produce. He has yet to find a way to successfully wipe out the bugs, even with pesticides. “The Ministry of Agriculture needs to do something.”

Beyond the direct impact of climate change on farmers like Abu Yazan and Abu Waleed is the issue of food security. About five percent of Jordan’s land is arable, according to Jordan’s first National Climate Change Policy,released earlier this year, but that amount is shrinking because of urbanisation, development and decreased precipitation.

As a result, Jordan’s self-sufficiency in certain foods is shrinking too. Although it grows enough of certain staple vegetables such as tomatoes and cucumbers to cover what the country consumes, it imports wheat, rice and barley. From growing 4.6 percent of the wheat consumed in 2005, it grew just 1.8 percent in 2011, according to the Department of Statistics.

Journalists and media activists have begun to confront the Jordanian government over its moves to block local news websites. Two months now after the blockage, many of these sites are struggling.

In two waves, at the beginning of June and again in early July, Jordan’s Department of Press and Publications blocked nearly 300 websites for violating its press law. The government alleged the sites had failed to secure licenses required under the controversial amendments to the law in September last year.

The blocking has sparked an outcry among journalists, activists, and human rights organisations that Jordan is curbing the press and freedom of expression.

Five of the blocked websites – AmmanNet, JO24, Ain News, Khabar Jo, and All of Jo – filed a lawsuit against the government Jul. 25 challenging the constitutionality of the amended press law as well as the legality of the procedure by which the ban was imposed."It's clear that the government was very disturbed by the way these websites have provided a space to talk about corruption." -- 7iber editor-in-chief Lina Ejeilat

Article 49 of the amended law gives the head of the Press and Publications Department the right to block and close unlicensed websites if they do anything illegal, Mohammad Qatishat, the lawyer representing the websites, tells IPS.

Article 15 of the Jordanian constitution states that “newspapers and information media may not be suspended nor the license thereof revoked except by a judicial order in accordance with the provisions of the law.” Article 49 is therefore unconstitutional, Qatishat said.

The head of the Press and Publications Department, Fayez Shawabkeh, tells IPS that the constitution referred “mainly to licensed media” and therefore did not apply to the unlicensed websites he blocked.

Others have brought separate cases against the government and against Internet service providers (ISPs). The popular site 7iber has filed a lawsuit on the basis that it is a blog, not a news website, and should not be subject to the ban. The publisher of JO24, Basil Okoor, is suing ISPs and the government for damages.

As websites wait for these lawsuits to proceed, they are using other creative ways to fight back – developing mirror sites, handing out instructions to get around the ban, publishing news via Facebook or other social media, and holding public protests and debates on the law.

7iber has published material on its mirror site and on Facebook teaching people how to bypass the block, and distributed instructional flyers at local debates “not just for 7iber but for any site,” says 7iber editor-in-chief Lina Ejeilat.

Still, protesting can only go so far before reality sets in. Alaa Fazaa, publisher of Khabar Jo, tells IPS that the ban has gradually been choking his website. A few weeks ago, “two companies told me that they would stop advertising on our website because it’s blocked.

“At this time I have no financial resources. I cannot pay salaries to my employees,” he adds, the strain of recent weeks apparent in his worried expression. “We cannot continue publishing the news the way we did before.”

Fazaa has set up a mirror site, but “not so many people are interested in following you on mirrors.”

Over the past decade, electronic media and news sites have blossomed in Jordan, providing new platforms for reporting and for public discussion. Some see this development as worrying for the government, particularly since the start of the Arab Spring two years ago.

“It’s not just happening now,” Fazaa says. The context began over four years ago, he says. Ejeilat said a “new political atmosphere” had begun with the Arab Spring when people were “much more outspoken about corruption and against public figures.

“It’s clear that the government was very disturbed by the way these websites have provided a space to talk about corruption,” Ejeilat says, even though “this online sphere played an important role in pushing the government to prosecute some of these [corruption] cases.”

Some of the websites were carrying out “independent news reporting in Jordan” and “producing content that could be investigative and hard-hitting” and therefore “beneficial to Jordanian society,” says Adam Coogle, researcher for Human Rights Watch.

The government claims it is trying to protect people from blackmail and character assassination. But forcing sites to register or banning them is not the proper way to do so, experts say.

“If such activities are going on, the authorities have ample ability to investigate and prosecute them,” says Coogle. “Forcing the websites to register in the first place is a violation of Jordan’s obligations under freedom of expression.”

According to General Comment 34 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Jordan is party, “general State systems of registration…are incompatible with” freedom of expression.

Daoud Kuttab, general manager of AmmanNet, is among many who believe the government’s real goal is to create a “chilling effect”. “Their aim is to control and maybe intimidate people into [covering] what they think the media should cover and how they should be working.”

According to Shawabkeh, “bankers, owners of big companies, investors” felt threatened by slander and blackmail. The law was also meant to protect ordinary Jordanians, he added later.

“It’s about the protection of the elite,” says Fazaa. “They do not want us to write about the elite – the political elite, business elite and so on.” The government, he said, is afraid of these websites.

“The websites are independent. They give the real picture. They give information about things that government does not people to know.”

One day after U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder outlined the statutory justifications for “targeted killings”, civil liberties groups here continue to question the legality of the Obama administration’s policy, particularly as it applies to the rights and very lives of both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals.

Speaking before law school students on Monday, Holder rebuffed claims that the president is required, under the U.S. Constitution, to obtain permission through a process of judicial review to assassinate U.S. citizens suspected of involvement with al-Qaeda.

Holder argued that the distinction between due process – the right guaranteed to U.S. citizens that the government cannot deprive life without due process of law – and judicial process – the system of military courts used to try suspected terrorists during a time of war – was an important one.

“The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process… These circumstances are sufficient under the Constitution for the U.S. to use lethal force against a U.S. citizen abroad – but it is important to note that the legal requirements I have described may not apply in every situation,” Holder noted.

Although the Obama administration has stated publicly that its policy to assassinate U.S. citizens and foreign nationals allegedly involved with terrorist organizations does not fall outside of legal bounds, the actual decision-making process – how, when and under what circumstances – through which authority is granted remains classified.

The debate over targeted killings reignited in December 2011 when President Obama signed into law a bill that included language reaffirming the executive’s right “to use all necessary and appropriate force” in combating terrorism.

“We have had all of these arguments since 2010. They are inadequate,” Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor at the University of Notre Dame who specialises in international dispute, told IPS.

“This is the global war on terror with a new name – the same global war on terror that President Obama dismissed on the campaign trail” in 2008, O’Connell added. “The U.S. has always had a policy against targeted killing for legal, moral and strategic reasons. None of these reasons have changed.”

An increase in attacks – and in debate

Obama has doubled the number of drone attacks conducted by the previous U.S. administration in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The most notable case of officially sanctioned assassination came in September 2011, when a U.S. drone killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and senior operative of al-Qaeda’s affiliate organization in Yemen.

Since 2009, the number of civilian and militant deaths from such attacks has been hotly contested by government officials and outside groups.

Officials in the U.S. Department of Justice and intelligence agencies have declined to release government memos describing the justification and details of drone operations abroad, despite a recent motion filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) under the Freedom of Information Act for publication.

The speech is “ultimately a defence of the government’s chillingly broad claimed authority to conduct targeted killings of civilians, including American citizens, far from any battlefield without judicial review or public,” Hina Shamsi, a specialist in national security issues for the ACLU, said in a statement on Monday.

She called the speech “a gesture towards additional transparency”.

International law

Holder also argued that certain legal principles “do not forbid the use of stealth or technologically advanced weapons”, such as covert operations and unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, used to kill militants and foreign nationals suspected of posing an “imminent threat” to U.S. national security.

But the use of such methods has set controversial precedents that may violate international law, Laura Pitter, a specialist on U.S. counterterrorism policy for Human Rights Watch, told IPS.

“The reason it’s important to comply with international law is that there are standards that all countries use when applying lethal force so that countries like Russia and China, when they have these technologies, all apply the same standards,” Pitter explained.

While the speech provided the clearest insight to date regarding the administration’s legal framework for assassinations of U.S. citizens, Holder avoided detailing the implications of such a policy for foreign nationals.

“[The speech] deals with what would be justified for a U.S. citizen,” said Pitter. The fact that it didn’t address non-citizens leaves “little basis for determining whether the U.S. is meeting its legal obligations when it conducts these operations in regard to non-citizens,” she added.

“Each targeted killing that occurs takes place in different circumstances, and all of it is secret because it’s being conducted by the CIA…We’ve called for a long time for them to be conducted under military authority, which has greater transparency,” Pitter added.

The search for justification

Holder’s speech briefly touched on sovereignty issues related to the drone campaigns – a point of bitter disagreement between U.S. and Pakistani officials – and cited the fundamental legal principles guiding the use of force during wartime, including those of proportionality and humanity, statutes ostensibly put in place to avoid excessive “collateral damage” and “unnecessary suffering”.

“He mention[ed] a right to attack states that are ‘unable or unwilling’ to control criminality on their territory. There is simply no such right in international law,” Mary O’Connell, the Notre Dame professor, added.

As human rights groups and some Congressional leaders remain adamant that the White House publicly declare, in concrete terms, its assassination policy in a broader context that includes a legal justification for killing both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals, drone operations continue in many countries around the globe.

“The most important point to note for this entire debate is how perverse and warped it is that we’re even having this ‘debate’ at all,” wrote Glenn Greenwald, a writer specialising in constitutional and civil rights, wrote Tuesday on his Salon.com blog.

“It should be self-negating – self-marginalizing – to assert that the president, acting with no checks or transparency, can order American citizens executed far from any battlefield and without any opportunity even to know about, let alone rebut, the accusations.”

Unless leaders act promptly, climate change and environmental degradation will only worsen and cause greater global problems, scientists warn. Crustmania/CC by 2.0

By Elizabeth Whitman
NEW YORK, Dec 23 2011 (IPS)

When the fast food chain McDonald’s decided to add oatmeal to its menu in January 2011, it literally sugar-coated the offering as a “portable, affordable and balanced breakfast solution… to help make it easier and more inviting for our guests to eat more whole grains and fruits”.

In 2007, McDonald’s spent an estimated 1.74 billion dollars globally on advertising. Credit: ND Strupler/CC BY 2.0

Although a single serving of plain oatmeal has one gramme of sugar, one serving (253 grammes) of McDonald’s fruit and maple oatmeal with brown sugar contains 32 grammes of sugar. One serving of the same oatmeal, without brown sugar, contains 18 grammes of sugar, according to the company’s nutrition facts.

“Why would McDonald’s… take a venerable ingredient like oatmeal and turn it into expensive junk food?” lamented New York Times columnist Mark Bittman in February 2011.

McDonald’s oatmeal, he pointed out, “contains more sugar than a Snickers bar and (is) only 10 fewer calories than a McDonald’s cheeseburger or Egg McMuffin”.

But critics say McDonald’s uncanny ability to turn an inherently healthy food into an unnaturally processed product (the oatmeal itself contains seven ingredients, including “natural flavour”, according to Bittman) is not even the most egregious of the stunts that large food corporations manage to pull.

A Nestle supermarket that set sail in the form of a barge on the Amazon River in Brazil in June 2011 could be one of the more outlandish efforts by the food industry to offer an expanding range of customers a plethora of processed and packaged foods.

Even though processed food is inexpensive, noted Bittman, “the costs aren’t seen at the cash register but in the form of high health care bills and environmental degradation”.

In the United States, food activists who are highly critical of corporations that market aggressively to attract and keep a steady consumer base are also critical of the government, which seems unable or unwilling to regulate these corporations, whether through limiting their marketing or requiring them to adhere to specific nutrition standards.

System overload

As a result, not only are individuals and communities feeling the effects of a consistent intake of unhealthy processed foods laden with sugar and fat, but societies around the world and the earth itself are also forced to bear the heavy burden of the unsustainable agricultural system upon which the food industry relies.

Some 33.8 percent of adults in the United States are obese, according to the Centres for Disease Control (CDC). Obese means having a body mass index (link) of more than 30. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that by 2015, 2.3 billion adults will be obese.

Lifestyles that incorporate little to no exercise and a processed diet high in fat and sugar are linked to obesity and being overweight, which are connected to a multitude of health issues, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes and some cancers.

Marketing tactics

On Dec. 1, a law took effect in San Francisco, California, known as the Health Meals Incentive Ordinance, establishing basic nutritional standards for kids’ meals that come with free toys, a marketing strategy used to attract kids.

Before the law was passed, according to Corporate Accountability International, McDonald’s threatened to sue San Francisco on the grounds of the First Amendment.

Once the law went into effect, instead of giving away free toys with its Happy Meals, McDonald’s decided to charge 10 cents per toy.

Still, “this law really had a tremendous public health impact even before it took effect,” despite McDonald’s approach, said Sara Deon, Value [the] Meal campaign director.

Southern Los Angeles passed a moratorium limiting the development of new fast food restaurants, for example, and Jack-in-the-Box eliminated toys from meals altogether.

Although prohibiting toys from accompanying meals may change nothing about the actual content and nutritional value of the food, the changes do have an impact on who buys fast food meals, and how often.

“It’s really about marketing,” Deon told IPS. “Big food companies create big demand for their products through aggressive marketing,” with some companies, especially McDonald’s, marketing especially aggressively towards children, so eliminating toys does help reduce demand.

In 2007, McDonald’s spent an estimated 1.74 billion dollars globally on advertising, according to a report by Consumers International. Yum Brands, the parent company for Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC, spent 1.23 billion dollars.

Additionally, “federal agencies wield tremendous influence over what types of foods we eat and the information we receive about them,” wrote Michele Simon, a public health lawyer, on her blog, pointing out that the government sets food safety standards, gives nutrition advice and subsidises agriculture.

However, powerful food industry lobbies are able to pressure representatives and senators who hail from districts where people rely on food industry corporations for jobs.

Conflict of interest

Many food activists seriously doubt lawmakers’ commitment to ensuring that people have access to healthy, affordable food, citing conflicts of interest and a focus on protecting corporations rather than people.

In April, the Interagency Working Group (IWG), including the Federal Trade Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the CDC and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, developed and proposed recommendations on both the nutritional quality of food marketed to children and teenagers, and marketing practices.

The House Committee on Energy and Commerce, however, wrote a letter to the IWG, saying, “the real causes of childhood obesity have more to do with inadequate physical activity and excess calorie consumption than with the advertising and packaging of food.”

It ignored evidence of a connection between marketing and the purchase and eating of fast food, which in turn contributes to excess calorie consumption.

The letter asked the IWG to “withdraw the current proposal and start afresh”.

“Corporations simply throw their money around and threaten politicians if they try to get in their way,” Simon told IPS. “Even when regulatory agencies try to do the right thing they’re beat back by congressional members that oversee them.”

Simon is not convinced that regulations and guidelines are the most viable solutions to a host of related issues including but not limited to poor nutrition, obesity, and an unsustainable food system that exploits labour and harms animals.

What Simon considers truly necessary is complete system overhaul. Her call for an end to corporate and industry control has a familiar ring.

“We need to build a political movement,” she said.

Still, despite “a lot of localised restructuring” and alternatives such as farmers’ markets, such options are insufficient, she insisted, because they fail to strike at the core of a flawed and broken system.

These days in Syria, “people dare not step a foot outside their homes because they’re being shot at. And so they pass food from home to home by ropes through windows,” Navi Pillay, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, told reporters Friday.

“Communities are under siege,” she said bluntly.

According to the U.N., over 4,000 civilians, including women and children, have been killed by security forces since the Syrian uprising began in March, in what an independent inquiry established in August by the Human Rights Council said amounted to crimes against humanity.

The inquiry’s report, published at the end of November, found “patterns of summary execution, arbitrary arrest, enforced disappearance, torture, including sexual violence, as well as violations of children’s rights”.

Yet despite the tales of horrific violence, which Pillay has warned could degenerate into a civil war, especially as army defections increase, the international community remains at an impasse, with leaders and governments seeming to grow only more entrenched in their views on how they – and others – should address ongoing events in Syria.

On Friday, the Local Coordination Committees in Syria, a network of activists around the country, reported 35 killed by security forces and the army.

Yet in an interview with Barbara Walters on Wednesday, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad denied that he’d authorised the crackdown, insisting, as he has since March, that foreign elements and terrorists were causing the unrest.

Political stagnation

Meanwhile, the U.N. Security Council has remained in a deadlock since March, with Russia and China, both of whom exercise veto power in the council, refusing to support resolutions that might result in sanctions or a referral of members of the Syrian government to the International Criminal Court.

In October, those countries vetoed a draft resolution, demonstrating how nations have struggled to agree on a unified approach to the human rights violations in Syria and underscoring how different countries’ motives have influenced their policies towards Syria.

Although Russia has cited concerns that a Security Council resolution would lead to military intervention and a repeat of what happened in Libya, the country is also reported to be selling arms to the Syrian government.

Reuters reported on Dec. 1 that Russia delivered anti- ship cruise missiles to Syria in a deal estimated to be worth 300 million dollars.

Russia’s acting on geo-strategic interests, however, is more the rule than the exception, argues Jim Paul of the Global Policy Forum, and other countries, including the U.S., are no less responsible for their responses to the violence in Syria.

“Politics, in the sense of state interests, always trumps human rights,” he told IPS. “The holier-than-thou approach of some Western governments cannot be taken seriously.”

So although the United States has heavily criticised Russia for blocking Security Council resolutions on Syria, in some ways, it is no more innocent. It just so happens that it is not actively vetoing Security Council resolutions on Syria.

Paul, who has written extensively on human rights in Syria, has long been convinced that Syrian human rights have “no impact on U.S. policy, except as a form of public discourse”.

But even if human rights serve as a convenient, albeit thin, veil for political interests, the hard truth remains that people are dying while the international community seems only to stand by and watch.

Current measures

Although what some have referred to as the “Libya syndrome” remains prominent in many debates, military intervention seems to be the last intention or desire of any country, or the Syrians who are protesting.

“We are not asking about military intervention at all; we are just asking for civilian protection,” Catherine al-Talli, a Syrian activist who had been arrested and is now part of the Syrian National Council, an opposition organisation outside the country, told IPS.

On Nov. 28, the Arab League imposed sanctions on Syria, following its suspension earlier in the month from the regional organisation, with 19 out of the 22 member states supporting the measures. The EU and U.S. have already imposed sanctions on Syria.

Iraq and Lebanon refused to participate in the Arab League sanctions, which in his interview with Walters, Assad dismissed, along with the impact they would have on the country, saying, “In reality, we’re not isolated here,” and insisting that the countries around Syria would suffer.

The human rights group Amnesty International has called for a referral to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and considers such a move the best way to stop the killing in Syria. But given Russia and China’s opposition to resolutions condemning Syria, an ICC referral seems logistically difficult to manage.

“The way to tackle these problems is not to pursue narrow routes like ICC referral, targeted sanctions, and so on,” Paul said. “There should be some clear thinking about how dictators like the Assads get in power and stay in power.”

“Look at Egypt today,” he pointed out. “It is the military, backed by the United States, that is standing in the way of the forces of democracy.”

“The situation of human rights in Syria each day is aggravated and requires the international community to immediately implement emergency measures… to stop the violence,” Paulo Pinheiro, chair of the international commission of inquiry, said at a press conference late November.

Similarly, “lives could have been changed if action had been taken sooner,” Pillay said Friday.

But how different is this rhetoric, really, from what has been said for months?

Finding and agreeing upon a unified, effective approach that exceeds mere verbal reprimands and condemnations from the international community, particularly through a global body such as the U.N., however, has been all but impossible.

The proposed law banning same-sex marriages and civil unions is just the tip of the iceberg, activists say. Credit: Elizabeth Whitman/IPS

By Elizabeth Whitman
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 7 2011 (IPS)

“The prospect of arriving home… being arrested at the airport – that’s kind of scary,” said Osazeme O., a dual citizen of Nigeria and the UK, in a wry understatement.

She was standing outside the Nigerian mission to the United Nations, on the sidewalk beside busy Second Avenue, where a small group gathered Monday to demonstrate.

Osazeme was referring to the Nov. 29 passage of a bill in the Nigerian Senate criminalising same-sex marriage, broadly defined in a country that has already banned homosexuality.

Yet the Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Bill, which must pass the House of Representatives and be signed by the president before becoming law, would diminish the rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered Nigerians even further, as banning same-sex marriages and civil unions is just the tip of the iceberg.

“Any person who registers, operates or participates in gay clubs, societies and organisation, or directly or indirectly make public show of same sex amorous relationship in Nigeria” is liable to be imprisoned for 10 years, the bill says.

The same term is applicable to people and organisations that “witness, abet and aids the solemnisation of a same sex marriage or civil union, or supports the registration, operation and sustenance of gay clubs, societies (and) organisations” and those who “directly or indirectly make public show of same sex amorous relationship”.

“What on earth is an indirect public display of affection?” wondered Akwaeke, a Nigerian student and writer, in an interview with IPS.

“Basically if you were holding hands with a friend of yours of the same sex you could be arrested,” she said. “So there’s a lot of loopholes there that are going to be used to persecute a lot of people. People aren’t talking about that because everyone thinks it’s about marriage. It’s not.”

Deflection and distraction

Not, it’s not, agrees Osazeme. “This isn’t really just about queer rights. This is about rights for everybody.”

“I think this law is really about distraction,” she told IPS. She called it “typical of the way Nigerians use deflection in our politics”, elaborating that for most Nigerians, “our concerns are about the daily hustle and grind of living in Nigeria, like, ‘Will I have light when I get home? Will I have running water?’ Things like that.”

“It’s a distraction. There are so many other things our government could be doing right now,” Osazeme said. “If we open this gate to this kind of discrimination, what next?”

The bill also has the potential to pose serious health risks by criminalising organisations that are associated with or work with or on behalf of members of the LGBTI community. Such organisations do much of the legwork in caring for those with sexually transmitted infections, such as HIV/AIDS.

The organisations that handle AIDS, or rape, Osazeme said, “are now under attack. And in my opinion, if the government cannot step in and provide those same services, then they need to sit down.”

“We’re putting our population at dire risk,” she added.

Human rights organisations have labelled the law as dangerous, reprehensible and even downright ridiculous.

The justifications for this bill from Nigerian lawmakers range from cultural to religious to the simply absurd.

“Should we allow for indiscriminate same-sex marriage, very soon the population of this world would diminish,” Senator Ahmed Lawan, who supports the bill, told the BBC. “In fact, we are protecting civilization in its entirety.”

Others cite different motives.

Scott Edwards, advocacy director for Africa at Amnesty International, suggests that the bill is “a way of making political gain”, calling it “a reprehensible bill that would appear to be designed to simply single out Nigerians because of their perceived or actual identity” simply because it’s easy.

The bill “wouldn’t just have implications for marriage” but for any relationships, real or perceived, between same sex couples, or for any NGOs or individuals who interact with those individuals, Edwards tells IPS.

Ultimately, this law “opens the door to all kinds of police abuse”, said Boris Dittrich, advocacy director of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) programme at New York-based Human Rights Watch.

It “introduces very vague notions of the organisations of gay rights”, Dittrich told IPS. “This is going to be a tool by the government to silence opposition and other civil society organisations.”

Furthermore, he added, “in Nigeria, politicians use the LGBT community as a scapegoat while they should address issues like poverty or corruption.”

The question of intervention

Whether or not outside governments can step in or exert pressure on Nigeria not to pass the bill into law is tricky, and highly sensitive.

UK Prime Minister David Cameron has suggested that aid to countries that refuse to recognise gay rights might be cut, saying that “British aid should have more strings attached in terms of… ‘Do you persecute people for their sexuality?'”

Nigerian lawmakers responded defiantly, with one, David Mark, saying countries who threaten to cut aid should just keep it, according to the BBC. Other African governments accused Cameron of undermining their sovereignty.

Similarly, on Tuesday, the U.S. government announced it would attempt to use U.S. foreign aid to support gay and lesbian rights.

But Dittrich says that using financial and economic threats to punish countries criminalising homosexuality are not as effective as other options, as African NGOs have said that doing so only stiffens the opposition to the LGBT community, which is seen as the cause of economic threats such as aid cuts.

Rather, sending funds to support LGBT organisations would be “a wiser approach”, said Dittrich, by giving them more power and a stronger voice.

“African countries can react badly to external pressure” they perceive to be attempting to influence their ways, said Chris Cooper, one of Monday’s demonstrators. “You can do more harm than good.”

But no matter how outside governments choose to act or how Nigeria chooses to respond, he pointed out a fundamental truth about this latest bill by Nigeria’s government: “The people they are really hurting (are) themselves.”

Women from Nepal's indigenous tribe. Credit: Mallika Aryal/IPS

By - - and Elizabeth Whitman
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 2 2011 (IPS)

In polished versions of U.S. history, the near-extermination of Native Americans in the United States is an unsightly blemish that continues to be glossed over to this day. Yet the struggles of indigenous peoples are not exclusive to the United States and have grown increasingly complex in modern times.

Women from Nepal's indigenous tribe. Credit: Mallika Aryal/IPS

The United Nations has developed various platforms and mechanisms, namely the advisory body the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNFPII) and the Inter-Agency Support Group on Indigenous Issues (IASG), to address these noticeable gaps in rights, health, education and more between indigenous and general populations.

“Many countries do not acknowledge the existence of indigenous peoples,” Sonia Heckadon, pro tempore chair of the Inter-agency Support Group (IASG) on Indigenous Issues, told IPS. Nor do many governments take their needs into consideration, she added.

The IASG, which allows U.N. agencies and non-governmental organisations to analyse the Forum’s recommendations and helps facilitate and coordinate those groups’ responses to the Forum’s recommendations, held its annual meetings at the headquarters of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in November.

Participants from U.N. agencies and NGOs pointed out some of the advancements made in terms of indigenous peoples, but those strides served in some ways only to underscore how seriously disadvantaged they are.

“Historic injustices”

A universal definition of indigenous peoples has yet to be adopted, but they are generally considered to be the non-dominant communities and groups with historical continuity with pre-colonial or pre- invasion societies.

Indigenous peoples are also known for having defined and highly- valued traditions, customs and practices.

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples notes that “indigenous peoples have suffered from historic injustices as a result of… their colonisation and dispossession of their lands, territories and resources.”

Colonisation and dispossession have in turn prevented them “from exercising… their right to development in accordance with their own needs and interests”.

In most countries, indigenous peoples are poorer, less healthy, less educated and more likely to face discrimination and be denied full access to human rights. Although indigenous peoples are only five percent of the global population, they comprise 15 percent of the world’s poor, according to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

The remote areas where indigenous families frequently live often lack basic social services, noting that as a result, “indigenous youth and children have limited or no access to health care, quality education, justice and participation”, UNFPII has noted.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in Australia have a diabetes rate six times that of the general populace. The suicide rates for Inuit youth in Canada are a whopping 11 times the national average, and indigenous infant mortality rates in Panama are more than three times that of the non-indigenous population, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Lower life expectancy and higher incidence of substance abuse, depression, suicide and teen pregnancies are also common among indigenous peoples.

Coordinating efforts

Interest in indigenous issues has risen since the first Permanent Forum session in 2002, Heckadon pointed out. At the third session in 2004, six governments presented reports. In 2011, 18 did.

Heckadon called the growth an indicator of “the accountability mechanisms that the Forum has been able to create”. She was adamant, however, that “we still have a lot of work to do”.

Indeed, indigenous peoples have a long way to go in terms of advancement in their own rights, while governments and international organisations have a similarly long distance to cover in order to ensure indigenous rights are protected and indigenous populations have equal access to health and educational services.

At the same time, methods to protect those rights such as ensuring adequate health and housing and providing access to education must be in harmony with indigenous customs and practices – one of many complex challenges facing both governments and indigenous populations.

For instance, building sustainable housing for indigenous peoples could incorporate traditional building materials, practices and designs, rather than standard, non-indigenous ones, thus preserving customs and traditions while alleviate housing issues.

At the same time, “a challenge is the lack of clear internal mandates within UN agencies to work on the promotion and protection of the rights of indigenous peoples,” Javier Vasquez, regional human rights law advisor at the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO), told IPS. He added that internal resolutions would be critical to effectively protecting indigenous rights.

The public sector, particularly in areas that can influence indigenous peoples’ rights, such as courts and parliaments, also possesses limited knowledge on indigenous peoples’ human rights, Vasquez said. Changes in this area could certainly help advance indigenous rights.

“The indigenous peoples are confronting incredible situations,” Heckadon said. “It’s getting worse because of natural disasters, the rise of fundamentalism, the erosion of human rights.”

“All these factors are having an impact on the rights of indigenous peoples.”

Excerpt:

Peruvian farmer Inocencia Chipana shows her coffee beans outside the cooperative's warehouse. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By - - and Elizabeth Whitman
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 22 2011 (IPS)

The 925 million people who went hungry in 2010 are just one facet of an ever-worsening food security crisis. Both food producers and consumers face the consequences of price volatility and unsustainable agricultural practices – challenges that leave leaders on local and global levels alike seeking sustainable models for agriculture.

Peruvian farmer Inocencia Chipana shows her coffee beans outside the cooperative's warehouse. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

Belonging to cooperatives offers “an opportunity for farmers to access markets and services that might not be available otherwise”, Brent Hueth, director of the Centre for Cooperatives at the University of Wisconsin, told IPS.

Farmers are not the only ones to benefit from agricultural co-ops. The bargaining power and resource sharing they derive from belonging to co-ops can help reduce poverty and heighten food security for millions, said the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in October.

Indeed, the United Nations threw its weight behind the idea of cooperatives as a stable business model for enterprises in many sectors, including health and finance. The international body declared 2012 the International Year of Cooperatives and launched the themed year at the end of October.

Cooperatives can be small, local businesses or multi-million-dollar entities, but they always operate based on the same seven principles, which adhere to the aim of being democratically owned and operated, with each member receiving one vote.

Eight hundred million people around the world are members of cooperatives, which employ 100 million globally. Financial cooperatives, such as credit unions, have been hailed by experts for their resilience in weathering the financial crisis.

Starved for solutions

“The new generation of food cooperatives look to create direct links with their local communities,” Luis Sierra, assistant director at the California Centre for Cooperative Development, told IPS. By shoring up individual efforts, cooperatives are ensuring that “commitments and connections to their own community are a driving force”.

In the past several years, cooperatives have helped to make supporting locally produced and marketed foods into a priority for more consumers, strengthening food supply chains and partnerships between producers, distributors and buyers, Sierra explained.

By strengthening these systems and connections, agricultural cooperatives can help with food insecurity by giving producers the opportunity to more fully “control and be able to effectively market their locally grown products”, said Sierra.

FAO, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the World Food Programme (WFP) have all stressed that by being part of a larger organisation such as a cooperative, farmers are able to negotiate better terms or lower prices for necessities such as seeds or equipment.

Farmers’ co-ops can also offer small farmers the prospects of securing land rights and better market opportunities.

With land degradation from both climate change and unsustainable agricultural practices, and phenomena such as land grabbing highlighting the growing need for stable agricultural models, cooperatives – where they exist – seem a feasible alternative to address such challenges.

Hitting boundaries

Still, co-ops have their limits. In particular, they cannot always accumulate enough capital to develop infrastructure to, for example, take wheat and turn it into pasta or bread, said Sierra.

“The scale required to make (those processes) economical requires a tremendous amount of investment,” Sierra explained. “Sometimes there’s just not enough members, not enough capital, to make that happen.”

Hueth agreed. “Agricultural cooperatives are often at a disadvantage when it comes to raising capital for cooperative business start-up or expansion,” he said.

The same qualities for which cooperatives can often attract praise – being financed by their members, organised to operate in a way that benefits those same members rather than generates a return on investment – can also hinder those organisations.

Expanding can present obstacles for cooperatives for another reason as well, Hueth noted. “Another challenge that all cooperatives face, as they grow and become more complex, is to maintain a strong board governance structure.”

“Different economic interests among members can sometimes undermine the unity of purpose needed to run a large business successfully,” he added, and business and law schools often have “limited expertise” to help cooperatives successfully manage their businesses.

Excerpt:

A 2008 investigation by the Environmental Working Group found bottled water to be "chemically indistinguishable from tap water". Credit: Clean Wal-Mart/CC BY 2.0

By - - and Elizabeth Whitman
NEW YORK, Nov 19 2011 (IPS)

Water is the lifeblood of this planet, whose inhabitants are watching its accelerated spiral into crisis mode even as they struggle to address the issues and lifestyles that are stretching the earth’s resources thin.

Outwardly, the global water crisis appears straightforward – people simply consume too much water. A key factor in this spiral is the fact that water has been morphing from a natural resource into a marketable – and costly – product, experts and reports have shown.

Exploring different aspects of the global water crisis, from privatisation of water to corporations marketing to minorities, reveals that water – as a human right, as a product, as a natural resource – is firmly entangled with a host of issues in areas, including public health.

By 2025, 1.8 billion people will live in areas with absolute water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world’s population – projected to reach eight billion by then – will be under stress conditions. Some 1.4 billion currently lack access to safe water.

Humans consume water at a rate more than twice that of population growth, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). In 60 percent of European cities with a population greater than 100,000, groundwater is used more quickly than it is replenished, said the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.

Yet even though humans consume more water than is sustainable, some would say that people do not drink enough water, and when they do, they’re often being tricked into doing so.

Water, the commodity

Early in November, the watchdog group Corporate Accountability International (CAI) accused the Swiss transnational Nestle of manipulative marketing.

“Pure Life marketing specifically targets Latino immigrants in the United States, many of whom have suffered the consequences of poor public water infrastructure in other parts of the world,” said a fact sheet from CAI.

“For the past 30 years, bottled water corporations like Nestle, Pepsi and Coke have helped build a 15 billion dollar U.S. bottled water market by casting doubts on public drinking water systems,” a CAI press release added.

An article published in Forbes Magazine in August also pointed out how corporations including Coca Cola, Las Oleadas and Ravinia Partners create brands that are Latino-specific, for instance, or target minority mothers.

It also noted how water companies’ slogans often promise water that is utterly natural, pure or fresh. A label on an ordinary Poland Springs bottle, for instance, which is produced by a Nestle subsidiary, reads “Pure Quality” and “100 percent natural spring water” and features a picturesque mountain peak and in the background.

When asked whether Nestle does market specifically to minority communities, Jane Lazgin, director of corporate communications for Nestlé Waters North America, told IPS, “That’s correct.”

“Nestle Pure Life is a meaningful brand in the Hispanic population,” she said, but added that it is “widely distributed across many, many different audiences”.

Lazgin acknowledged that Nestle Pure Life water “comes from wells or municipal systems”, but emphasised that it undergoes an “intensive purification process”.

Still, a 2008 investigation by the Environmental Working Group found bottled water to be “chemically indistinguishable from tap water”, the summary of the investigation said.

“But with promotional campaigns saturated with images of mountain springs, and prices 1,900 times the price of tap water, consumers are clearly led to believe that they are buying a product that has been purified to a level beyond the water that comes out of the garden hose,” it added.

Water v. soda

Targeting minorities can be seen as exploitation – a recent study found that Latino and black parents are three times more like to choose bottled water over tap water for their children – but the situation is not so black and white.

Hispanic children, according to the New York Department of Health, are at a higher risk of obesity than other groups.

“Marketing for sugary drinks also may be targeted disproportionately more often to minority and low-income youth who consume more of these products and are at higher risk of obesity and related diseases,” found a recent report by Yale University’s Rudd Centre for Food Policy and Obesity.

In addition, beverage companies spend 948 million dollars in advertising sugary drinks and energy drinks in 2010, according to the report. Coca Cola alone spent nearly 180 million.

By comparison, Nestle Pure Life spent 9.7 million dollars in advertising expenditures in 2009, according to a Food and Water Watch report.

No longer is the problem merely the fact that bottle water has become a commodity that is marketed to a targeted audience.

Water is inarguably a healthier alternative to soda, so perhaps marketing water, albeit bottled, to the very audiences who are at higher risk of obesity, for instance, serves as a meagre counterbalance to companies selling sugary drinks, even if many believe water should not be sold as a commodity in the first place.

Excerpt:

By - - and Elizabeth Whitman
NEW YORK, Nov 14 2011 (IPS)

A new report has highlighted a connection – and not always a positive one – between U.S. foreign aid to Colombia and Mexico and violence and crime rates in those countries, pointing out that U.S. policy toward Mexico deserves careful application of lessons learned from the aid the U.S. has supplied Colombia since 2000.

“Our government has an absolute obligation to press for justice and ensure that… U.S. assistance doesn’t contribute” further to problems, Lisa Haugaard, co-author of the report “A Cautionary Tale: Plan Colombia’s Lessons for Mexico and Beyond”, told IPS.

These problems range from increases in violence, crime and human rights abuses to impunity for those who carry out those abuses, says the report, published Nov. 10 by the Latin America Working Group Education Fund, the Centre for International Policy (CIP) and the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).

With 1.4 billion in aid supplied to Mexico from 2007 to 2010, the U.S. retains some responsibility for actions carried out by the individuals or institutions to whom this aid flowed, argued the report, especially with three-quarters of the aid going to military and police forces.

Four years after the launch of the Mérida Initiative, as it was known, “meaningful improvements in public security have not been achieved.” Killing or capturing major leaders of organised crime “has made violence more generalised” and triggered “new power struggles that have multiplied the violence”, the report found.

More importantly, after decreasing for two decades, violations and abuses in Mexico by the military and the overall homicide rate increased from 2007 to 2010, a period that overlaps the years of U.S. aid, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch.

The homicide rate grew by over 260 percent, while “the government counted nearly 35,000 deaths related to organised crime from December 2006 to the end of 2010, with number of killings increasing dramatically with each passing year”, the report said.

According to “A Cautionary Tale”, the flow of U.S. aid under the framework of the Mérida Initiative – meaning a majority of the aid goes to the military – continues, and new aid seems likely to be approved despite budget constraints.

Hard lessons

In 2000, the U.S. and Colombia agreed on an aid package of approximately 8.5 billion dollars as part of an anti-drug strategy. They called it Plan Colombia, and most of the aid went to the military police. Over 70,000 Colombian military and police personnel were trained, according to the report.

Although Plan Colombia succeeded to a certain degree – many parts of the country are now more secure and according to government statistics, murders were reduced by a third – the country also saw an “enormous escalation of extrajudicial executions by the army that happened with large amounts of U.S. support and assistance”, Haugaard said.

“Policymakers assured members of Congress that human rights abuses would decrease because the U.S. would supply training to those forces,” she added. Still, those responsible for such killings have yet to face consequences for their actions.

One of the main lessons of Colombia, Haugaard continued, is that “if you have a climate that fosters abuse, you will have abuse,” so in order to ensure that abuses do not escalate, investigation and prosecution of those abuses in civilian courts are necessary.

The report notes that because Colombia is the only Latin American country over the past decade to have significantly reduced violent crime, “Plan Colombia… may appear tempting to policymakers” when it comes to policy towards Mexico.

But, it cautions, Plan Colombia’s so-called success is “only a partial, and fragile, victory at best” that has “come at an unacceptably high human and institutional cost”, making it “an experience from which to draw lessons”.

Plan Colombia did offer some positive lessons, Haugaard pointed out. Aid to Colombia was held up a couple of times, when the State Department started listening to Colombian human rights groups, since aid was supposed to be contingent upon human rights conditions.

Meanwhile, discussion within the administration and among policymakers and thinktanks often refer to Plan Colombia as a model, the report argues.

“We think it’s very important for policymakers to learn from some of the negative experiences of Plan Colombia as well as the positive experiences,” Haugaard said. “We want to encourage U.S. policymakers to think about how they design these aid packages.”

The report presented several recommendations, including creating opportunities for youth who might otherwise be tempted to engage in violence, strengthening and working with civil society institutions rather than the military, and protecting civilians.

Taking responsibility

“A Cautionary Tale” called for the U.S. government to take responsibility for the damage its funding had contributed to, or ways U.S. policy – domestic and foreign – have helped to exacerbate rather than reduce violence and crime.

The U.S. remains the world’s top consumer of cocaine, accounting for 36 percent of the world supply in 2010, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

The report called for the U.S. to tackle domestic issues that are more politically difficult but are damaging to Latin American societies, such as the high use of and demand for drugs and its lack of control over the flow of assault weapons into Mexico, Haugaard said. “The U.S. is still not shouldering its share of the burden.”

Excerpt:

The number of people flocking to cooperative banks has recently skyrocketed in the U.S., with 650,000 people joining credit unions just since late September. Their rationale: financial cooperatives offer a more secure and socially just alternative to big commercial banks – or a way for the 99 percent to fight the one percent.

Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, President of the U.N. General Assembly, addresses the GA at the launch of the International Year of Cooperatives. Credit: Devra Berkowitz/UN Photo

Cooperatives, and particularly the benefits that accompany membership in one, whether social, financial or political, may have been a sweet and recent discovery for people in this country, but for many in other parts of the world, cooperatives, or co-ops for short, are old news.

Still, with the European debt crisis and Greece and Italy in tatters, significant popular unrest in cities around the globe and climate change an omnipresent, albeit insufficiently addressed, global concern, experts, leaders and frustrated civilians around the world are shining fresh light on cooperatives in the search for viable alternatives to existing financial and political models.

When singing their praises of cooperatives, experts cite a variety of reasons, ranging from their role in fostering sustainable development to supporting local businesses and communities.

The United Nations has hailed cooperatives and designated 2012 as the International Year of Cooperatives. The world body said in 2009 that “financial cooperatives contribute significantly to ensuring access to affordable financial services, access that is especially critical given the current economic crisis”.

In the U.S., 40,000 people, or 24 times the average daily rate in 2010, joined credit unions on Nov. 5, according to the Credit Union National Association (CUNA), and approximately 600,000 joined credit unions in 2010 – fewer than those who joined just last month.

Although leaving traditional banks to join smaller financial cooperatives may be just one way the 99 percenters aim to fight back against the one percent, financial co-ops have many other far- reaching benefits, experts say.

Searching for new solutions

Throughout the ongoing economic crisis, for instance, cooperative banks have proved their worth and resilience by faring far better than many of their non-cooperative counterparts.

A 2009 report by the International Labour Office (ILO) found that “the cooperative model of enterprise survives crisis, but more importantly that it is a sustainable form of enterprise able to withstand crisis, maintaining the livelihoods of the communities in which they operate”. The report noted, furthermore, cooperatives’ abilities to avert future crises.

Michael Gertler, acting director for the Centre for the Study of Cooperatives at the University of Saskatchewan, agreed that following the economic crisis, financial cooperatives, including credit unions, “have experienced growth as a result of increased visibility, positive publicity, and people shifting their accounts from conventional banks to credit unions”.

Credit unions are just one type of financial cooperatives. In particular, credit unions do not draw on outside capital to finance their loans. Rather, they pool members’ savings and shares, and members generally receive higher returns on savings and fewer fees, according to the World Council of Credit Unions.

Credit unions also provide financial services to those who otherwise may not have access, the U.N. has noted, and perhaps most significantly, “Unlike other types of financial institutions, credit unions … have not otherwise been the cause of the current economic circumstances.”

“Cooperatives are more prudent, less willing to take excessive risks that impact members and customers, because these people are also the owners,” Monique Leroux, president and CEO of Desjardins Group, the largest cooperative financial group in Canada, told IPS.

“Because cooperatives are more democratic, they are less likely to follow the herd or be driven by the ambitions or ego at the top of the organisation,” she said.

In addition, most cooperatives operate on a one person, one vote principle, rather than basing votes on shares held. All of these practices and principles help to build sustainability and stability, to which the higher survival rates of cooperatives can attest.

A study in Quebec in 2009 found cooperatives’ survival rates to be significantly higher than those of traditional businesses – after 10 years, 44 percent of coops had survived, compared with 20 percent of other new businesses.

Credit unions “are often seen as part of the social economy and as contributing to community economic development,” Gertler noted.

Room for growth

Financial coops’ prevalence varies among regions. Western Europe and Japan, for instance, have a substantial sector of financial cooperatives, said Jean-Louis Bancel, president of the ICBA, in an interview with IPS.

In North America, “cooperative banks are not huge,” he allowed, calling it a highly “prospective continent” for cooperative banks and credit unions.

Others would distinguish between Canada and the U.S. in that statement. Leroux noted that in Quebec, the cooperative business model is a 22-billion-dollar industry, and 70 percent of the population is a member of a co-op.

Gertler said, “In Canada the sector is much bigger by various measures,” in comparison to the U.S. Similarly, the cooperative movement is “particularly strong” in some European countries, such as Germany, and certain Asian ones, like Sri Lanka.

Financial coops’ success and popularity depends a lot on government policies. One drastic example is found in Romania and Hungary, Bancel said, where cooperative banks are prohibited. A more common challenge facing cooperatives is “to be recognised for what they are” and to be given the opportunity “to play on an even playing field”.

Politicians “have to acknowledge the difference” between cooperatives and institutions with different structures, and between different types of co-ops, Bancel said. Or, as Leroux said, “Each one is unique with its own mandate and service offer in its community.”

With so much positive hype engulfing cooperatives, their disadvantages seem lost in the fray.

“It depends on the way they’re run,” Bancel acknowledged. “Are the financial cooperatives complying with regular rules?” Simply being a cooperative, he said, does not excuse a cooperative from complying with ordinary rules.

Often, he said, local laws have an impact on cooperatives’ transparency.

On another level, expanding while maintaining contact with members can also be tough. “That’s always a challenge: to get bigger, and stay cooperative.”

By Elizabeth Whitman
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 2 2011 (IPS)

The United Nations unveiled its 22nd annual Human Development Report on Wednesday, with grave warnings that unless countries take action against climate change and implement sustainable solutions, progress in human development will be in serious jeopardy.

South Africa's plans for adaptation offer little to smallholder farmers, who are among those most vulnerable to climate change. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

Trends over the past 40 years indicate extraordinary progress in health and education in some of the world’s poorest countries, and if those trends continue, by 2050, most countries will have achieved or surpassed standards enjoyed now only by the top 25 percent of countries.

But if business as usual goes on, progress will not. In fact, “it might actually stop” altogether, Bill Orme, spokesperson for the report, told IPS.

Using a human development index (HDI) to gauge countries’ progress in development in the areas of income, life expectancy and schooling, the HDI incorporates more than just financial aspects of growth and development.

The report also utilised a multidimensional poverty index (MPI), introduced in last year’s version of the report, which measures health and education, to gauge poverty levels with more nuance than simply measuring income.

As environmental sustainability issues become increasingly acute, developing countries and poorer communities, which are already disproportionately vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change, face greater challenges in attaining higher standards of living, he said.

But unsustainable practices are not just ones that are environmentally damaging, Orme emphasised. Practices that are equitable for all are also key. “Acute inequality is incompatible over the long term with human development progress,” he explained.

Unequal distribution

The report, “Sustainability and Equity: A Better Future for All”, highlighted strong and mutually reinforcing links between environmental degradation and inequality. “Inequalities in human development amplify environmental degradation” it found, while “environmentally harmful practices accentuate racial and social inequalities”.

“If you look at societies that have smaller degrees of inequality,” Orme said, “there’s an argument that those societies are in some ways better equipped” to handle current and future problems, such as slowing the pace of climate change.

Norway, Australia and the Netherlands were ranked at the top of the HDI, with the U.S., New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, Liechtenstein, Germany and Sweden completing the top 10. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Niger and Burundi fell at the bottom of the HDI.

However, countries’ rankings changed in the inequality-adjusted HDI. The U.S. dropped from fourth place to 23rd, but Sweden jumped from tenth to fifth place.

The inequality adjusted HDI measures how uniformly income, schooling and life expectancy are distributed across a country.

For example, if the adult population of a country has an average of 12 years of schooling, but that average is in reality due to some having 16 years and others three or four, then education would be poorly distributed in that country, despite a national average that appears decent.

Although the inequality adjusted HDI does not directly reflect where those gaps tend to occur, such as along gender or racial lines, it does emphasise the contrast between the high and low ends of the income, schooling and life expectancy scales.

Unsurprisingly, the U.S. dropped 19 places because of its extreme disparities income distribution as well as life expectancy.

Virtually blameless, but hit the hardest

Even though they contribute the least to the problem, the most disadvantaged people in the world deal with the harshest repercussions of climate change, the report said.

Developed countries have the greatest carbon footprint, but developing countries are feeling the effects the most, experiencing the greatest loss in rainfall and the greatest increase in its variability.

Moreover, poor communities in developed countries face a “double burden” of deprivation, Allan Fuchs, a researcher for the report, told reporters. Not only are they vulnerable to the global effects of climate change and land degradation, but they deal with environmental challenges on a household level, such as with indoor air pollution and dirty water.

Furthermore, people in developing countries depend upon land and natural resources more directly than those in developed countries, so they feel the impact of land degradation and extreme temperatures and precipitation more acutely.

Women in poorer countries are affected by the adverse repercussions of climate change more than men, as women “engage disproportionately in subsistence farming and water collection work”, the report said.

In Malawi, women spend over eight times what men do fetching wood and water, and in other developing countries, women also bear the primary responsibility for fetching wood and water. Still, people all countries will be ultimately affected, perhaps not proportionately, by climate change.

“In the absence of reform, the links between economic growth and rising greenhouse gas emissions could jeopardise the extraordinary progress in the HDI in recent decades,” warned the report.

It outlined three scenarios – base, environmental challenge and environmental disaster – and in each projected the impacts of climate change on progress in development until the year 2050.

The worst case scenario, environmental disaster, projected that the global HDI would fall 15 percent below the baseline scenario’s projections, which were based upon current rates of progress.

Even in the second worst scenario, environmental challenge, the global HDI would fall eight percent below the baseline and 12 percent below for South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa by 2050.

Recommendations

The report is “fundamentally analytical”, Orme told IPS, adding, “We’re not in the process of making policy prescriptions.” Although the report is commissioned and published by the U.N. Development Programme, it is nonetheless an independent one.

Still, the report had several recommendations.

One solution it recommended was an international currency trading tax of .005 percent on foreign exchange trading to generate revenues of almost 40 billion dollars per year. This money would help close the gap of 105 billion needed annually just to help finance adaptation to climate change.

Fuchs noted that although this tax was first argued for in the 1994 version of the report, the tax would be much more politically and technically feasible today.

The report also called for the immediate implementation of a U.N. universal energy access initiative to help the 1.5 billion around the world who do not have access to electricity, which has a proven positive impact on both health and education.

As if to point out the lack of global action to address climate change over the years, the report quoted from a 1987 U.N. report, “Our Common Future”.

“Our inability to promote the common interest in sustainable development is often a product of the relative neglect of economic and social justice within and amongst nations.”

Excerpt:

Hailed as economically viable and socially responsible, cooperatives have over one billion members worldwide and can be found in sectors ranging from agriculture to finance to health.

Monique Leroux, President and CEO of the Desjardins Group, speaks about the financial crisis and the role of cooperative banks. Credit: UN Photo/Rick Bajornas

Yet for an economic model deemed so vastly beneficial, cooperatives have received surprisingly little attention from both the media and governments, experts agree. By dubbing 2012 the International Year of Cooperatives (IYC), launched today in New York, the United Nations is attempting to reverse this trend and instead shine a global spotlight on cooperatives.

The U.N., along with its Department for Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) and the Committee for the Promotion and Advancement of Cooperatives (COPAC), has three main goals for the year.

It aims to increase awareness about cooperatives and their contributions; to promote the formation and growth of cooperatives; and to encourage member states to develop policies conducive to cooperatives’ growth.

With an ongoing global economic crisis and various “Occupy” movements demanding large-scale system overhaul, right now is a particularly topical time to celebrate cooperatives as equitable economic models that enhance socioeconomic development.

Furthermore, because they are member driven, cooperatives are not profit-maximising enterprises. Rather, the pursuit of profit is balanced out by the needs and decisions of members, who can become fully involved in the governance of the cooperative.

Cooperatives “can make longer-term investments and better reflect the multiple bottom lines that users, owners, employees and neighbours will recognise as important,” Michael Gertler, acting director of the Centre for the Study of Cooperatives at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, told IPS.

As a result of these characteristics, cooperatives are regarded as having impressive longevity. The survival rate of start-up cooperatives is also higher than those of private sector competitors.

Cooperatives and sustainable development

The potential of cooperatives to help eradicate poverty as well as create and reinforce sustainable practices while contributing to development is precisely what the U.N. wants to highlight and encourage states to tap into.

A primary struggle of the U.N.’s development agenda has been to highlight the human aspect of development and wealth, rather than the financial elements. Cooperatives combine both, making them a highly desirable economic and business model.

Cooperatives “empower individuals to organise themselves into self- help enterprises”, said Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs Sha Zakang. They also “promote cooperation at a grassroots level”, he said during a breakfast meeting with members of European cooperative banks.

Sha noted later on during a round table discussion that because developing a green economy will require “radical shifts” in the way humans produce and consume energy, cooperatives play a valuable role in the transition to a green economy by creating economically and socially sound practices.

“How can cooperatives be best utilised to advance a people-centred approach to sustainable development?” he asked rhetorically. He underscored the importance of cooperatives to the U.N.’s development agenda and its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015.

Gertler affirmed this point, noting that cooperatives “have the potential to be excellent vehicles for making the… transition to sustainable production and consumption”.

Daniela Bas, director of DESA’s Social Policy and Development Department, similarly noted that by being a “value-driven, people- centred model of enterprise”, cooperatives can positively affect particularly vulnerable populations such as indigenous peoples and rural communities.

Yet despite the high value placed on cooperatives for both the model and the potential they offer, cooperatives have largely fallen under the global radar.

Immensely beneficial, yet overlooked

One area where cooperatives have outshined the more mainstream private businesses is in the financial sector. A 2009 report by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) sang the praises of cooperative banks, finding that while the economic crisis hurt the majority of enterprises, “cooperative enterprises around the world are showing resilience to the crisis”.

Not only does the cooperative model of enterprise “survive crisis”, the report elaborated, but it is also “able to withstand crisis” while “maintaining the livelihoods of the communities in which they operate”.

“The recent massive public bail-out of private, investor-owned banks has underlined the virtues of a customer-owned cooperative banking system that is more risk-averse and less driven by the need to make profits for investors and bonuses for managers.”

Ultimately, the report argued, “it is the strength built up by cooperatives during the good times that helps tide them over a recession.”

Any resilient organisation that can weather a recession would seem invaluable in the current economic climate. Yet cooperatives are not given the proper attention that would allow them to flourish, argued Jack Wilkinson, farmer and president of the World Farmers’ Organisation, at a round table this morning. He called for the cooperative sector to be given the support to become more mainstream, so that they do not remain on the fringe.

Piet Moerland, chair of Rabobank and president of the European Association of Cooperative Banks, and Pauline Green, president of the International Co-operative Alliance, echoed this sentiment at a press briefing.

Both emphasised how little known cooperatives are – neither the number of people involved in them nor the market value they contain.

“The cooperative business model is, in my view, underestimated in the media,” Moerland said. He added that it is similarly underestimated by legislators and in regulatory frameworks.

“Co-ops do not compete in the same way as conventional corporations,” said Gertler. “Governments need to understand their proven role in providing financial and economic stability, especially for more vulnerable populations and places,” he concluded.

By Elizabeth Whitman
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 26 2011 (IPS)

Over the past four decades in Latin America and the Caribbean, women have made remarkable strides in education, health, labour, and beyond, with girls now outperforming boys in school, the rate of working women more than doubling in many countries, and female participation rising in politics.

Yasmín Sena (front) and Melissa Vargas at a workshop in Lima. Credit: Milagros Salazar /IPS

And yet this progress has bred new challenges, ones that have thrust the complexities of balancing jobs, careers and families into the daily lives of many women, says a new World Bank report, “Work and Family: Latin American and Caribbean Women in Search of a New Balance”.

The report, issued Tuesday, demonstrates how improvements in the lives of women, along with a narrowing gender gap in Latin America and the Caribbean, do not necessarily translate into enhanced wellbeing or happiness, and how a new gender reality is setting in.

Greater access to opportunities means women are faced with more complex decisions regarding their careers and their families, especially as women’s education levels rise and some may come to see their work more as a career than as a just a source of income.

The nuances and challenges of balancing the competing demands of careers or work and families must “be brought to the centre stage of policy design”, said the report.

The fact that traditional gender roles define women as primary caretakers in the family further complicates matters. Women comprise the vast majority of the unpaid care economy, yet this work goes unaccounted for from an economic perspective and remains undervalued.

Michelle Bachelet, executive director of U.N. Women who was president of and held two ministerial posts in Chile, spoke at the report’s launching, relating an anecdote of her experiences as a single mother and government minister.

By the time she would arrive to work in the mornings, she had been awake for three hours taking care of her children, while a male colleague would have passed the morning in a considerably less active fashion.

As likely any working mother in any country could attest to, “Striking the right balance between work and family is perhaps one of the most demanding tasks facing women in the developed countries, and a rising challenge in emerging economies,” said the report.

Government leaders and their policies will have to address these new “tensions and challenges for women which, paradoxically, have been made possible by four decades of steady gains”.

Significant progress, yet more to be done

Since 1980, 70 million additional women have entered the workforce in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the report, which called such growth “unprecedented”.

Furthermore, in the Caribbean, mortality rates have dropped by 40 percent since the 1980s. In the Andean region, they have dropped by 70 percent. Sex imbalances in other parts of the world, including South Asia, Europe and Central America, are the opposite in Latin America and the Caribbean, where females comprise over half of the total population.

These statistics indicate girls’ “wantedness” in the region and reflects increased investment in girls’ and women’s health, said the report.

Overall, the gender gap has been closing in many areas of education, meaning females are outperforming males in school enrolment, achievement and attainment, although indigenous populations are a noticeable exception to this growth, said Augusto de la Torre, chief economist for Latin America and the Caribbean at the World Bank.

Social views of the younger male generation are also shifting, said de la Torre. According to research, younger and better-educated men believe less and less that men make better executives than women do – indications of progress in the parity agenda.

Gender policy, he told those present at the launch, is at a crucial juncture.

Finding a balance

Policies that enable “freedom of choice” while “facilitating the quest for balance” are needed, de la Torre said. Empowering women to have outside options also helps improve dynamics inside the household, he added.

Facilitating and coordinating all of these shifts and transformations – politically, socially, culturally, domestically – will be a key challenge for the future, experts agreed.

The report said that new issues point to “the need for a second generation of gender policies”. Or, as Bachelet described, many gaps in gender equality remain; society must consolidate these gains while going well beyond them. These joint goals require new kinds of policies.

The report acknowledged that “no one-size-fits-all policy agenda that is well suited to these changing gender realities” exists. Still, the report is not intended to provide such a solution to countries.

“The report gives general guiding principles for policy,” Laura Chioda, lead author of the report, told IPS. “In this sense it’s less about giving answers in detail and more about fostering a debate that could potentially lead to new policies.”

Gender policies are no longer limited to the realm of gender ministers, she added. Rather, they inform the work of any minister, whether labour, finance, or otherwise. The goal is to bring the relevance of the household perspective to the attention of governments to “stimulate debate about policy”, Chioda said.

Realistically, “it’s never balanced,” Bachelet said of the dynamic between men and women and the work they do. But we need to try to find a “new” or “better” balance, she added wryly.

Excerpt:

By Elizabeth Whitman
NEW YORK, Oct 24 2011 (IPS)

Beaten. Chained to walls. Exposed to extreme temperatures. Deprived of food, water and sleep. Hassan bin Attash, Sami el- Hajj, Muhammed Khan Tumani and Murat Kurnaz suffered years of inhumane and illegal treatment while in U.S. custody either at Guantánamo Bay or in military bases in Afghanistan.

George W. Bush, shown here on his last day in office, Jan. 19, 2009, is accused of authorising and overseeing torture programmes. Credit: White House photo by Eric Draper

Previously, CCR and CCIJ had submitted two letters, one on Sep. 29 and another on Oct. 14, to Robert Nicholson, Canadian minister of justice and attorney general, with the first letter urging him to launch a criminal investigation against former U.S. President George W. Bush for “authorising and overseeing his administration’s well- documented torture program”.

Attash, currently detained at Guantánamo, has been imprisoned without formal charges for more than nine years. El-Hajj, Tumani and Kurnaz have all been released.

The attorney general took no action in response to the letters, so as promised, CCIJ submitted a private prosecution case on Oct. 20 on behalf of the four men. More than 50 human rights groups and prominent individuals supported the case.

As a signatory to the Convention Against Torture, Canada is “obligated to prosecute or extradite for prosecution anyone present in its territory for whom there is a reasonable belief he has committed torture”, the Sep. 29 letter noted.

Bush was scheduled to, and was, on Canadian territory during his visit Surrey, British Columbia for a speaking engagement at an economic summit on Oct. 20.

Under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which has 147 signatories, including the U.S. and Canada, parties to the convention are supposed to have committed to promptly investigate, prosecute and punish torturers.

Multiple efforts

CCR and CCIJ had compiled a 65-page indictment, with 4,000 pages of supporting material, presenting the case against former Bush for authorising and overseeing torture programmes. The indictment was included in the Sep. 29 letter to the attorney general.

In that letter to Nicholson, CCR and CCIJ said, “Mr. Bush bears individual and command responsibility for the acts of torture committed by his subordinates that he ordered, authorised, condoned, or otherwise aided and abetted.”

“The legal basis for the case is exceptionally strong,” Matt Eisenbrandt, legal director of CCIJ, said in a statement. The four men “have a right to have a court of law examine the evidence and hear the legal arguments”.

In a statement, Katherine Gallagher, senior staff attorney at CCR, who worked on the case, called Canada’s decision “a stark example of politics trumping law”, adding, “The government of Canada obviously did everything it could to protect George Bush from facing criminal accountability for torture.”

Earlier this year, in February, two torture victims planned in Geneva to file criminal complaints for torture against Bush during a scheduled visit to the country, because Swiss law requires alleged torturers to be on Swiss soil before any investigation against them can be opened.

Bush cancelled his visit the night before the complaints, which over 60 human rights organisations supported in a joint letter.

In an interview with IPS, Gallagher called the move by the Canadian government “deeply, deeply disappointing” and “a shocking departure for a country that’s supposed to live under the rule of law”.

This decision “can only be described as a political move” to protect Bush, she said.

Setting a precedent

The case may be considered disappointing in itself, but its potential implications could be downright alarming, rights activists warn.

Both the Canadian government’s decision and the lack of U.S. action against Bush and officials in his administration, which oversaw the U.S.’s well-documented torture programme, leave a “dangerous and lasting legacy of the impunity of U.S. officials” and serve as “a real degrading of the entire system of law and international human rights”, Gallagher said.

As much as the U.S. and Canada talk about supporting a robust human rights programme or invoke human rights to justify some of their actions, Gallagher said, they “make a mockery of the system” when they draw on human rights to justify their choices, coming to be seen as hypocrites.

From here, future steps depend on the information CCR and CCIJ can obtain regarding the Canadian government’s basis for moving to stay the case, especially if it can be determined that the reasons the government presented to justify shutting down the case were insufficient.

They also plan to call upon the United Nations Committee Against Torture and ask them to review and comment on Canada’s actions regarding this particular case.

This decision has implications far beyond North America, opening the doors for dictators and other leaders to justify illegal, inhumane actions, Gallagher said. “If the U.S. doesn’t have to follow the law,” she posed, “Why should we?”

Excerpt:

By - - and Elizabeth Whitman
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 19 2011 (IPS)

After much delay, Finland has been chosen to host a 2012 conference to establish a zone free of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in the Middle East. The meeting aims to bring together all Middle Eastern countries, some of which share a long history of disagreement, such as Iran and Israel.

Jaakko Laajava, under-secretary of state in Finland’s ministry of foreign affairs, will act as the facilitator for the conference, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced Oct. 14.

The long-awaited decision, announced jointly by Ban and the governments of the Russia, the UK and the U.S., is one step forward in a painstaking process that has spanned more than two decades since Egypt first proposed the idea in 1990.

Arms control and disarmament groups welcomed the decision and the choice of Finland as host, but they also raised concerns about the implications of the delay in naming the host and facilitator, as well as remaining challenges to holding the conference and ultimately establishing a WMD-free Middle East.

Appointing someone was “positive, obviously”, said Anne Penketh, programme director in Washington for the British American Security Information Council (BASIC).

“But the fact that it has taken until mid-October does raise questions… over whether logistically it’s going to be possible to organise such a complex event in 2012,” she told IPS.

Still, “the conference would be a major, major step particularly if Iran and Israel are at the same table for discussions on their mutual security,” said Penketh.

Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, called the decision “a very good development”. Now, he said, “the task is to make the meeting happen, to ensure that all of the key parties in the region show up and constructively engage on the topic,” an achievement that “is by no means certain”.

Attention should turn to “beginning a practical dialogue among these countries about nuclear, chemical and biological weapons issues… whether that’s Iran or Israel or Syria,” Kimball said.

Will progress remain elusive?

Following Egypt’s proposal in 1990, a WMD-free zone in the Middle East was first officially called for during the 1995 Non- Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference, but not until 2010 NPT review conference did states agree on a process to accomplish that goal.

One of the steps agreed upon then was to hold a conference in 2012, with Russia, the UK, the U.S. and the U.N. leading those efforts.

Finally, deciding on a host and facilitator for the conference indicates progress in the effort to bring together countries over such an intractable issue, but it does not guarantee that the conference will be a success.

“It’s absolutely vital that the key governments come to this meeting with constructive ideas about how the region can move along the path towards” disarmament, Kimball said. “Doing so is going to require some initial steps.”

Each country has certain steps to take in terms of signing and implementing treaties, be they nuclear, biological or test ban treaties, he said.

Yet diplomatic language discussing efforts leading up to the conference is laced with doubts, caveats and preconditions.

“We hope the 2012 conference will be an opportunity for productive discussion,” Kurtis Cooper, deputy spokesperson for the U.S. Mission to the U.N., told IPS. He said the U.S. has urged states to take “practical and constructive steps to remove the obstacles to achieving this goal”.

A WMD-free Middle East is “an achievable goal”, he said, “but it will not happen overnight.”

“We recognise that this goal can only be achieved in the context of a comprehensive and durable peace in the Middle East, and after Iran and Syria return to full compliance with their existing international agreements.”

In a similar statement, the UK said it remained committed to the establishment of a Middle East free of WMDs. “But it will not happen overnight nor without the commitment and support of all states in the region.”

It called the conference “a first step in what will be a challenging process” and “a real opportunity for the region to discuss”, but only with “the full commitment of all the states in the region, and the wider international community”.

Other challenges

If doubts about how productive the meeting will be are not serious enough, then concerns about current conditions in the Middle East affecting the conference’s prospects certainly are.

“Practical issues” such as the ongoing Arab spring or an alleged plot by Iran to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. can hinder the process, Penketh said. “This kind of conference is not operating in a vacuum”, and many “political sensitivities… need to be navigated”.

Laajava outlined the proposed time frame as being broadly 2012, according to Helsingin Sanomat.

That choice of words, particularly “broadly”, “opens the door to a possible delay”, said Penketh.

Separately, the fact that Laajava is not known for having a background in Middle Eastern affairs “could be an asset in this situation”, Penketh said. As an outsider, he could be able to identify problems much more clearly than people who have been heavily involved or invested over the years.

Israel, the only state in the region with nuclear weapons, has expressed concern that – and the desire not to attend if – the conference would target it for its undeclared arsenal.

Kimball stressed that ensuring the conference is productive continues to be a challenge, even though the conference’s locale has been established. Countries have to be prepared to take action both prior to and following the conference.

“This has to be the beginning of a process,” he said. “It’s important that this meeting is not just an exercise in getting certain diplomats from certain countries to show up and then leave.”

Excerpt:

By Elizabeth Whitman
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 18 2011 (IPS)

In a major breakthrough Tuesday, researchers announced that the vaccine candidate RTS,S reduces the risk of malaria by half in children ages five to 17 months, first results from a continuing phase three trial showed.

The plasmodium parasite, seen here in the ring stage taken from a blood smear, is transmitted through infected mosquitoes. Credit: Bobjgalindo/wikimedia commons

The trial was conducted at 11 trial sites across seven different countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Three doses of RTS,S reduced the risk of malaria for children by 56 percent for clinical malaria and by 47 percent for severe malaria, according to analysis of data from tests on the first 6,000 children aged five to 17 months over a 12-month period following vaccination.

Clinical malaria, which results in high fevers and chills, can quickly develop into severe malaria, which can be fatal.

The trial was also conducted on infants aged six to 12 weeks. Analysis of those results is expected to be available at the end of 2012, with more data about the long-term efficacy of the vaccine available by 2014.

With 15,460 infants and children participating in the trial overall, this trial is the largest malaria vaccine trial to date.

“These data bring us to the cusp of having the world’s first malaria vaccine,” said Andrew Witty, CEO and president of the UK drug company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) Biologicals, which is developing the vaccine in partnership with the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative (MVI).

In addition to the potential of RTS,S to save lives, the results are also significant because they highlights two common but incorrect assumptions about malaria, said Regina Rabinovitch of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which helped fund the research for the vaccine candidate.

The first is the public’s assumption that a vaccine for malaria already exists and the second is the scientific world’s belief that one cannot be found. Though it never offers full protection, immunity to malaria can be developed over years of exposure, so most deaths from malaria occur in young children.

Scientists at first created RTS,S in 1987. In 1993, it was first tested in the United States and Belgium on healthy adults, and in 1998 it was tested for the first time in Africa on adults in The Gambia.

Scourge of the developing world

Half of the global population is at risk of malaria – in 2009, the disease was present in 108 countries. Most cases are found in sub- Saharan Africa, with Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and parts of Europe also at risk.

The parasite Plasmodium, transmitted by infected mosquitoes, causes malaria in humans by multiplying in the liver, then infecting red blood cells.

The disease is “truly a disease of poverty”, said the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and it disproportionately afflicts the poor, whose housing structures usually offer limited protection against mosquitoes.

Malaria’s economic impacts are widely recognised in Africa, where it hinders economic growth and development. Although methods for preventing malaria, such as sleeping under insecticide-treated nets, can be effective, many children, especially in Africa, do not sleep under these nets and do not have immediate access to treatment once infected.

The parasite has also become increasingly resistant to anti-malarial treatments, complicating efforts to address the disease.

In countries with high levels of malaria transmission, malaria can decrease gross domestic product (GDP) by as much as 1.3 percent, the WHO says. Lost productivity due to malaria has cost Africa approximately 12 billion dollars annually.

A continuing battle

The results of the trial are encouraging, but “we still have a ways to go”, said Tsiri Agbenyega, a principal investigator of the trial and chair of the Clinical Trials Partnerships Committee, during a telephone press conference based in Seattle on Tuesday.

Still, “this potentially translates into tens of millions of malaria cases in children being abated,” he said.

Witty said that 300 million dollars has so far been invested in developing the vaccine and that GSK expects to invest another 50 to 100 million dollars.

“Our intention is to supply this vaccine at the lowest price possible,” he emphasised. The vaccine would be priced at five percent more than the actual cost of the drug, with the five percent being reinvested for further research into malaria and other diseases.

“We are not there yet, but well on our way to developing a vaccine for malaria,” Christopher Elias, president and CEO of said.

The study noted an 18-percent incident rate of serious adverse events or effects. Those receiving a control vaccine had an incident rate of 22 percent.

As if to underscore in advance the relevance of this breakthrough and the necessity of developing new methods to combat malaria, the U.N. warned Monday that two million Somalis are at risk of contracting the disease.

They are already suffering from drought, famine and conflict, and the U.N., along with related agencies, is stepping up its response to prevent a large-scale outbreak.

Excerpt:

By Elizabeth Whitman
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 10 2011 (IPS)

What was once a glaring weakness in the seven-month Syrian revolution and uprising against the government of President Bashar al-Assad is now slowly transforming into one of its strengths with the coalescence of opposition groups into the Syrian National Council (SNC) earlier this month.

Yet many questions and concerns about strategies, both domestic and international, remain, especially in the wake of the latest failure in the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution condemning the violence in Syria.

On Oct. 2, the SNC convened in Istanbul to announce its official formation, outline its structure and goals, and publish a founding statement.

Members of the international community have welcomed its creation, even as the Syrian government threatened “tough measures” against countries that recognised the opposition council.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said Monday that France intends to establish relations with the SNC, while the European Union hailed its formation, calling it a “positive step”.

Syrians began protesting in March 2011, calling for reforms and an end to government corruption, among other demands. The Syrian government initially responded with promises of reform that went unfulfilled. As protests grew, it turned to tanks and bullets in a brutal crackdown that has killed nearly 3,000 civilians, according to U.N. estimates.

Fledgling opposition

A core of the national council was announced in mid-September, followed by negotiations to include more political groups.

The SNC, with a general assembly membership of 230, and executive committee of 29 and presidential committee of seven, spans the political spectrum from leftists to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Four Kurdish and one Assyrian representative are among those included in the 29-member executive committee. Many Christians, Druz and Alawite are also members.

The council’s immediate concern is “having a well-founded and solid entity”, Monajed said. Until the leadership and structure is finalised, the council is not seeking meetings with world leaders.

The organisation’s vision is the “formation of a national body to represent the Syrian Revolution, embody its aspiration in toppling the regime, achieve democratic change, and build a modern civil state”, according to a council document.

It sees itself as a “political umbrella for the Syrian revolution in the international arenas” that aims to “deliver the message of the Syrian people in the field of international diplomacy”.

Saying that it was “inspired by previous initiatives and attempts at unifying opposition groups”, the council subtly acknowledged the difficulties, especially over the past six months, to consolidate Syrian opposition.

“It’s an agreement in terms of all the committees on the ground and it’s an agreement in terms of all the opposition,” an activist, who goes by the pseudonym of Alexander Page, told IPS.

Based in Damascus until early October, Page escaped Syria after he learned his identity had been compromised. He has been on CNN, Huffington Post and other outlets.

Page’s perspective was that a better opposition council could not be formed at this point. “After this, there’s not going to be any council that’s going to go through,” he said.

Politically, the council’s immediate concern is “having a well- founded and solid national council”, Ausama Monajed, a member of the council, told IPS. Until the leadership and structure is finalised, the council is not seeking meetings with world leaders.

In both its declaration and the words of Ghalioun, the Council has explicitly rejected foreign intervention “that undermines the sovereignty of the Syrian people”, as Ghalioun said.

Page, who was involved and remains in contact with various revolution groups on the ground in Syria, said that the SNC has garnered notable popular support domestically.

Intervention: a highly sensitive topic

A wide array of concerns accompanies discussion of international intervention, which remains a prominent issue that is highly sensitive both in Syria and for the international community because of the Syria regime’s domestic propaganda campaign and because of the looming shadow of NATO’s military intervention in Libya.

The Syrian government has claimed since March that armed gangs are launching attacks inside the country and that Syrian security forces have responded by quelling those attacks.

Aiming to discredit the international community, the Syrian government would use international intervention to support its claims that foreign governments are trying to undermine Syrian sovereignty. Giving the Syrian government the opportunity to legitimise those claims through foreign intervention could be detrimental.

Many, Syrians included, are wary of any intervention that could follow in the footsteps of NATO’s in Libya.

At most, the SNC would call for would a no-fly zone or possibly a buffer zone, Page said.

But Monajed emphasised that from the international community, the SNC would seek measures to ensure civilian protection, such as a Security Council resolution that called for U.N. observers that might help prevent some of the violence.

Similarly, the international community should “protect the civilians by all the legal means commensurate with the U.N. charter and international conventions”, Hozan Ibrahim, spokesperson for the coordinating network Local Coordinating Committees (LCC) of Syria and member of the SNC, told IPS.

Complications in the Security Council

Meanwhile, the U.N. Security Council has been criticised as it struggles to find a unified voice condemning the violence, civilian deaths, arbitrary arrests and torture.

Most recently, a rare double veto by China and Russia on Oct. 4 thwarted a Western-backed resolution that would have condemned Syrian authorities’ “continued grave and systematic human rights violations” and called for a “an inclusive Syrian-led political process” free from violence and intimidation.

In addition to the Russian and Chinese vetoes, Brazil, India, Lebanon and South Africa abstained – results that indicate underwhelming international solidarity regarding how to respond to the current situation in Syria.

Russia has strong business ties to Syria. Reuters reported in August 2011 that Russia’s top arms exporter, Rosoboronexport, would continue selling arms to Syria.

The European Union (EU) and the U.S. have already imposed sanctions on Syria, and Turkey announced last week that it would as well.

“Russia is waiting for the right price to sell, unfortunately,” Monajed told IPS. For Russia, Syria is a matter of money, regional interest and influence, he said.

He said the SNC was hoping the West would be able to pressure or reach a deal with Russia to allow a Security Council resolution to pass that would permit U.N. observers into the country to help prevent civilian deaths and hold the Syrian government accountable.

Martin Nesirky, spokesperson for U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, had no specific comment on the SNC’s formation, but noted, “The Secretary-General has called consistently, repeatedly, for there to be a dialogue, inclusive dialogue,” in Syria and so the SNC could be understood “in that context”.

Excerpt:

By - - and Elizabeth Whitman
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 23 2011 (IPS)

History is strewn with proof of the destructive capabilities of nuclear weapons and power, yet science is also replete with evidence that nuclear power has many advantages.

How to protect against the dangers of nuclear power while ensuring that humans can safely reap its benefits is an ongoing dilemma that leaders gathered to address in high-level meetings at the United Nations on Thursday and Friday.

The accidents at Fukushima in the wake of an earthquake and tsunami in March of this year and at Chernobyl in 1986 “are a wake-up call”, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Thursday when he opened the summit on nuclear safety.

“The effects of nuclear accidents respect no borders,” he said. He called for strong international consensus and safety standards “to adequately safeguard our people”.

On Friday, over 40 ministers and high-level officials met to discuss the entry into force of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which 182 countries have joined to date and 155 have ratified. Nine more countries need to ratify the treaty before it can enter into force, including the United States.

Discussions Thursday centred on implications of the accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant, which have retrospectively underscored the urgent need for the international community to intensify efforts to improve nuclear safety.

Indeed, recommendations did not operate on the basis that all states will cease to pursue nuclear activities.

Sergio Duarte, high representative for disarmament affairs, said in a ministerial session that while some states have decided to phase out or not to pursue nuclear energy, “other states remain committed to developing and acquiring nuclear power”. As a result, disaster and risk analysis need to be further developed.

A system-wide study, which Ban presented Thursday, on the implications of the incident, demonstrated the extent to which Fukushima remains on international radar, at least in terms of nuclear safety.

It examined both the pros and cons of nuclear energy, pointing out, “Safe and scientifically sound nuclear technologies… are valuable tools for agriculture and food production.”

Nevertheless, an accident releasing radioactive material into the surrounding environment leads to serious “contamination of water, agriculture” and other areas and has “direct implications on the livelihoods of people”.

“The principal lesson of the Fukushima accident is that assumptions made concerning which types of accident were possible or likely were too modest,” the study said. “In order to properly address nuclear security, the international community should promote universal adherence to and implementation of relevant international legal instruments.”

Entry into force: the CTBT

The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) is one of those international legal instruments. The observational technology of its International Monitoring System is widely considered valuable and effective at detecting potential violations of the CTBT. Its detection capabilities might also prove useful in the event of a nuclear emergency.

In 1996, the CTBT opened for signature. Ban set 2012 as a target year for it to enter into force, but first, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan and the U.S. must ratify the treaty.

Entry into force of the CTBT has multiple benefits, leaders said.

It is an “indispensable stepping stone to a nuclear weapon free world”, Ban said during a ministerial meeting Friday. He urged remaining states to sign and ratify the CTBT “without further delay”.

The German foreign minister noted that not only would the entry into force help regional tensions such as in the Middle East and East Asia, but would also “strengthen global peace and security”.

Until the treaty enters into force, however, ratification remains the outstanding challenge.

“These are national decisions,” Toth told IPS, in reference to whether the nine remaining countries ratify the CTBT. “Countries will have to assess for themselves whether they feel that with this treaty they have a safety net below.”

Especially in the Middle East and South Asia, “it’s important that… countries see this treaty as one of the important assets to achieve more security,” he added.

Furthermore, “beyond the political security benefits, there is a wider benefit as well on mitigating complex disasters,” he stated.

Sergio Duarte, high representative for disarmament affairs, agreed. “The decision about whether countries want to add nuclear sources to their energy mix or not is a sovereign decision,” he said in an interview with IPS.

All the U.N. can do, he affirmed, is “promote the treaty and show to (countries) benefits that will accrue from their participation” in CTBT.

The U.N. can convene meetings, pool knowledge and resources, and share ideas. It can arm member states with the knowledge necessary to prevent or deal with nuclear accidents, and it can try to develop frameworks and treaties to the same effect. But ultimately, member states are the ones who implement practices or ratify treaties.

“It’s up to them to decide what they want to do,” Duarte said.

Excerpt:

By Elizabeth Whitman
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 21 2011 (IPS)

Political, private sector and civil society leaders from around the world gathered here on Tuesday to recommit to a year-old initiative, Every Woman Every Child, which aims to prevent 16 million maternal and child deaths by 2015.

Though much progress has been made, they said, much more remains to be done.

Each day, over 21,000 children under the age of five around the world die, while 350,000 women die annually from complications in pregnancy and childbirth.

Launched one year ago by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Every Woman Every Child is an effort to advance components of the Global Strategy for Women’s and Children’s Health, to which 200 organisations have pledged their commitment, by coordinating international and national actions across various sectors.

Those who spoke at Tuesday’s event not only shared stories of success related to their respective countries or organisations, but they also reiterated the call for greater resources and financial contributions.

“We have the knowledge, we have the expertise” to reduce mortality rates and improve women’s health, General Secretary of World YWCA Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda said at the event. “We know what works. We just need the resources.”

She called for countries to reallocate their spending to support health-related causes rather than, for instance, military pursuits, in a slight echo of Ban’s earlier warning that “political roadblocks litter the path ahead”.

Countries, many of them in the developing world, have already pledged to the cause an estimated 40 billion dollars for the next five years.

The Global Strategy, launched in April 2010, targets children and women’s health in order to bring countries closer to achieving Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 4 and 5 by their target year of 2015.

MDG 4 calls for a two-thirds reduction, based on 1990 data, in mortality for children under the age of five, while the fifth MDG is universal access to reproductive health and a 75-percent reduction in maternal mortality.

Ban said that the private sector would play a “central role” in helping countries reach these MDGs. Indeed, under Every Woman Every Child, public-private partnerships have thrived, with several new initiatives between the private sector and U.N. agencies such as the World Health Organisation, and between governments and private foundations.

Several developing countries have been hailed for their efforts to reduce infant, child, and maternal mortality rates. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh told those who attended the event that since 1990, Bangladesh had reduced infant mortality by 45 percent and maternal mortality by 66 percent.

Every Woman Every Child also seeks to avoid 33 million unwanted pregnancies and protect 120 children from pneumonia.

Maternal and child mortality rates have declined at an accelerated pace since the signing of the Millennium Declaration aimed at improving child and maternal health, said a new analysis by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.

The report by the IHME, “Progress toward Millennium Development Goals 4 and 5 on maternal and child mortality: an updated systematic analysis”, published in the leading British medical journal The Lancet, showed that since 2000, maternal mortality rates in 125 countries have declined at a faster pace.

In 1990, approximately 409,100 women died from pregnancy and childbirth-related complications, whereas in 2011 the number is estimated at 273,500.

Similarly, mortality rates of children young than five have declined faster since 2000 than in the past 11 years than they did the decade prior, from 11.6 million deaths in 1990 to 7.2 this year. The data indicates that efforts to decrease maternal and child deaths through education and health initiatives are succeeding.

Nevertheless, the initiatives have not ensured that countries will be on track to meet MDGs 4 and 5 by 2015, the report said. Though 31 developing countries will achieve MDG 4 and 13 developing countries MDG 5, only nine will achieve both. They are China, Egypt, Iran, Libya, Maldives, Mongolia, Peru, Syria and Tunisia.

Haidong Wang, assistant professor of global health at IHME and co- author of the report, commended the work of U.N. agencies, telling IPS that they “have played an important leadership role in improving child mortality and maternal mortality”.

Efforts in particular to fulfill the MDGs “have been a huge boon for public health” in developing countries, he said, and have had a significant impact child and female health there.

“Governments within those lower income countries have also, for the most part, increased their own spending on health,” Wang said. Those changes contributed to major improvements.

Still, education was “one of the biggest factors”, said Wang. “Half the reduction in child mortality can be tied to the education of young women. With more schooling, they make better choices about their own health and about the health of their families,” he explained.

Nevertheless, despite efforts on the part of the U.N. and individual countries, said Wang, “We need to acknowledge the fact that most countries are not on track to achieve either MDG goal.”

“In order to continue reducing child and maternal mortality to the targeted levels,” he concluded, “We must build on what has been working the past two decades.”

Excerpt:

By Elizabeth Whitman
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 21 2011 (IPS)

“There is a well-documented and shameful history of certain players in industry who… put public health at risk to protect their own profits,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told world leaders Monday as they met to address the issue of non-communicable diseases at the 66th U.N. General Assembly.

The high-level meeting provided countries with a chance to share stories of success and innovation to combat NCDs, the most common of which are cancer, diabetes, chronic respiratory illness, and cardiovascular disease.

Responsible for 63 percent of deaths worldwide, or 36 million deaths per year, NCDs constitute a serious threat to global social and economic development.

Yet throughout events held on Monday and Tuesday, and in the political declaration agreed upon by member states outlining the steps they would take to address NCDs, a clear, persistent and pervasive challenge emerged: ensuring that profit-driven corporations and industry groups are not able to influence policies or other efforts aiming to improve public health.

Government and civil society leaders alike agreed that, as the political declaration stated, NCD prevention and control require “multisectoral approaches”. But many also expressed concern that no clear boundaries exist to distinguish appropriate involvement of the private sector from the inappropriate and potentially unethical, or to ensure that profits do not trump public health.

A demonstrated conflict of interest

The political declaration itself explicitly noted a “fundamental conflict of interest between the tobacco industry and public health,” but it did not do the same for the food and beverage or pharmaceutical industries. Rather, it called on the private sector to “consider producing and promoting more food products consistent with a healthy diet” and to “contribute to efforts to improve access and affordability for medicines.”

Tobacco, overconsumption of alcohol, an unhealthy diet, and lack of exercise are the four main causes of NCDs. Industry groups play a key role in the first three of these areas, though whether that role is advantageous or dangerous to public health can vary.

Bill Jeffery, national coordinator for Centre for Science in the Public Interest, Canada (CSPI-Canada), told IPS private sector engagement will “have no integrity” without a code of conduct. Nor was the “relationship between trade and health… squarely addressed in this political declaration,” Jeffery pointed out.

CSPI-Canada is part of the Conflict of Interest Coalition calling for the creation of such a code.

Douglas Bettcher, director of the World Health Organisation‘s (WHO) Tobacco Free Initiative – WHO is considered the world’s primary specialised health agency – told IPS that WHO had “very clear and strict guidelines vis-à-vis work with commercial enterprises to make sure that our… policy work is not deviated and not open to undue influence by the private sector.”

He insisted that the political declaration did protect against such undue influence. “It says very strictly, ‘where and as appropriate,'” he told IPS.

Nevertheless, there are “certain aspects of reducing risk factors where the cooperation of the industry can be beneficial,” Bettcher said. Actually implementing policies by cutting down on sodium in foods and engaging in responsible marketing can help improve public health, for example.

But when industry groups participate in discussions or are involved in policy making decisions, their influence can run the gamut from directly opposing public health interests to emphasising control of NCDs, a more profitable aspect from the pharmaceutical perspective, for instance, over prevention.

“Ensuring that the focus is… less on prevention and more on how to control NCDs” is one way the pharmaceutical industry can profit from the NCD crisis, Gigi Kellet, deputy campaign director for Corporate Accountability International, told IPS.

Prior to the start of the NCD summit, PepsiCo co-hosted, with two U.N. agencies, a breakfast panel discussion at the U.N. on Monday for government representatives.

When asked about the potential for a conflict of interest in such an event, Bettcher told IPS that side events were separate from the U.N. and WHO.

Dr. Mehmood Khan, CEO of PepsiCo’s Global Nutrition Group, spoke at a related event on Tuesday, where he emphasised the need for public- private partnerships. He stated explicitly that his job was to help the group grow to 30 billion dollars by 2020, and reminded the audience, “Processing (foods) equals preservation of important food groups.”

Resistance to hard targets

WHO recommended setting a goal of reducing NCD deaths by 25 percent by the year 2025, a target whose exclusion from the political declaration drew criticism from many leaders. Monitoring NCDs and setting reduction targets are the next crucial steps – and challenges – they said.

“Without clear targets there will be neither accountability nor a real incentive to deliver,” Princess Dina Mired of Jordan, director of the King Hussein Cancer Foundation in Jordan, told the General Assembly on Monday.

Joanna Ralston, CEO of the World Heart Forum, a member of the NCD Alliance, highlighted the disparity between NCD rates in developed versus developing countries, where 90 percent of NCD-related deaths occur.

Because “people are increasingly urbanised, living in huge dense cities in low and middle income countries,” their lifestyles and food options have changed, Ralston told IPS. They generally get less exercise and don’t have as many options for healthy food.

“There’s a host of factors that affect this,” she elaborated, ranging from urban planning to agricultural development to trade. These aspects are in some ways part of the problem, but they can also be part of the solution, she said. She also mentioned a need for stronger language surrounding specific targets.

Regulating the amount of sodium allowed in foods, for instance, has a clear impact on cardiovascular disease, Ralston said.

All over the world, evidence points to the feasibility of reducing NCD deaths. The challenge that remains for many countries is simply to take action.

After imposing advertising bans and anti-tobacco laws, Uruguay, for example, saw a 25 percent reduction in smoking over a three-year period. Meanwhile, Brazil has taken steps to increase the amount of physical activity children get at school and to better label foods while reducing sodium content and eliminating trans fats from foods.

WHO estimates that NCD-related deaths will increase by 17 percent in the next decade, but in Africa the increase will be 24 percent. According to the World Economic Forum, over the next 20 years, the global economic impact of the four major NCDs, plus mental ill- health, could total 47 trillion dollars.

Excerpt:

By Elizabeth Whitman
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 16 2011 (IPS)

Bottom trawling, a method of deep-sea fishing, is threatening the existence of ecosystems in the deep oceans, wreaking nearly irrevocable havoc on thousands of species and the very habitat in which they live.

Even so, recent international efforts to limit the damage have been relatively ineffective, experts said this week at the United Nations.

Deep-sea bottom trawling is viewed as the most serious threat to fragile deep-sea ecosystems, which, once damaged, can take decades if not centuries to recover.

Over the past five years, the United Nations General Assembly (GA) has passed two resolutions in an effort to protect deep-sea areas and the biodiversity unique to them, yet many countries continue to flout the commitments to prevent adverse impacts on deep-sea species and ecosystems, commitments to which they agreed in 2006 and 2009.

Resolutions have not been fully implemented, nor are deep-sea fisheries being managed sustainably, scientists who attended a workshop last May to review fisheries management concluded. They published their findings in a report, which also stated that vulnerable marine ecosystems (VMEs) are not being sufficiently protected from the devastation that bottom fishing wreaks.

Ineffective resolutions

In 2006, the GA resolution called upon “regional fisheries management organisations” to assess, identify and manage areas particularly vulnerable to adverse impacts of bottom fishing, including closing certain areas if necessary.

The resolution in 2009 reiterated key elements of its predecessor, calling for the same fisheries management organisations to strengthen implementation of the earlier measures, a sign that they had not accomplished what they were intended to.

This week, the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC) published a report noting issues such as a lack of regulation, lack of implementation of U.N. resolutions, and the ineffectiveness of areas closed to deep-sea fishing.

In some areas, it said, existing conservation efforts are often only move-on rules, where once a vessel catches a threshold weight of a certain species in a single trawl, it must leave the area and report it. The DSCC considered these rules “of limited value given the high threshold levels established as triggers” to move on from an established area.

Furthermore, “The deep-sea fisheries in the (North East Atlantic) area are characterised by extensive discarding, misreporting and non- reporting of catches,” said the DSCC report.

Destructive methods vs. fragile ecosystem

Bottom trawl fishing is a highly destructive and inefficient method of fishing that accounts for more than 95 percent of the bottom fish catch in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. It has been banned in international waters around Antarctica. In the northeast Atlantic, deep-sea fishing takes place at a range of 400 to 1,700 metres. Light can only penetrate to a depth of about 200 metres.

A boat, called a trawler, drags a funnel shaped net on or just above the bottom of the ocean floor, catching all that falls into the net’s path. In some instances, up to 50 percent or more of what is caught may be thrown back into the sea. Scientists estimate that zero percent of what is discarded, called bycatch, actually survives once returned to the sea.

Off the coast of Ireland, deep-sea fish abundance down to 1,500 metres has declined by 70 percent, studies have shown, although decreases in fish abundance have been observed down to a depth of 2,500 metres. The fact that deep-sea fishing does not reach to that depth shows how its impact extends far beyond the boundaries of areas directly fished.

Phil Weaver of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK, said during a panel at the U.N. on Thursday that deep-sea fishing can have an impact on an area close to three times that actually fished.

Bottom fishing “destroys complex seabed habitats… It reduces the three-dimensional complexity of the seabed,” Alex Rogers of Oxford University and a member of the group of scientists who met in May, told IPS. Ultimately, it eliminates habitats for organisms such as coral that in turn become habitats for yet more organisms, he added.

Despite the wide swath of destruction bottom fishing cuts, in the European Union’s fishing industry, the reported 43,000 tonnes of deep-sea catch in 2008 accounted for only 1.8 percent of all fish landed in the EU.

“Although the overall contribution to fish catch is low, the value to the individual vessels can be quite high,” Rogers explained. Thus continuing bottom fishing is profitable on a smaller scale, even if it represents only a tiny percentage of all fish caught.

Scientists estimate the deep sea to contain the majority of 750,000 undiscovered marine species worldwide. The deep sea is also home to coral reefs, some as old as 8,500 years. By destroying coral reefs, bottom fishing devastates entire ecosystems, destroying the very structure in which the ecosystem is contained and can thrive.

Deep-sea fish species are particularly vulnerable to harm, especially in comparison with shallow-water species. They grow slowly and reproduce late in their lives, and some species are known to live 150 years or longer.

Deep-sea fishing is also damaging because it lifts sediment off of the seabed, at which point it can be scattered and redistributed throughout the ocean, causing further environmental complications.

Excerpt:

By Elizabeth Whitman
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 15 2011 (IPS)

Next month, the world’s population will reach seven billion people, a landmark that the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) is hailing in its drive to raise awareness about the need for global cooperation to solve issues of development.

On Wednesday, U.N. and civil society leaders gathered in a panel to discuss some of the challenges to components critical to economic and social development, especially health and education, as part of its 7 Billion Actions initiative, an awareness campaign that aims to serve as a platform for individuals, businesses, governments, and many others to facilitate collective action.

Although the resources needed to support a global population of seven billion are not disproportionately greater than those necessary to support 6.8, or 6.9 billion, the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) called the milestone “a rare call- to-action opportunity to renew global commitment for a healthy and sustainable world”.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon remarked in his opening statement that those born today are born into “a world of contradictions”, one simultaneously containing extreme poverty and great wealth, and starving communities yet plenty of food. These paradoxes underscored what he called the “vast implications” of reaching a global population of seven billion.

Food and water crises, migration, land and conflicts are some of the issues that must be dealt with as the earth’s population continues growing, said Babatunde Osotimehin, UNFPA executive director and one of Wednesday’s panellists. And while addressing health, family planning, and education should be priorities, “there is no one size fits all” solution, he emphasised.

Critically analysing what each country’s circumstances would determine what steps would contribute most to that country’s development, he said.

Similarly, Carsten Staur, permanent representative of Denmark to the U.N., cautioned that development must happen in a sustainable fashion.

“Seven billion is basically a wakeup call” driving home the importance of sustainable economic development, he said, adding that it begs the question of what it actually takes to create sustainable development, especially since as the global population grows, he noted, resources are consumed at an accelerating rate.

At its current growth rate, the world’s population is projected reach nine billion by 2050 and 10 billion by 2100, according to the U.N.

Osotimehin told IPS that the 1.8 billion youth in the world, 90 percent of whom live in developing countries, must be regarded “as the face of the next phase of development” and therefore given access to education and other resources.

Female empowerment key to development

Empowerment of and investment in women and girls was, is, and will continue to be possibly the most critical element of efforts and initiatives for countries’ development, the panellists agreed, and moderator Riz Khan, an international television host, remarked that in the developing world, women lead innovation.

Women produce half of the world’s food and perform 66 percent of the world’s work, yet earn just 10 percent of the world’s income and own one percent of its property, says the agency UN Women.

Osotimehin told IPS that UNFPA needed to “create an awareness of people’s rights and needs… particularly women and young girls,” who are the most vulnerable sector of the population, and ensure that girls’ education was a priority.

U.N. agencies across the board, including UNFPA and UN Women, have acknowledged that cultural barriers can be obstacles to female empowerment, especially where tradition dictates that girls stay home and not go to school, and instead marry early. These agencies emphasise that government and grassroots initiatives must alter these expectations and enable girls to attend school and women to control how many children they want and when.

Naveen Salvadurai, co-founder of Foursquare and panel member, highlighted the advantages of new media in educating girls. In order to see how others approach similar problems, youth embrace social media and networking, even across different cultures, he said.

Salvadurai also suggested that developing countries not adhere to developed countries as an ideal model for development, because certain standards in industrialised countries simply aren’t practical.

For instance, in cities in developing countries as well as developed ones, constructing well-designed public transit systems is far more practical, efficient, and sustainable than trying to ensure that everyone has a car, Salvadurai said.

He argued that development efforts skip the “rich world check list” and directly address the specific needs of less developed countries in order to be most effective and efficient, an idea that, given the fact the population and its needs will only continue to grow, may have some merit.

Excerpt:

By Elizabeth Whitman
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 15 2011 (IPS)

Despite the frenzy of media attention bestowed upon Palestine’s expected bid for statehood at the United Nations later this month, some doubt the impact it would have on the political complexities of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or the humanitarian issues and human rights abuses that many Palestinians face regularly.

Rashid Khalidi, a professor at Columbia University and outspoken proponent of Palestinian rights, is sceptical that a vote at the U.N. on Palestine, through the Security Council or the General Assembly, would immediately or significantly alter the political realities of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

In a panel in New York on Monday, he criticised the “consecration” of the idea that the solution to the Palestinian problem is to create an entity out of the Occupied Palestinian Territories of Gaza and the West Bank, and noted that the necessary prerequisites to dismantle the Israeli occupation of Palestine are currently non-existent.

Still, Khalidi acknowledged that membership at the U.N. would increase Palestine’s international recognition and expand its access to resources and treaties that would strengthen its diplomatic hand.

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice also questioned the impact of a bid for statehood at the U.N., though for different reasons.

“After whatever show we have in the United Nations is done, what will change in the real world for the Palestinian people? The answer is nothing, sadly,” she told reporters on Monday in Washington.

Karima Bennoune, a professor at Rutgers School of Law-Newark who was on the same panel in New York on Monday, told IPS in an email that, “Formal statehood may be important for certain reasons, but what is most important is translating that statehood into concrete improvement in the protection of human rights on the ground.”

The Palestinians had been considering two options, not mutually exclusive, to change Palestine’s status at the U.N. and boost its international political leverage. One was to seek full statehood through the Security Council and the other to upgrade its current status from observer to observer state through a resolution in the General Assembly.

An official for the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) announced on Tuesday that it would apply to the United Nations Security Council for full recognition as a state, although Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, president of the 66th Session of the GA, also told reporters Tuesday that whether the Palestinians would go through the Security Council or the GA was unclear.

An unsuccessful bid for statehood through the Security Council would not preclude the Palestinians from seeking non-member observer state status in the 193-member General Assembly via a resolution that requires only a simply majority of member states to support it in order to pass – an effort almost certain to succeed.

U.S. opposes Palestinian bid

The United States, one of five permanent members with veto power in the 15-member Security Council, has said that it would veto any Palestinian bid for full membership as a state. This threat has not deterred the Palestinians and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) from preparing the U.N. request.

The United States opposes any efforts by Palestine to seek a vote at the U.N. Rice argued on Monday that recognition of Palestinian state in the General Assembly went against Palestinian interests.

She called direct negotiations “the absolute only way” to reach a two-state solution, which the U.S. supports, and said that pushing for statehood would hurt chances to renew peace negotiations, currently frozen, between Israelis and Palestinians.

Khalidi told IPS, however, that several factors, namely the political climates in the U.S. and Israel and the current state of Palestinian leadership, were “not propitious to negotiations” and thus called into question whether the Palestinians are really sacrificing the option of renewed negotiations by pushing for statehood at the U.N.

Already qualified for statehood

Ironically, although Palestine is seeking statehood recognition at the U.N., it already meets the requirements of international law that define a state.

Bennoune said during Monday’s panel that strong arguments can be made that Palestine meets the four criteria for statehood found in the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, the classic statement of the international law requirements for statehood.

Although these qualifications have been subject to much debate, Palestine possesses a population, the core of a defined territory, and the equivalent of a government, and is able to conduct relations with other states so as to meet the thresholds required in international practice, Bennoune said.

“Being a state matters,” she told attendees during Monday’s panel, since in this age, states remain the leading international legal actors. In many ways, statehood is a prerequisite for developing the institutions and policies necessary for growth and development both domestically and internationally.

Bennoune added that that although international law should provide a framework for peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, it has been more or less excluded from the debate in the United States about these issues.

The fact that Palestinian leadership sought to seek statehood recognition from a multilateral channel such as the U.N. marked Palestine’s return to an international forum after two decades of direct talks brokered by the United States, Khalidi said.

Still, “I don’t see how you can keep the U.S. out of any negotiations,” he told IPS.

The world will be watching what happens at the U.N. after Sep. 23, when Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is expected to submit Palestine’s bid for statehood at the U.N. But the world will have to keep watching in the following weeks and months in order to witness the more concrete implications of Palestine’s bid for statehood.

Excerpt:

By Elizabeth Whitman
NEW YORK, Sep 11 2011 (IPS)

Karen Keyworth is frustrated by the racial profiling and ignorance frequently displayed towards Muslims and Arabs in the United States after 9/11.

Enrolment in Islamic schools in the U.S. has risen from about 32,000 in 2006 to 40,000 or more today. Credit: Courtesy of ISLA

A Muslim for 35 years, she said she has witnessed and experienced the “incredible ignorance” of those who equate Islam with terrorism, a belief she senses has worsened steadily since 9/11.

The effects of profiling have been seen and felt in a range of ways, but a less visible one has been the increase in enrolment in Islamic schools across the U.S.

According to Keyworth, co-founder and director of education at the Islamic Schools League of America (ISLA), enrolment in Islamic schools has risen from about 32,000 in 2006 to about 40,000 or more today, even though the increase in the number of Islamic schools over the same time period is only between five and 15.

Keyworth said that ISLA hadn’t looked at reasons for increases in enrolment, but she noted that some Islamic schools have indicated that parents are placing their kids in Islamic schools because of the discrimination they’ve faced in public ones.

Parents decide to enrol their children in certain schools for many reasons, she explained, but “safety is an important issue”, though she could not declare direct links between 9/11, greater discrimination in non-Islamic schools, and increased enrolment in Islamic schools.

Janet Penn, executive director of Youth LEAD, suggested that the growth in enrolment in Islamic schools could also be due to parents’ wanting their children to maintain an Islamic identity in a post-9/11 world. She explained that after 9/11, she saw some Muslims wanting to dissociate themselves from Islam, while others chose to embrace it.

Youth LEAD is a non-profit based in Sharon, Massachusetts devoted to facilitating interfaith dialogue and community-building activities among youth from different faiths and backgrounds.

The enrolment numbers in Islamic schools may represent a minority of the U.S. population, but they, along with many other incidents and phenomena, nevertheless beg further examination of the ideas that have continued to shape U.S. culture, society and beliefs since then.

Exploiting stereotypes

The weeks immediately following 9/11 contain stories of large-scale arrests and detention of Arab and Muslim Muslims as primary suspects of terrorism.

In November 2001, then-U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft announced sweeping new counter-terrorism measures. One of them included supposedly voluntary interviews conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation or other law enforcement personnel of more than 5,000 men, mostly Middle Eastern, in the United States on temporary visas, even if they weren’t suspected of any crimes.

Politicians and the media are responsible for exploiting the relationship between the 9/11 attacks and extremist political Islam, Keyworth believed. Rather than clarifying the fact that extremist political Islam is a complete departure from the mainstream moderate Islam practiced by the vast majority of more than 1.5 billion Muslims around the world, the media instead has not stopped “painting every Muslim as a terrorist”, she said.

Now, Keyworth explained, Muslims are being asked, “Can you be a Muslim and an American – a loyal American?”, a question that suggests the two identities are incompatible.

She believes political leaders should do better educating the public and dispelling inaccurate stereotypes and portrayals of Muslims. Yet they don’t, because addressing the issue is not politically expedient, she said.

Arab and Muslim Americans are not the only ones targeted for discrimination. Others with similar features, or simply mistaken for Arab or Muslim through sheer ignorance, have been targeted as well. Cases have been reported where Sikhs and Hindus, for instance, were subjected to racial profiling.

Hope for a better future

Still, 9/11 has brought about positive as well as negative change in U.S. society, some say, and the opportunity for change and growth is certainly present.

Penn said she believes that Muslims have become more outspoken in trying to educate their communities about Islam and Muslims in order to dispel racial profiling and stereotypes.

Before 9/11, Muslims in the community were invisible, she told IPS. “After 9/11, there was a huge upsurge in interfaith activities,” where Muslims put forth “large-scale efforts to say, ‘This is who we are, please get to know us,'” she added.

Such community activism can help to counter the media’s racial profiling, Penn stated. But she also acknowledged the engagement required in order to make those efforts successful.

“You can live in a diverse place and not ever interact,” she pointed out.

Despite her critique of the media and politicians, Keyworth as well expressed optimism that U.S. society could learn to cope with its fears about threats of terrorism – without resorting to stereotyping and racial profiling.

Keyworth shared that on an individual level she had seen signs of increased awareness and understanding that she found encouraging. And even though she believes that widespread societal change in the country is a long ways off, “I think here is enormous hope,” she concluded.

Excerpt:

By Elizabeth Whitman
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 8 2011 (IPS)

Each day, one thousand women die in childbirth and one million people become infected with sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including 7,000 cases of HIV. Yet these numbers are preventable, experts insist, when countries possess the resources and willpower to address and deal with them.

Dignitaries and high-level officials gathered this week to discuss reproductive health commodity security (RHCS), or, simply put, ensuring that people have access to essentials of reproductive health including contraceptives and drugs for safer maternal health and childbirth.

Sponsored by the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), the two-day conference underscored the importance of reproductive and sexual health, especially in developing countries, to improve public health and quality of life as well as to empower girls and women.

RHCS is akin to the concept of food security, explained Jagdish Upadhyay, chief of UNFPA’s Commodity Security Branch, meaning that these commodities need to be consistently available and affordable to communities rich and poor, in areas urban and rural, to the educated and the undereducated.

Technology has made a remarkable difference in many countries to improve governments’ management of multiple aspects of reproductive health. CHANNEL is one such programme that been installed in countries such as Madagascar, Senegal and Sudan, enabling them to better track storage levels of contraceptives and medicines, so that when stock levels run low they are replenished.

A consensus from the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo declared that reproductive health was a basic human right. In order to transform such a concept into reality, however, states must build the infrastructure that allows all individuals to obtain and use their choice of affordable quality productive health supplies whenever they need them, said Dr. Kechi Ogbuagu, a technical adviser to the Commodity Security Branch in UNFPA.

A starting point for global health and development

Security for reproductive health commodities is viewed as an area essential to human and economic development. It is “one element of many other processes that are going on that are all contributing to similar outcomes to improve the health and the lives of women and children,” said Julia Bunting of the UK’s Department for International Development, during a presentation to dignitaries and officials.

Closely connected to public health, healthcare systems, women’s rights, education, and several other areas marked crucial as priorities for development in the developing world, establishing RHCS can help begin or contribute to development in those areas for several reasons.

Ideally, not only does reproductive health security rely upon infrastructure that can serve other health needs, but it also demands that communities engage with the topic of sexual and reproductive health, altering social and cultural dynamics and empowering women by allowing them to take charge of when they want children, and how many.

“Reproductive health commodity security is a tool, a tool for ensuring that we’re going to empower women to make choices for themselves,” Babtunde Osotimehin, executive director of UNFPA, told IPS.

The point at which women can make those choices “almost always correspondents to economic development” because it reflects the level of education and empowerment those women have, he said.

“Women are drivers of the economy in many developing countries,” he added.

Experts acknowledged, however, that despite the multiple benefits RHCS carries, many countries still have a way to go before they enjoy them or before they have security in reproductive health commodities.

UNFPA estimates that 215 million women in the developing world have an unmet need for. These women qualify as having “unmet need” because they want to delay or avoid pregnancy yet use traditional and less effective methods of contraception, or none at all.

UNFPA has also noted areas of success, citing work by its Global Programme to Enhance Reproductive Health Commodity Security, a framework to assist countries and provide them with support. In Ethiopia, the contraceptive prevalence rate rose from six percent in 2003 to 30 percent in 2009.

Challenges to RHCS

Though some countries have demonstrated, measurable success in RHCS, speakers and officials acknowledged the many challenges that lie ahead in securing reproductive health commodities, especially for communities in developing countries.

Challenges tend to vary from country to country, said Osotimehin, but some parallels include cultural or political “gatekeepers” who can either hinder or facilitate the ability to make their own choices, governments who don’t pay health commodities the necessary attention or resources, and health systems that don’t work.

Public health sustainability derives from governments’ putting domestic resources to reproductive commodities on a continual basis, Osotimehin elaborated. If governments don’t contribute the necessary resources or political will, change – ranging from cultural norms and beliefs to health infrastructure – will be quite limited.

Speakers emphasised the fact that unmet need is greater in rural or poor areas and populations with lower levels of education, where social and cultural norms may threaten open discussion or action towards ensuring RHCS.

Experts also noted that additional financial resources are always needed for RHCS.

In spite of the challenges ahead, Osotimehin stressed that RHCS was absolutely crucial and one of the most important issues countries could focus on. “It saves lives, and it helps people to develop,” he concluded.

Excerpt:

By Elizabeth Whitman
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 5 2011 (IPS)

On Aug. 29, 1949, the Soviet Union conducted the first of 456 nuclear tests in Semipalatinsk in Eastern Kazakhstan, at the site where it ultimately held over two-thirds of all Soviet nuclear tests without warning inhabitants of the region of the impact of exposure to these tests.

On Aug. 29, 1991 the site closed, yet the devastating health and environmental effects continue to plague the region to this day.

With last week marking the 20th anniversary closure of the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site and the second International Day Against Nuclear Tests, world leaders and U.N. officials gathered to discuss the issue of nuclear testing.

They convened in a high level workshop on Thursday and an informal meeting of the General Assembly on Friday.

In the wide array of views and concepts presented in these gatherings, however, consensus seemed clear on only one point: the fact that efforts to ban nuclear testing and indeed, to entirely eliminate nuclear weapons around the world, are clouded with political overtones and motives.

Meanwhile, states with nuclear weapons continue to depend upon those capabilities for strength and influence in areas of international security and relations, and politics overshadow the fact that nuclear testing poses serious hazards to human and environmental health and nuclear weapons have the ability to destroy the planet.

In Semipalatinsk, for instance, the death rate is extremely high and the rate of cancerous diseases there is at critical levels. Serious birth defects are common, with incidences of mental retardation three to five times higher than average, and the average life expectancy is less than 50 years.

“No one can say what will be the results after one, or two, or three generations” of living in a region contaminated by four decades of nuclear testing, Ermek Kosherbayev, deputy governor of East Kazakhstan, which contains the Semipalatinsk region, told IPS.

The government there continues efforts to assist people with their traditional livelihood of agriculture, yet doing so is not only difficult but also dangerous when the very dirt and water can be tainted by radiation.

Perhaps because its people understand firsthand the horrors of living with the effects of nuclear testing, Kazakhstan has fully supported efforts to ban nuclear testing and nuclear weaponry, and has given up its nuclear arsenal.

The nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) went into effect in 1970, during the middle of the Cold War, when concepts of security were driven by the idea of nuclear deterrence – that if a state possessed nuclear weapons, it would not be attacked.

Today, 189 states are party to the treaty, with five of them possessing nuclear weapons. Those countries are China, France, Russia, Britain and the United States. Three states – India, Israel and Pakistan – are not party to the treaty, although India and Pakistan have declared that they possess nuclear weapons and Israel has undeclared but widely acknowledged nuclear capabilities. North Korea withdrew from the treaty in 2003.

A Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) was approved in 1996 but is not in force, and this week, officials stressed the importance of implementing the CTBT and its obligations.

Joseph Deiss, president of the 65th General Assembly, stated Friday, “The current international moratorium on nuclear tests, respected by almost all states, is not a substitute for the full implementation” of the CTBT.

In a high-level workshop on Thursday, participants noted that implementation of the CTBT was a long overdue and crucial step towards global nuclear disarmament, especially since most countries have agreed that nuclear testing is no longer useful. Rather, suggested Annika Thunborg, representative of the executive secretary of the Preparatory Commission for the CTBT, keeping open the option of nuclear testing is a status symbol for countries.

Committing to nuclear disarmament, or to a ban on nuclear testing, often ends up being more about power than about nuclear weapons themselves, participants of the workshop noted. Several of those who commented suggested that weapons played perhaps a symbolic role, and that those who did not want to see progress in non-proliferation could block progress.

Another issue in non-proliferation and test ban talks was the preoccupation with which states possessed nuclear weapons and whether they were categorised as good or bad states, rather than the acknowledgement that nuclear weapons are inherently dangerous, no matter who possesses them.

In addition, “the concept of deterrence does not work”, said Libran Cabctulan, chair of the 2010 NPT Review Conference in Thursday’s workshop, citing the fact that in the future, nuclear weapons users are more likely to be non-state actors rather than states. “Non-state actors have no return address,” he added.

All in all, the fact that numerous preconditions and political concerns detracted from concrete progress and productive discussion was made quite clear.

At the informal GA meeting on Friday, Eshagh Al Habib, Iranian ambassador to the U.N., urged Israel, without naming the country, “to place promptly all its nuclear facilities under the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) full-scope safeguards.” Yet Iran itself has come under fire for not cooperating with IAEA inspectors.

The IAEA is an international body responsible for ensuring that nuclear capabilities are used for peaceful purposes.

At the same meeting on Friday, Enkhetsetseg Ochir, Mongolian ambassador to the U.N., posed the question, “Are military and political considerations more important than the health and well- being of people?” They are not, she said emphatically.

For now, however, in efforts to end nuclear testing, those considerations do take priority. Whether that agenda will change remains to be seen.

Excerpt:

By Elizabeth Whitman
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 2 2011 (IPS)

A highly anticipated and controversial report on Israel’s May 2010 interception of an aid flotilla bound for the Gaza Strip and subsequent killing of nine civilians and wounding of many others was finally leaked on Thursday, as diplomatic relations between Israel and Turkey continued to deteriorate.

The report stated that Israel’s decision to board flotilla vessels was “excessive and unreasonable” and that Israel had provided “no satisfactory explanation” regarding the nine deaths resulting from that decision. It suggested that Israel offer financial compensation to injured victims and families of the deceased.

Turkey announced Friday that it was replacing its ambassador to Israel with a second secretary and expelling Israel’s ambassador to Turkey.

The New York Times obtained and published a copy of the report containing the conclusions of a panel commissioned by the secretary- general of the United Nations and led by Geoffrey Palmer, former prime minister of New Zealand, and Alvaro Uribe, former president of Colombia. One representative each from Turkey and Israel also sat on the panel.

In May 2010, a flotilla of six vessels carrying humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip attempted to break Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza. When the flotilla refused to change course as per Israeli directions, Israeli soldiers resorted to force, boarding the Mavi Marmara and killing nine on board as well as wounding many others.

In contradiction to previous statements and findings of the United Nations, the Palmer report found Israel’s naval blockade to be a “legitimate security measure” and that “its implementation complied with the requirements of international law”. The U.N. position on the Gaza blockade has long been that it ought to be lifted but that those seeking to bring aid to Gaza should utilise established routes and procedures.

Both Israel and Turkey sought to use the report’s release as a political tool, with Turkey hoping that delaying it might force Israel to yield to diplomatic demands, such as Turkey’s request for Israel to apologise for its actions in May 2010. Meanwhile, Israel sought as late as this week to delay the report’s release by another six months, supposedly to buy the government time to better deal with the report’s consequences.

The report’s conclusions have been met with varying levels of scepticism and outrage, and its impact so far appears to lie mainly in diplomatic realms. In addition to downgrading relations with Israel, Turkey has said it will seek to bring the legality of the blockade to the International Court of Justice, the principal judicial organ of the United Nations which settles disputes between states.

A spokesperson for Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon refused to comment on whether the report represented the views of the U.N., insisting on awaiting Ban’s official comments and saying only, “It is the report of the commissioners who analysed the situation.”

Contradictory conclusions

In September 2010, a fact-finding mission of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) unequivocally declared Israel’s interception of the flotilla illegal, saying “the flotilla presented no imminent threat” to Israel and that “the conduct of the Israeli military and other personnel towards the flotilla passengers… constituted a grave violation of human rights law and international humanitarian law.”

But in April of this year Israel rejected those conclusions, and so the U.N. secretary-general commissioned a second panel – the Palmer commission – in August 2010 to re-examine the legality of Israeli intervention.

Even the report itself contains inconsistencies. Israel’s “implementation [of the blockade] complied with the requirements of international law” even as that very implementation involved “excessive” use of force and killings in a manner that resembled execution rather than self-defence.

Israel has imposed economic sanctions on the Gaza Strip and its 1.5 million inhabitants since 2006, after Hamas, a group Israel and the U.S. label as terrorist, won legislative elections there. In 2007, Israel heightened the already choking restrictions to a full closure, citing security concerns.

The International Committee of the Red Cross in June 2010 called the closure “devastating”, as it constituted “collective punishment” that violated international humanitarian law. The September UNHRC report noted that enforcement of a blockade may not continue “where it inflicts disproportionate damage on the civilian population”.

Problematic framework

Experts agreed that the structure of the panel was inherently faulty and thus compromised the reliability and objectivity of its conclusions. The report itself acknowledged that the sources the panel relied on were national investigative reports from Israel and Turkey, and it could neither compel witnesses to provide evidence nor conduct criminal investigations.

Richard Falk, former professor of international law at Princeton University and two-time U.N. special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, said that the panel operated under an “unacceptable framework” not only because it relied solely on reports from the two countries but also because panel members lacked the relevant experience to examine issues inherent in the flotilla event.

“I think there are really questionable elements connected with the U.N. procedure for assessing legal responsibilities and really dealing appropriately with an incident of this magnitude where people lost their lives unnecessarily,” Falk told IPS.

Similarly, “There are serious problems with the Panel’s composition, mandate and legal analysis,” said Audrey Bomse, legal adviser to the Free Gaza Movement, in a press statement.

Quoting the HRC’s Fact-Finding Mission, the statement noted that “public confidence in any investigative process … is not enhanced when the subject of the investigation either investigates himself or plays a pivotal role in the process.”

Falk suggested that the report focused on the wrong topics as well. “There’s nothing in the Palmer report that separates the security issues which are fairly trivial from the humanitarian issues which are fundamental and central,” he pointed out.

The report paradoxically stated, “The Panel has searched for solutions that will allow Israel, Turkey and the international community to put the incident behind them.”

Yet with the plummeting of Turkish-Israeli relations and the continued disgust in much of the international community at Israel’s refusal to relent in its responses to its actions, the incident remains as prominent as ever.

Excerpt:

By Elizabeth Whitman
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 28 2011 (IPS)

For the majority of the world’s population, citizenship is a fact of life, something so fundamental that the idea of not being citizen to any state seems unfathomable. Yet for 12 million people worldwide, ordinary life as most people expect it is impossible because they belong to no country and are thus deprived of basic rights.

The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) launched a campaign last week to raise awareness about the issue of statelessness, and to rally states to increase their efforts to address the struggles faced by stateless inhabitants – not citizens – of their countries.

Stateless communities and individuals “are in desperate need of help because they live in a nightmarish legal limbo,” said António Guterres, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

Without legal status, these people are rendered relatively helpless to ameliorate their situations. In some countries, legislation is what prevents them from obtaining citizenship, yet they cannot vote and are not constituents of any legal representative. As a result, their voices often go unheard and their plight unnoticed.

In addition to these legal challenges, being stateless prevents people from accessing basic rights and leading normal lives. Without citizenship, receiving an education, finding employment, getting married, opening a bank account, or accessing health care become difficult if not impossible.

In 1954, states held the first convention relating to statelessness and managed to define who is considered stateless. In 1961, they held the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, agreeing on principles and a legal framework to help states reduce statelessness in their own laws. To date, only 66 states have signed the 1954 convention and 38 are party to the 1961 convention.

UNHCR estimates 12 million people are stateless in the world, but acknowledges that the very definition of statelessness complicates the gathering of accurate information, and some estimate that the number may be as many as 15 million globally.

Slipping Through the Cracks

An individual can lose his or her citizenship in several different ways. One of the most common instances is after a state ceases to exist, such as after the breakup of the Soviet Union and several of its republics in the 1990s. Other causes include racial or ethnic discrimination, discrimination against women, or simple negligence to register a child at birth.

Depending on the state, the legal pathway to becoming a citizen may be extremely expensive or complicated, or may not exist at all.

Russians living in Kazakhstan after the collapse of the Soviet Union, for instance, were not eligible to apply for Kazakh citizenship after their Soviet Union citizenships became defunct. But unless they had lived in Russia for a certain period of time, they could not apply for Russian nationality either.

“These are problems that are solvable through administrative or legislative action,” Vincent Cochetel, a senior UNHCR staff member who was kidnapped near Chechnya in 1998, told IPS. Though in some countries, especially ones with racially or ethnically discriminatory practices and laws, laws “systematically create more obstacles for one part of the population to get access to citizenship.”

Few states have established laws that address such situations to override discrimination and grant stateless people citizenship. The issue is “totally overlooked by many countries,” Cochetel said, while other countries possess a “culture of denial” and seek to shift responsibility for stateless people within their borders onto other countries. In general, he said the issue possesses “not much traction” in the international community.

The commonly held belief that statelessness is a phenomenon of the past also impedes legal progress. What UNHCR hopes to do is convince states of the issue’s urgency so that they “put in place practical measures to assist people to be documented and to get a right to nationality,” Cochetel explained, and work with states to eliminate barriers that lead to or create statelessness.

Being stateless has dire consequences for such individuals, because “without nationality there is no access to anything,” Cochetel explained. Many of these individuals are part of marginalised communities with no government or embassy to turn to for protection. With limited education or employment opportunities, their very livelihoods are threatened.

A Global Issue

Statelessness is a problem existing in many parts of the world, though UNHCR highlighted Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and some African countries as places where it was “particularly acute”.

Others, including Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, states from the former Yugoslavia, Kyrgyzstan and Kenya, were considered “works in progress” for amending legislation, though they have yet to fully implement it.

Some countries have successfully implemented laws granting citizenship to certain communities and minority groups. Bangladesh, Brazil, Iraq, Vietnam, and Indonesia all recently amended or passed constitutions or laws to make them more inclusive of those previously without citizenship due to gender, ethnicity, birth location, or time spent abroad.

UNHCR’s campaign will continue for several months and U.N. headquarters in New York is currently hosting an exhibit called “Nowhere People” featuring photographs and information on the world’s stateless.

Excerpt:

By Elizabeth Whitman
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 25 2011 (IPS)

Four months before 2012 – the year a conference is slated to be held on freeing the Middle East region of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) – no date, facilitator, or host country has been named.

At the Non- Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference in 2010, parties to the treaty agreed to organise a conference in 2012 involving all states in the Middle East to discuss biological, chemical, and nuclear disarmament in the region – in accordance with the 1995 Resolution on the Middle East. The United States, the United Kingdom, Russia and the United Nations Secretary General were to lead these efforts.

Though planning discussions are underway among high level officials from both Middle Eastern governments and the governments leading the planning effort, the fact that these countries have not yet named a host country, facilitator, or date – all of which are necessary to hold the meeting – is “disappointing,” said Anne Penketh, Washington director of the British American Security Information Council, in an interview with IPS.

Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association also noted that intensive consultations to plan for the meeting were taking place. But he expressed worry that, provided the conference does happen, states will have been too focused on logistics in the lead up to the meeting rather than its substance to make it productive.

Though many issues have contributed to the delay in settling on the essential logistics of the conference, a significant one is the fact that states cannot agree over who should host the conference or serve as facilitator.

The very act of bringing together states in the Middle East is a challenge, Kimball emphasised, and agreeing simply to hold a conference was a “breakthrough,” he told IPS. “This is a very challenging proposition – to get Israel and Egypt and Iran and Syria and Saudi Arabia in the same meeting room and to do so in a way that produces a constructive conversation.”

Elephant in the Room

Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal remains an obstacle in many areas of political discussion, but is especially sensitive when the discussion revolves around disarmament. Israel took offence at the final document of the 2010 NPT review conference, which singled out the country for not being a signatory to the agreement.

As a result, according to Penketh and Kimball, the Israeli government is concerned that the 2012 conference could evolve into a meeting focusing singularly on Israel and its nuclear weapons programme.

Yet such a possibility only enhances the benefits to Israel if it participates in the conference. Attending would improve Israel’s credentials in the region, Kimball pointed out. “It would give Israel the opportunity to point out the ways in which other countries in the region need to meet their own chemical, biological, and nuclear non-proliferation obligations,” he added.

Israel is the only country in the Middle East that is not party to the NPT and the fact that it possesses an undeclared nuclear arsenal is widely accepted. Syria and Iran are party to the treaty but are widely believed to be developing chemical and nuclear arsenals, respectively.

Israel’s level of commitment to the 2012 conference is uncertain. It has said in the past that it would participate on the condition that Israel would not be singled out for criticism, and Kimball said that Israel has been “cagey” about whether or not it would participate in the conference.

Yet Penketh said she had spoken with Israeli officials who were “open” to discussions on a WMD free zone, and she said the Israelis remained engaged in the discussion process.

The Israeli Mission to the U.N. did not respond to a request for comment.

Peace in the Middle East

The current political upheaval and uncertainty sweeping through many countries in the Middle East does not simplify discussion over what is already an extremely complicated and sensitive topic.

Recently, disarmament “has not been the top issue on the diplomatic agenda for these countries,” Kimball noted. As a result, the planning process has been delayed.

Yet even if governments are preoccupied, the unrest makes the case for a disarmament conference, especially one where Israel sits down with all of its neighbours, all the more compelling, said Penketh.

She said that some countries might seize on the unrest as an excuse not to attend the 2012 conference but that she hadn’t seen concrete evidence that any countries actually intended to do so.

Disarmament has always been closely connected to the Middle East peace process, especially because for one of the key players in the peace process, Israel, security is a top priority.

In an email to IPS, Richard Butler, former U.N. weapons inspector, called disarmament “intrinsically important” to the peace process.

But Penketh suggests there is a “strong argument” for separating the peace and disarmament processes.

Regardless of the connection between disarmament in the Middle East and the peace process in the region or what form it takes, however, both are long and complicated efforts requiring time and consistent commitment. Disarmament in the Middle East cannot be accomplished over the course of a single conference, but without such an initiative, progress is even more unlikely.

“Things are moving too slowly,” Penketh concluded. “But they are moving.”

Excerpt:

By Elizabeth Whitman
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 19 2011 (IPS)

The first High Level Meeting on Non-Communicable Diseases is scheduled to take place one month from now, but U.N. member states are lagging in preparing for it, an alliance of civil society organisations says.

The draft of the political declaration that will be the outcome of the meeting contains “no overarching goal” or mechanism for following up on member states’ commitments, the Non-Communicable Disease Alliance wrote in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Instead, “sound proposals” for the draft “are being systematically deleted, diluted and downgraded” and replaced with “vague intentions”, the letter said. “Efforts by some member states to postpone and weaken United Nations negotiations” threatened international progress on managing non-communicable diseases, NCDA warned in a press release.

Ann Keeling, chair of the NCDA and CEO of the International Diabetes Federation and a former U.N. employee, said she was “surprised” that member states took so long to take positions on the issue and that preparations had gotten off to a “slow start”.

The four most common non-communicable diseases are cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and chronic respiratory disease. Non- communicable diseases are responsible for 63 percent of global deaths, according to NCDA. The organisation projects 52 million NCD deaths annually by the year 2030.

The NCDA is a coalition of over 2,000 organisations that focus on non-communicable diseases. With members hailing from over 170 countries, the Alliance works at “putting non-communicable diseases on the global agenda”, according to its website.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) said in a response to the NCDA’s letter that non-communicable diseases represent “an enormous burden worldwide that requires global commitment… That is why the United Nations High-level Meeting on NCDs is being held.”

Although the NCDA’s work on the issue was “appreciated”, WHO said it “cannot pre-empt the discussions of Member States” on the upcoming meeting.

Causes of inaction

Preparations for the meeting have fallen by the wayside for several reasons, suggested Keeling, not the least of which is that with the current economic climate, states hesitate to commit any money to any cause at the moment.

Confusion and misunderstanding have also contributed to the inaction- not many are familiar with the label of non-communicable diseases, so some people aren’t sure what kinds of diseases or how many they are dealing with, Keeling told IPS. They also questioned whether the summit would focus primarily on low-income or developing countries.

Keeling stressed, however, that non-communicable diseases are not confined to the developing world, calling them “a truly global issue” that is “not under control in any country in the world”.

Nor are these diseases purely a health issue. Dealing with non- communicable diseases falls into the realm of transport systems, food marketing and human rights, to name a few, Keeling added.

The uncertainty surrounding the dynamics of non-communicable diseases – what they entail, for instance, or where they are to be found – indicates a need for clarification, Keeling pointed out. Otherwise, the summit will be even less productive than lagging preparations have already made it.

“The longer the negotiations have gone on,” Keeling said, the weaker the draft document has grown, a direction that is “entirely unacceptable”. At one point, she said, the document contained proposed targets and measures to deal with non-communicable diseases. Now they’ve been removed.

A global issue

The U.S., Canada and the European Union sought to block proposals to include the goal of cutting preventable non-communicable disease deaths by 25 percent by 2025, said the NCDA’s press release.

Low-income countries that have been guiding the preparations process and pressing for a strong measurable outcome of the meeting have encountered some “pushback” from high income countries like the U.S. and Canada, Keeling said.

Although non-communicable diseases, particularly ones that affect the elderly, have long been associated with high-income countries, now four out of five cases are in low-income countries. This shift could be one reason for more developed countries are investing less time and showing less commitment to the High Level Meeting.

The split between high and low-income countries on the issue of non- communicable diseases is reminiscent of the High Level Meeting on AIDS held last month at the United Nations in New York.

In discussions over the outcome document, divisions over the role of intellectual property rights and level of financial commitment to fighting AIDS emerged along the lines of developed and developing countries with different priorities and vastly different resources.

Similarly, in negotiating a document for the upcoming meeting, “member states are coming from very different positions”, Keeling noted.

The NCDA called on member states to agree on the overarching goal of reducing preventable deaths from NCDS by 25 percent by 2025, a clear timeline for dealing with the four major non-communicable diseases, specific targets and a high-level collaborative initiative that would assess progress.

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By Elizabeth Whitman
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 19 2011 (IPS)

Legislation incorporating gender identity protection has ignited debate among activists for gay and lesbian rights, with some arguing that the legislation actually endangers women and threatens their physical safety, while others contend that gender identity protection is key to obtaining equality for the LGBT community.

“The proliferation of legislation designed to protect ‘gender identity’ and ‘gender expression’ undermines legal protections for females vis-à-vis sex segregated spaces,” wrote lawyers Elizabeth Hungerford and Cathy Brennan, in a response to a call from the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women for communications regarding “alleged violations of human rights that affect the status of women in any country in the world”.

Sex-segregated spaces, such as public bathrooms, are necessary for females especially due to the “documented frequency of male sexual violence against females”, Brennan and Hungerford wrote. “As females, and as lesbians, we seek legal recognition and protection for the potential harm that females may experience.”

Additionally, “‘gender identity’ legislation incorporates stereotypical ideas of ‘what is female’ into law,” they argued, complicating the legislation’s impact from an intellectual as well as from a public health and safety perspective.

Gender identity, according to the LGBT rights group Human Rights Campaign (HRC), “refers to a person’s innate, deeply felt psychological identification as male or female, which may or may not correspond to the person’s body or designated sex at birth.” HRC estimates that anywhere from .25 to one percent of the U.S. population identifies as transgender.

While Brennan, Hungerford, and their supporters worry about the legislation’s implications for women, mainstream LGBT rights groups such as the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and Human Rights Campaign consider gender identity legislation key to pursuing equality for and ending discrimination against gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender/transsexual persons.

In June, the New York Assembly passed a bill to include gender identity and expression with other characteristics, such as age, sex or race, protected from discrimination in employment, education and other areas.

Human Rights Campaign welcomed the vote, praising the Assembly. “Gender identity and expression should not be factored into an individual’s access to education, employment, housing or public accommodations,” HRC president Joe Solmonese said in a statement.

Impinging on women’s rights

Hungerford and Brennan were concerned about the impact that gender identity legislation will have on women’s safety, citing several aspects of gender identity legislation, passed now in 15 states and Washington D.C. and being considered in other states, as causes for concern.

One was the fact that gender identity does not require objective proof, and “merely requires the person seeking protection to assert that he or she identifies as the sex opposite his or her sex at birth”, as they wrote in the communication.

Because existing definitions of gender identity are based on self- identification rather than duration or medical documentation, they create the potential for “a human rights violation against all females”, the communication said.

In an interview with IPS, Brennan described the definition of gender identity as overly broad and the discussion surrounding its role in public policy as lacking nuance, jeopardising female safety.

She cited examples of men entering public female bathrooms, for instance. “Males are already abusing females in that they spy on females in sex-segregated spaces,” she noted. “Do we want to give sanction to that?” She asserted that ample evidence of such behaviour exists, such as examples (compiled by transsexual activist Dana Lane Taylor.

“I’m actually unconcerned about people who are transgender entering sex-segregated space,” Brennan told IPS. “I’m very much concerned, however, that we are adopting a completely over-broad definition that would give cover to non-transgender males to have a reason and a basis for being in that space without question.”

Hungerford and Brennan supported a definition of gender identity as a person’s identification with the sex opposite his or her birth sex that could be supported with evidence, such as history of medical care.

Support for gender identity legislation

Others maintain that gender identity legislation is much needed, however, because discrimination against transgender persons remains strong.

Earlier this year, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force published “Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey”, which found that in Maryland, 71 percent of transgender and gender non-conforming persons reporting suffering harassment and mistreatment in the workplace.

In May, after Nevada passed legislation banning employment discrimination based on gender identity, Task Force Executive Director Rea Carey stated, “The startling statistics and personal stories found in our national survey on transgender discrimination show just how critically necessary these protections are,” and she commended Nevadan lawmakers for the legislation.

Brennan and Hungerford emphasised in their communication that they condemned discrimination against transgender and transsexual persons, but that at the same time, they “abhor[ed] the lack of concern for females that exists in the legislation” fighting discrimination based on gender identity.

“We should be able to come up with a proposal that balances” all efforts and sides, Brennan told IPS. “So we’re just trying to start a conversation” incorporating different perspectives, she concluded.

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By Elizabeth Whitman
NEW YORK, Aug 4 2011 (IPS)

In Shishmaref, an Inupiaq village on an Alaskan barrier island north of the Bering Strait, a way of life is gradually disappearing due to higher temperatures, rising sea levels, declining numbers of sea animals to hunt, and shrinking shorelines wrought by climate change.

The effects of climate change may be felt across the globe, but in the United States, compared to the general population, indigenous peoples feel the impact disproportionately, a report published Wednesday by the National Wildlife Federation concluded.

Because they are dependent on it for their social, cultural, and economic welfare, “indigenous people… have a unique relationship to the natural system in which they live,” Kim Gottschalk, staff attorney for the Native American Rights Fund, told reporters Wednesday.

As a result, “they are the first to be affected” by changes in the climate and physical world, he added.

The average 45 percent unemployment rate among Tribes means that the added costs and damage, both social and economic, resulting from climate change only exacerbate the struggles for communities facing high rates of poverty. Some 565 federally recognised Tribes exist in the United States, which has an American Indian and Alaska Native population of 3.2 million.

In several tribal areas of the U.S., such as Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation, and sections of Washington state home to Hoh, Quinault, and Quileute Tribes, and other sections of the Pacific Northwest inhabited by Tulalip Tribes, changing water flow or glacial melting patterns leading to flooding or shifts in river flows are damaging fisheries and agricultural infrastructure, not to mention homes and buildings.

Funding increases urged

Because the future promises the intensification of extreme weather – bigger snowstorms, for instance, or more serious droughts – rather than its mitigation, the report suggested greater funding to Tribes as the most effective means of dealing with the consequences of climate change.

“Increasing the resiliency of public and private infrastructure… can provide a cushion when extreme weather and climate events occur,” the report recommended.

But climate change adaptation planning requires significant financial resources, as do programmes to educate Tribal youth who will ultimately deal with the impacts of climate change.

Furthermore, in certain programmes, funding for Tribes is managed by the state, so if a state rejects federal funds, Tribes in that state can only obtain funding if they prove to the federal government that the state is not meeting Tribes’ needs – an additional hindrance.

“There has been a history of a lack of funding in order to give Tribes the… financial capacity to participate as they need to as sovereign partners in addressing this global problem,” Gottschalk said.

Not only would additional funding for programmes to manage the effects of climate change benefit Tribes, but some also say that Tribes use those funds more efficiently.

Gary Morishima, a founding member of Our Natural Resources (ONR) – a coalition of over 30 Tribes and Tribal organisations developing a strategy to conserve natural resources – pointed out in an interview with IPS that credible research has shown that “the funding that’s spent to support the efforts of indigenous communities is far more effective” than pouring dollars into government-run, bureaucratic mechanisms.

The report also suggested increasing the energy efficiency of Tribal houses to reduce energy costs for Indian Tribes, who incur some of the highest energy costs in the country.

Native Americans as partners

Native Americans have lived in harmony with nature for generations, with “a tremendous accumulation of knowledge that has been transmitted and shared” through those generations, Morishima said.

“Interconnection between people and land and resources… is really the tribal way,” he added.

That knowledge is precisely the reason groups such as ONR argue for involving Tribes and their perspectives when discussing how to deal with climate change. What Tribes can contribute are time-proven practices that are “sustainable, bountiful and cost effective,” Aguto told reporters.

“When you combine this knowledge… with modern natural resources management practices, you will find a highly effective partnership,” he explained.

A World Bank study declared that in Latin America, lands under the control of indigenous people are less prone to forest fires than other protected areas. This example is outstanding proof, Aguto told IPS, that giving funding to indigenous peoples is an extremely effective way of preventing forest fires.

Those promoting the inclusion of Tribal perspectives in climate change discussions argue that this type of knowledge of indigenous peoples should be applied in other areas of environmental protection.

Still, obtaining funding for indigenous peoples so that their accumulated empirical knowledge can become part of the discussion is a “crucial component” in climate change discussions right now, he added.

Tribes’ way of life follows the concept of reciprocity – one takes resources from the earth but gives back respect and care, Morishima said. Current debates on climate change lack that perspective, he remarked. For these reasons, the viewpoints and beliefs of indigenous peoples need to be considered when discussing climate change.

Cooperation between Tribes, NGOs and the government is essential to combat climate change not only to pool information but also because Tribes are sovereign nations, Gottschalk emphasised during the briefing.

“It is absolutely crucial that they be treated as sovereign partners at nations,” particularly when addressing the effects of climate change, he added.

On Aug. 9, the United Nations will celebrate the International Day of the World’s Indigenous People. First celebrated in 1995, International Day will focus this year on indigenous designs to highlight the need for preserving indigenous cultures.

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