Ice ridges in the Beaufort Sea off the northern coast of Alaska, where Shell is planning to open exploratory wells. Credit: NOAA

By Ethan Freedman
WASHINGTON, Jul 31 2012 (IPS)

Many environmental groups are concerned over a possible extension of drilling expeditions in the Arctic, as oil companies, including Royal Dutch Shell, are set to begin drilling in the region as early as this week.

Shell is planning to open three exploratory wells in Alaska: One in the Chukchi Sea off the state’s northwestern coast, and two in the Beaufort Sea off the northern coast, after delays in production caused by a myriad of factors, including warm weather and production lapses.

An extension of a drilling window would allow the company to drill in the Arctic past the previously agreed-upon deadline of Sep. 24 in the Chukchi Sea, and the end of October in the Beaufort Sea.

Some environmental activists, however, say that the extension of the drilling window is no more than an attempt to make up for lost time.

“It would be really disturbing attempt to move the goal posts,” Travis Nichols, a media officer at Greenpeace, said to IPS. “They haven’t been able to get their fleet in order. They want to change the rules to get the administration to cater to their needs.”

The Shell project in the Arctic, originally slated to start this month, has faced numerous setbacks in its operations.

In June, a Shell drilling-rig, named the Noble Discoverer, did not meet Environmental Protection Agency emission standards, because its generator engines contained higher-than-allowed amounts of nitrous oxide and ammonia.

Earlier this month, the ship, anchored in Alaska’s Dutch Harbor, drifted off its moorings and came within 100 feet of reaching the shore.

“They clearly cannot ensure safety in the Arctic,” Dan Howells, deputy campaigns director at Greenpeace, said in a statement. According to Howells, by extending the drilling window, it “is inviting major catastrophe in one of the most delicate ecosystems on Earth.”

In February, despite opposition by environmentalists, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), the governmental agency in charge of offshore oil and gas drilling, approved Shell’s plans for responding to oil spills — one of the major hurdles on the way to getting full approval of offshore drilling.

“Alaska’s energy resources — onshore and offshore, conventional and renewable — hold great promise and economic opportunity for the people of Alaska and across the nation,” Ken Salazar, the U.S. Interior Secretary, explained in a statement.

“In the Arctic frontier, cautious exploration — under the strongest oversight, safety requirements and emergency response plans ever established — can help us expand our understanding of the area and its resources, and support our goal of continuing to increase safe and responsible domestic oil and gas production,” he continued.

Shell had received permission from the George W. Bush administration to drill in the Arctic, but the final permits had not been approved by the Barack Obama administration until recently.

In response to the approval, a coalition of about a dozen environmental groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club and Oceana, filed suit against the Interior Department, challenging its approval of Shell’s oil spill response plans.

Oil and Water

Greenpeace, an environmental activist group, has been one of the strongest critics of Shell’s arctic drilling expedition, and have aggressively protested against prolonged arctic drilling.

They have notably used social media to lampoon the oil company — including by creating a faux website, a fake Twitter handle and a game called “Angry Bergs”, as a satirical jab at Shell.

Lisa Murkowski, the Republican Senator from Alaska, has lambasted protest efforts by Greenpeace, including Greenpeace’s usage of a “protest fleet”, which would be used for “obtain(ing) core samples and other natural material form the seabed”.

“Greenpeace is pledging to impede planned exploratory drilling operations in arctic waters off the north coast of Alaska this summer,” she said in a letter to James Watson, director of the BSEE.

“Allowing intrusions by any group to disrupt or threaten federally-permitted operations is a direct threat to … safe operations … and puts in jeopardy those workers and our environment,” she wrote.

Shell has not been the only oil company trying to extract resources from the Arctic region.

The U.S. oil company ConocoPhillips and the Norwegian oil company Statoil have also won the rights to explore fields in the U.S. portion of the Arctic. ExxonMobil, the world’s biggest energy company, struck a deal with Russia to explore its portion of the Arctic.

The drilling in the Arctic has been delayed in part due to the unusually warm weather in the Arctic.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a U.S. government agency dealing with environmental issues, the Arctic lost a record amount of sea ice in June — a total of 1.1 million square miles — due to the weather.

Shell, the most profitable European oil company, has already invested and spent 4.5 billion dollars in the Arctic since 2005, predominantly for leases, permits and equipment.

The potential financial and ecological risks in undertaking such an operation, however, might be outweighed by the potential profit for oil companies.

According to estimates by the U.S. Geological Survey, the Arctic Ocean holds 12 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil, up to 177 billion barrels. The ocean is also estimated to hold up to 25 percent of the world’s undiscovered gas, up to 3.4 trillion barrels.

Nevertheless, other oil companies are shying away from perceived hazards in the region.

Last week, BP announced last week that it was abandoning efforts on a 1.5-billion-dollar project in the Arctic — one that had been ongoing for 14 years — stating that the project “does not meet (its) test” for proper safety standards.

The Obama administration has said that no new drilling leases will be issued for the Arctic until 2016, in order to accommodate further research on the region.

The Arctic experience, however, has not deterred Shell from further oil expeditions.

On Jul. 27, Shell signed a deal with the China National Offshore Oil Corporation to allow for gas and oil exploration in both China and West Africa. It is Shell’s first venture into Chinese waters in nearly 10 years.

Against the backdrop of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, a panel of United States government officials and experts called for stronger methods to prevent modern-day genocides and mass atrocities, particularly in the case of Syria.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the highest-ranking government official at the panel Tuesday, held in cooperation with the Council on Foreign Relations and CNN, addressed the mass killings of Syrian citizens by President Bashar al-Assad. She defended the administration’s decision not to directly intervene in Syria by force, but said that nevertheless, the administration is taking steps to address the situation there.

“We are increasing our efforts to assist the opposition,” she said about the Syrian rebels. “We know that the sooner it ends, the less violence there will be, and the less chance there is for extremism to take hold.”

In a poll of 1,000 U.S. citizens released Tuesday, conducted by the polling firm Penn Schoen Berland in conjunction with the panel, 78 percent of those surveyed support the U.S. taking military action to stop genocide or mass atrocities.

“Americans believe they have a moral responsibility to prevent or stop genocide around the world, even if it means putting boots on the ground,” Mark Penn, CEO of Burson-Marsteller, one of the firms that commissioned the poll, said. “But they view multilateral action as the most effective military strategy for prevention.”

The poll also suggested, however, that U.S. citizens are not satisfied with the U.N.’s handling of current genocides or mass atrocities. In the poll, 55 percent said that the international community was not effective at protecting civilians from genocide or mass atrocities.

The U.N. has so far not taken action in Syria, as two veto-wielding members of the U.N. Security Council, Russia and China, have blocked action. Other countries, including all the remaining permanent members of the council — the U.S., Britain and France — have called for intervention in Syria.

While public perception might seem hawkish, Clinton was adamant that less extreme measures needed to be taken. “Force must remain a last resort,” Clinton said. “In most cases, other tools will be more appropriate: through diplomacy, financial sanctions, humanitarian assistance (or) law enforcement measures.”

The Obama administration has made preventing genocide a foreign policy priority.

In April, Obama announced to formation of the Atrocity Prevention Board, a governmental department focused on genocides around the world, and has asked that the U.S. intelligence community account for the risk of mass atrocities and genocide in national intelligence estimates.

21st century genocide

While other experts agree that preventive measures are key, there is disagreement about what causes genocides and what policies get at the root of the problem most effectively, particularly with such a new and complex paradigm.

Looking at the possible causes of future genocides, Chris Kojm, chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said that the “nexus of food, water and resources” would be a prevailing problem in the future.

Kojm said that nearly half the world’s population will be living in areas of severe water stress by 2030. “That’s an enormous factor to stability,” he said, adding that the incessant competition for resources will increase the likelihood of mass killings.

“Unpredictability leads to the mass killings,” said Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale University.

He says that this unpredictability, brought on by global warming and other factors, will spur governmental panic over the scarcity of remaining resources.

However, Kojm issued a caveat. “We must remain open to the possibility that the past is not necessarily a predictor of where and when mass atrocities will occur, or the means by which they will,” he said.

Technology has played an increasing role in 21st century genocides, and the Obama administration has taken note. In April, Obama signed an executive order imposing financial and travel restrictions on companies that provided technological aid the Syrian and Iranian governments used to hunt down their citizens.

The groups targeted by the restrictions included Syriatel, a Syrian communications company, and Datak Telecom, an Iranian Internet service provider.

“Access to technology, as opposed to access to information, is becoming the human right,” Strieve Masiyiwa, founder of Econet Wireless, a large technology firm based in Zimbabwe, which has been the site of genocides under President Robert Mugabe.

“The big difference with the technology is that the people, the victims, are empowered to speak, not just people in power,” he added

This has lead to a society where the victims get a voice, but are increasingly dependent upon social media, according to some in the media.

“Without social media, there would be a black hole,” said Arwa Damon, a Beirut correspondent for CNN who has been covering the Syrian conflict. “If social media did not exist, you could be assured that the killings would surpass what it is now.”

But the effect of social media extends further that that, according to other foreign policy experts.

“Social media connects people to transparency,” said Sarah Sewall, founder of the Mass Atrocity Response Operations Project and a national security adviser to Obama.

“The question is: What do you do with the awareness to galvanise change?”

Women farmers clearing abandoned farmland in the drought-affected Nachol village in Northern Bangladesh. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Ethan Freedman
WASHINGTON, Jul 24 2012 (IPS)

Women across Asia are being shut out from prosperous forestland because of a paradigm geared towards male ownership, according to a new report by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), an environmental non-governmental organisation.

“Women continue to be excluded from property rights and they are seldom the owners of the land they cultivate,” the RRI study says. “Gender discrimination combined with the lack of rights and security and limited opportunities often lock women into a cycle of vulnerability and poverty.”

Xiaobei Wang, a field researcher for RRI, highlights how women are effectively prevented from enjoying the profits received from forestland.

“A woman’s membership of a collective or a household will change with her marital status. This crucial issue has direct bearing on whether women can enjoy the same rights and benefits as men,” she explained.

“Whether women marry in or marry out, they seem to face vulnerability, which worsens when they divorce.”

In Nepal, one example given in the report, women own just 10 percent of the landholdings, and the average land holding for a woman is two-thirds of what the average male owner owns.

Although there is no uniform model for land ownership in these rural areas, typically men are the ones that get the say over the distribution and allocation, according to the RRI report.

An International Forestry Review study of forestland in China states that access to forestland provides economic opportunity to impoverished rural communities.

The Hongtian village in Mainland China, one of the villages mentioned in the study, was able to maintain a prosperous community by collecting 100,000 Yuan per year in rent fees from contractors. They were then able to use that money to reinvest in infrastructure, such as roads and access to electricity, which led to further modernisation and economic opportunity.

Many groups are decrying the lack of progress among Asian women, saying that is it holding some countries back from prosperity.

“In every country across Asia and the Pacific, pervasive gender inequality remains a barrier to progress, justice and social stability, and deprives the region of a significant source of human potential,” the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) wrote in their annual Human Development Report.

A 2011 estimate by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) placed the total cost of gender job inequality in Asia at 47 billion dollars a year, due to the economic inactivity of 45 percent of working-age women in Asia — as compared to 19 percent of working-age Asian men.

Some say that there are other factors holding women back from achieving affluence, beyond economic interests.

“It’s not economic development that brings about a narrowing of the gap. It’s obviously cultural values,” Aung San Suu Kyi, chair of the National League for Democracy (NLD) and member of the Burmese parliament, said at the World Economic Forum.

“And I think these are what (women) have to address if we want to find out why we are not allowed to make the contributions of which we are capable,” she continued.

One of the most successful East Asian countries, China, has faced scrutiny over the lack of women in the corporate landscape. It has been one of the Asian countries shifting away from an agrarian society, with nearly half of its 1.37 billion citizens now living in urban areas, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, the Chinese census agency.

A report by the World Bank, released earlier this year, found that, in the private sector, there had been some progress in women corporate leadership in East Asia. In a study of Hong Kong businesses, they said, the percentage of women on corporate boards increased from less than five percent to 8.9 percent during the 2000-2009 decade.

The report also notes that East Asia has a high percentage of firms owned by women and firms with female top management, compared to other developing regions. Countries like Mongolia, the Philippines and Vietnam have what they consider the “highest levels of female participation in business ownership” —with a number hovering above 20 percent.

According to the 2011 U.N. Millennium Development Goals Report, women accounted for 42 percent of non-agricultural employment in 2009, a number that is projected to rise one percent by 2015.

An infected child resting on the floor of the Doin medical centre near Saint Marc, a town in the Artibonite Region, where UNICEF has worked to contain the cholera outbreak. Credit: UN Photo/UNICEF/Marco Dormino

By Ethan Freedman
WASHINGTON, Jul 20 2012 (IPS)

U.S. legislators are appealing to the United Nations to take a greater role in addressing Haiti’s cholera outbreak, now in its third year and which has has left thousands dead.

In a letter addressed to U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations Susan Rice, 104 U.S. members of Congress urged Rice to help step up U.N. concern over the outbreak.

“It is imperative for the U.N. to now act decisively to control the cholera epidemic,” Representative John Conyers, Jr. wrote. “A failure to act will not only lead to countless more deaths … and will pose a permanent public health threat.”

The cholera outbreak has been linked in analyses to Nepali peacekeepers stationed in Haiti in 2010. A 2011 study by the New England Journal of Medicine concluded that the cholera strand introduced into Haiti — Vibrio cholerae — matched a strain that was found in a South Asian source identified in 2002 and 2008.

The 2010 outbreak was the first time that a case of cholera was reported in Haiti for nearly a century, according to the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

In March, former president Bill Clinton, now a U.N. special envoy to Haiti, stated that a U.N. peacekeeper was the “proximate cause” of the outbreak.

The U.N. offered no formal comment to IPS regarding the outbreak.

The letter from U.S. representatives was welcomed by the Haiti rights group Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), based in Boston, Massachusetts. The group is currently suing the U.N. on behalf of 5,000 cholera victms, for up to 100,000 dollars per death, and 50,000 per infected person.

“Congress’ call to action reflects a growing consensus that the U.N. has a moral and legal responsibility to address Haiti’s cholera epidemic, and that it must do so urgently before more lives are lost,” Brian Concannon Jr., director of the IJDH, said in a statement.

The U.N. has never accepted full responsibility for the outbreak, however, finding in a 2011 report that a “confluence of circumstances” caused the outbreak and that the epidemic was “not the fault of, or deliberate action of, a group or individual”.

According to some, the continued denial can be put down to the U.N. trying to save face. “It’s an embarrassment for them,” Daniel Beeton, director of international communications at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive think tank based here, told IPS. “It’s the opposite of their mission.”

According to the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO), an arm of the World Health Organisation (WHO), more than 7,000 people have died from cholera in Haiti since the start of the outbreak in 2010.

Jon Kim Andrus, deputy director of PAHO, said that in addition to the death tolls, the Haitian government had reported a total of more than 520,000 cases of cholera.

The influx of cholera in Haiti has had adverse effects on the country beyond just health concerns, according to the WHO.

“In addition to human suffering caused by cholera, cholera outbreaks cause panic, disrupt the social and economic structure and can impede development in the affected communities,” the WHO has said.

The WHO cites the experience of Peru, which experienced a cholera outbreak in 1991. It ultimately cost the country 770 million dollars due to “food trade embargoes and adverse effects on tourism”.

Cholera, which induces diarrhea and vomiting in the victim that potentially lead to extreme dehydration, is impacting an economy that already has an unemployment rate of 40 percent, according to the Central Intelligence Agency World Factbook.

In response to the outbreak and humanitarian crises in Haiti, the U.N. requested 864 million dollars for stabalisation efforts, in 2010. The current budget for the U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) is 793 million dollars.

According to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the government has already distributed more than 73 million dollars in aid to Haiti in response to the cholera outbreak.

Cholera has also been spreading across the Caribbean. Cuba now has 170 confirmed cases of the disease, though it has not yet been definitively linked to the outbreak in Haiti. However, the Cuban Health Ministry has said that the last reported outbreak of cholera in the country, before this year, was shortly after the 1959 Cuban Revolution.

Haiti has had additional problems previously with U.N. peacekeepers, notably over claims of sexual assault and excessive violence.

In March, the U.N. discharged three members of the Pakistani Formed Police Unit, who were serving with MINUSTAH, after they were accused of sexually assaulting a 14 year-old boy.

U.N. peacekeeping troops were also accused of pinning down and sexually assaulting an 18-year-old Haitian man in 2011, an event that was reportedly captured on a cell phone video.

As the Latino population in the United States rises, the demographic shift will affect future as well as current voting habits, and therefore election outcomes, in the United States, according to several experts.

In the highly competitive upcoming presidential elections, “a couple hundred of Latino voters can make a difference,” Roberto Suro, director of the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute at University of Southern California, said Monday. The impact is especially significant in battleground states like Florida, which holds 29 electoral votes, and where 22.9 percent of the populace is Latino.

The Hispanic and Latino population in the United States is projected to more than double by 2050 and will account for 24 percent of the future population – more than 102 million people – according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

American denizens have long been predominantly white and of European descent. However, 2012 marked the first time that minorities – such as Latinos and blacks – have outnumbered the majority – non-Hispanic whites – in the U.S.

According to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, the rising Latino voting populace “solidifies this emerging electorate as an important voting bloc among U.S. voters”. Every month, an estimated 50,000 Latinos in the United States turn 18 and thus are legally allowed to vote in the country.

A record number of Latinos voted in the 2008 presidential election, where 9.7 million Latino voters cast ballots in a marked increase from the 7.6 million who voted in 2004.

Yet the voting bloc represents only a small percentage of potential voters in the Latino demographic. According to a U.S. Census Bureau finding on voting patterns, 40 percent of Latinos did not register to vote and 50 percent did not vote in 2008.

Nevertheless, the Latino population might be the deciding factor in this year’s elections. Tamar Jacoby, president of ImmigrationWorks USA, an organisation focused on immigration reform, called the Latino influence in the election “the whisker that wags the dog”.

In 2010, three Latino candidates, all Republican, ran for and won political offices. In Nevada, Brian Sandoval became the state’s first Hispanic governor. In New Mexico, Susana Martinez became the first Latina governor in U.S. history, and in Florida, Marco Rubio won a U.S. Senate seat.

One of the most intriguing candidates in this elections cycle has been Rubio, who has been named as a potential – though unlikely – candidate for vice president on the Republican ticket with Mitt Romney, the party’s presumptive nominee.

“It brought light to his biggest plus, which is that he could bring some (Latinos) under his tent,” Manuel Roig-Franzia, author of “The Rise of Marco Rubio”, said of Republicans’ vetting of Rubio, at a panel discussion at the New America Foundation.

Despite the fact that all three of the winning Latino candidates for office were Republicans, Latino voters generally tend to vote for Democratic candidates. According to exit polls conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center in 2010, 60 percent of Latino voters supported Democratic candidates in House races, while 38 percent supported Republican candidates.

In the last presidential election in 2008, Latinos supported President Barack Obama by a margin of more than two to one – 67 percent to 31 percent – over his Republican challenger John McCain, according to the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut.

The elections cycle, however, has brought about a different set of circumstances that do not guarantee Latinos will vote according to past practices. With the economy and unemployment paramount in this year’s election, naturally the Latino population is far from exempt from political plays.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate among Hispanics and Latinos is 11 percent, according to June statistics, which is noticeably higher than the national average of 8.2 percent.

Another prickly issue regarding the Latino population is the issue of deportation. President Obama addressed a less contentious part of the deportation issue earlier in 2012, a move that earned him a mixture of both praise for his efforts to push for along immigration reform as well as criticism for what some considered a political maneuver.

However, the Obama administration has deported more people than the Bush administration. According to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau, the United States deported nearly 400,000 illegal immigrants in 2011 fiscal year – the highest total ever.

A major U.S. energy company, AgriSol Energy, is accused of engaging in land grabs in Tanzania that would displace more than 160,000 Burundian refugees who have lived there for decades, according to a report by the Oakland Institute, an organisation focused on environmental issues.

An ethics complaint from the Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (CCI) states that AgriSol is benefiting from the forcible eviction of the refugees, many of whom are subsistence farmers, and leasing the land — as much as 800,000 acres — from the Tanzanian government for 25 cents per acre. “All duty and tax free,” the Iowa CCI adds.

The project could net AgriSol, led by co-founder Bruce Rastetter, as much as 300 million dollars a year, according to the Iowa Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board.

Larry Ginter, a retired hog farmer from Rhodes and a member of Iowa CCI, said in a telephone conference that he was “outraged at the exploitation of the farmers there (in Tanzania).”

“This is an old pattern that has been going on for years,” he adds about AgriSol. “This is a classic case of colonialism, and is theft of the highest order.”

A spokesperson for AgriSol Tanzania denies those allegations and claims that the government had been the one that had instigated the movement of refugees. “We did not evict them,” Henry Akona, director of communications for AgriSol Tanzania, told IPS.

“Perhaps it has been mishandled,” he said, regarding the movement of refugees. “But it’s unfair for the Oakland Institute to mix AgriSol into it.”

The company’s website states that the project is delayed at the settlements of Katumba and Mishamo “until the situation is resolved”.

The Tanzanian connection

The AgriSol project was supported by the Tanzanian government under an initiative called Kilimo Kwanza — meaning “Agriculture First” — that was launched in 2009 by the Tanzania National Business Council to “promote agricultural development through public-private partnerships”.

The “public-private” partnership would, currently and in the future, aid ArgiSol in three different types of production: large-scale crop cultivation, such as food grains, beef and poultry production, and soy and maize production.

AgriSol was set to launch a 100-million-dollar investment in Tanzania over the next 10 years. The stated aim of the programme, according to AgriSol was to, “help stabilise local food supplies, create jobs and economic opportunity for local populations, (and) spur investment in local infrastructure improvements.”

The demands that ArgiSol made included such lopsided conditions that AgriSol would effectively “pay less for land in Tanzania than for a Starbucks coffee in the United States,” according to Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the Oakland Institute.

Mittal, who conducted field research in Tanzania, said these policies have been supplemented by aggressive moves to stymie local businesses. “The people on the ground have been told they can’t build new businesses,” she said. “They have no other option left but to move.”

This partnership, according to the report, was also contingent on several other factors including that the Tanzanian government grant AgriSol a preferential “strategic investor status” and relocate the 162,000 people currently living in Katumba and Mishamo.

While unfortunate, the company counters, AgriSol was simply engaging in a business relationship, since the refugees were set to move anyway. “AgriSol was like a potential new tenant,” Akona explains.

AgriSol Energy Tanzania, the company behind the Tanzanian operations, was a partnership venture between Rastetter’s AgriSol Energy and the Tanzania-based Serengeti Advisers Limited. Iddi Simba, the former Minister for Industry and Trade for Tanzania was one of the heads of Serengeti Limited.

According to a memorandum by Iddi Simba, written on behalf of AgriSol, the Tanzanian government “made AgriSol aware of three tracts of land in western Tanzania that were previously used as camps for refugees, but were, at the time, either closed or being closed.”

Simba, however, was not formally in government when he made the statement. He was forced to resign from his ministerial office in 2001 after issuing illegal sugar import permits.

On AgriSol’s website, AgriSol has claimed that they have ”halted active development efforts” in Katumba and Mishamo, until the refugee situation is resolved. They state that they only have current plans in the Tanzanian towns of Kigoma and Lugufu, which has also held a refugee camp, and at a “smaller location near Basanza village”.

According to some Tanzanians, however, this process has been particularly unfavourable to the local population.

“It’s like someone climbing a tree and finding a poisonous snake— and below him there’s a crocodile in the water,” said Sembuli Masasa, an inhabitant of the Katumba district in Tanzania, according to the report.

“If he stays on the tree, the snake will bite him. If he goes into the water, the crocodile will get him. That’s the situation we’re in.”

Children of the corn

The corruption allegations against Rastetter are not confined to Tanzania.

In June, the Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement lodged a complaint against Rastetter, calling for his removal as the head of the Board of Regents, which has control over the public school system in Iowa, including Iowa State University.

Rastetter was appointed as a member of the Board of Regents by Governor Terry Branstad in 2011, a few months after Branstad’s campaign, and was soon promoted to president pro temp.

Rastetter had made multiple contributions to Branstad’s campaign worth more than 160,000 dollars, and was the largest single contributor to Branstad’s campaign, according to the Daily Iowan.

“I didn’t support Gov. Branstad to be a regent,” Rastetter flatly told The Daily Iowan in 2011. “I supported him personally and raised money for him because I believed he would make a positive difference in Iowa.”

Rastetter, managing director at AgriSol, and the CEO at several other agriculture-based firms, had no specific education or training in education before receiving his position on the board of regents.

Rastetter had been a large donor at Iowa State University. According to the Iowa State University Foundation, Rastetter has made a total pledge of 2.25 million dollars to Iowa State University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

Initially, Iowa State University had trumpeted the project with AgriSol as a responsible agricultural investment, similar to other agricultural endeavours they had previously undertaken.

“In the fall of 2009, AgriSol Energy contacted ISU to ask if we would provide advice and assistance on planning a small-farmer education program similar to our Uganda project,” Wendy Wintersteen, dean of Iowa State University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, explained in a statement. “As in Uganda, an effort in Tanzania would focus on human nutrition, child survival, clean water and food security.”

According to Mittal, Rastetter was instrumental in enlisting Professor Kevin Kimle, who holds a chair which Rastetter donated in 2009, and Eric Peterson, a member of advisory board of the College of Agriculture at Iowa State University and General Manger of Summit Farms, one of Rastetter’s companies. They were both allegedly influential in getting Iowa State University to go forth with the Tanzania project.

In February, the university withdrew support from the project, citing the public pressure over the venture.

Iowa State University’s withdrawal, however, has not stopped AgriSol from pursuing other academic partners. Ohio State University has also been approached for a partnership, according to Mittal.

After weeks of delay, the United Nations released Monday its full annex by the U.N. Security Council condemning the Rwandan government for its support of Congolese rebels.

The 48-page annex, which was leaked partially last week, claims that the Rwandan government was instrumental in the militarisation of M23, a mutinous movement that is allegedly led by, among others, Bosco Ntaganda, a military official wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes relating to the recruitment and use of child soldiers.

Officials say 19 people died and thousands more were displaced from their homes in June, a byproduct of fighting between the M23 and government militia in the eastern Kivu provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

“The war in Congo is bursting into flames, sparked by a new rebellion that Rwanda appears to not only have aided, but that it helped create,” Sasha Lezhnev, senior policy advisor at the Enough Project, a humanitarian group focused on the Congo, told IPS.

“There was a drive to cut off Rwanda’s access to the conflict minerals trade, and the new M23 rebellion was created in large part to retake control of it.”

The main group of Congolese rebels have called themselves M23 -otherwise known the March 23 Movement – after the date of a 2009 peace treaty between the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) and the military.

The CNDP, which was the first incarnation of the M23, switched from a rebel group into a political party after the treaty, and temporarily aligned with the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC). The M23 movement started in March after former CNDP members complained of the conditions in the military.

The U.S. had been accused by Congolese officials of protecting the Rwandan government by delaying the release of the U.N. report.

“There is a risk of the Security Council losing any credibility. We don’t understand the position of the U.S.,” Atoki Ileka, a senior Congolese ambassador, said at the time.

“This will do nothing to protect the people of eastern Congo and will not bring stability to the region. The path they are taking is not intelligent.”

Victoria Nuland, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, said in a statement Saturday that the United States is “deeply concerned about the report’s findings that Rwanda is implicated in the provision of support to Congolese rebel groups.”

Nuland said the U.S. had “asked Rwanda to halt and prevent the provision of such support from its territory”.

The war in these Central and Eastern African nations has also been rife with conflicts of interests, according to some.

“At the same time, the U.S. is training some units of the Congolese army … (while) other Anglo-Saxon companies enjoy the lion share in all mining contracts in Congo,” Antoine Roger Lokongo, a London-based Congolese investigative journalist, told IPS. “But still the U.S. supports Rwanda against Congo.”

Nevertheless, the U.S. gave the DRC more than 350 million dollars in combined aid in 2010, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The U.S. also has strong financial ties to the DRC through a bilateral investment treaty, one of 41 investment treaties the U.S. has in total, meant to strengthen economic ties between the two countries.

Human rights groups had been pushing for more sustained pressure on the Rwandan government by major global players. “The UK and U.S. governments are the two largest bilateral donors to Rwanda,” Sophia Pickles, an activist at Global Witness, said in a statement Friday. “This gives them significant influence and in cases like this they have a responsibility to use it.

“They cannot stand by and watch a regime they bankroll orchestrating a new war in Congo. The lives of thousands of Congolese civilians, as well as the stability of the region, are on the line.”

The Rwandan government, which is vying for a seat on the U.N. Security Council, has been quick to deny the allegations in the report that they have supported the rebels.

“Of course, Rwanda’s top army leadership in no way would be involved in destroying the peace they have been working very hard to build,” said Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo.

Diplomatic relations between Rwanda and neighbouring DRC have soured following the U.N. report, which also stated that top Rwandan government officials, including General James Kabarebe, the Rwandan minister of defence, were behind the recruitment and mobilisation of Rwandan citizens who back the rebellion.

In June, Lambert Mende Omalanga, the DRC’s minister of communications, stated that 200 rebel soldiers had been
killed since March, and more than 370 had surrendered – including 25 Rwandan citizens.

According to Human Rights Watch, Rwandan military officials provided weapons, ammunition, and an estimated 200 to 300 recruits to support Ntaganda and his militia. They also published eyewitness testimony attesting to the execution of recruits who tried to escape.

“I saw six people who were killed because they tried to flee. They were shot dead, and I was ordered to bury their bodies,” an unnamed Rwandan soldier, who was forced into Ntaganda’s army, told Human Rights Watch. “All of us wanted to flee to the government troops, but many of us didn’t know how and we were scared.”

Following what many regard as a disappointment at the recent Rio+20 Earth Summit, the World Bank and several groups have begun implementing new initiatives to “personalise” climate change, in hopes of revitalising the issue among the younger generation.

On Thursday, a World Bank-led programme here in Washington called “Apps for Climate” was held in a bid to bridge the gap between data and actionable results. Its organisers have fostered the creation of applications for mobile phones and the Internet, with the aim of allowing individuals to see their impact on the global environment.

“Rio+20 showed the vital need for sustainability,” Caroline Anstey, managing director at the World Bank, headquartered here in Washington, said at the event at the Newsuem. “It demonstrated that climate is too important to leave to negotiators.

“Data collected is just data. But data interpreted and visualised becomes something fundamentally more empowering.”

According to a 2011 Yale University study that surveyed U.S. teenagers’ understanding of climate change on a letter grade scale (A-F), only 25 percent of teenagers received a grade of C or higher. Comparatively, 54 percent of the adolescents tested received a failing grade.

“Solving the problem of climate change requires behaviour change. People in all walks of life will need to make decisions based on the best available data,” Rachel Kyte, vice-president of Sustainable Development at the World Bank, said Thursday.

The Apps for Climate venture brings the systemic issues inherent in dealing with climate change to a younger population by using technology and social media to heighten awareness.

On Thursday, the programme unveiled the results from a contest to help “crowdsource” the project, enlisting eco-activists and software and computer programmers. At stake was 55,000 dollars in prizes for applications that were successful in visualising relatively dry data.

Apps for Climate was originally announced by the World Bank last December at the United Nations COP-17 conference, an environmental symposium in South Africa.

Of 14 finalists, the winner was a software application called Ecofacts, built by an Argentinean software programmer named Andres Martinez Quijano, who claimed a 15,000-dollar prize.

The 33-year-old Quijano, who studied computer science at university and has been programming for 17 years, said he believed his project could have an individualised impact. “It’s not about government, it’s about people,” he told IPS.

Ecofacts, which Quijano built with open-application software, allows users to plug in data to visualise their own carbon footprint and effect on the environment, as well as that of their community.

The application is also open sourced, meaning that it allows users to customise its programming to their own specifications. “Anyone can access the source code for use in their own tools, or create improvements,” Quijano said. “I hope that Ecofacts will be useful to other developers and users.”

In a gala held Thursday in Washington, Connect4Climate, a climate change campaign by the World Bank, partnered with MTV, the music television channel, to launch a new initiative, “Voice4Climate” that brings together artistic youths to address climate change.

Connect4Climate already had a fairly significant reach, having received over 288,000 “likes” on Facebook and 13,000 followers on Twitter.

The endeavour connects to young people in typical MTV fashion, through photos, videos and music videos. Teens compete to earn a spot at the December 2012 U.N. Conference on Climate Change in Doha, where they will have a chance to voice their opinions on the issue, and to create a music video to be aired on MTV.

“Education and information do not change a lifestyle,” John Jackson, an MTV official, said. “People need real choices, before they can make real change.”

The programme started in 2011 with an African competition, receiving over 700 photo and video submissions from every country on the continent. The contest awarded prizes to 54 winners from 20 African countries.

Getting the message out to Africa was important for the initiative because Africa’s demographic houses a particularly large youth population. According to the United Nations, 70 percent of the African population is under the age of 30.

Further, as a group Africans are relatively less cognisant of global warming issues than the rest of the world. According to a Gallup poll, 44 percent of people in Sub-Saharan Africa are aware of global warming, compared to a global average of 62 percent.

Juliani, an environmentalist and rapper from Kenya, who performed here Thursday to raise awareness for the issue, says that when it comes to environmentalism, the problem might come down to bringing it to a level everyone can understand.

“When it comes to sustainable development, green economy, those are big words,” Juliani said in a statement. “You have to break them down into something people understand – I do it through music.”

A rise in drug trafficking in Honduras has resulted in a sharp increase in violence, leading some to question the United States’ influence in the country.

Honduras, along with several other Central American countries, has become a transshipment point for U.S.-bound illegal drugs, predominantly cocaine. This has led to wide-scale drug intervention efforts, which has subsequently led to an increasingly bloody effort to stymie the trafficking.

Fueled by the violence surrounding the drug trade, and the failure of security forces in the country, the war on drugs in Honduras has been marred by a rapid increase in homicides. In 2005, there were 2,417 homicides. By 2010, the numbers of homicides jumped up 158 percent from 2005, to a total of 6,239 homicides.

“The escalating war on drugs in Honduras is another legacy of the coup,” Mark Weisbot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said Wednesday, referring to the 2009 ousting of former President Manuel Zelaya after an alleged constitutional overreach.

“The coup has led to the breakdown of many of Honduras’ key institutions,” Weisbrot said, specifically citing abuses by the Honduran police.

Many Honduran security forces in the region have been infiltrated by drug organisations. In the past year, police officers have been implicated in a wide array of criminal activity, such as kidnappings, extortion and robberies, according to the New York Times.

In March, a letter from 94 members of the House of Representative implored the State Department to limit assistance to the Honduran police and military due to the human rights abuses, many times carried out under the influence of the cartels.

According to some activists, there are other interests that render the U.S. military and fiscal interventions moot.

“The increased funding is allegedly to fight the drug war, yet much of the violence in Honduras is politically motivated, unrelated to drugs,” said Tanya Cole, a member of Witness for Peace Southwest, a human rights group.

The U.S. is one of the strongest supporters of Honduras, politically and economically.

Honduras serves as an important smuggling port for Mexican drug cartels, which they then use to expand trafficking networks into Central America. According to U.S. officials, the north coast of Honduras is the origin of a drug pipeline connected to the U.S.

The U.S. has some leeway in this issue as Honduras’ biggest trading partner, having supplied 34 percent of Honduran imports and purchased 41 percent of Honduran exports in 2010, totaling 8.3 billion dollars worth of trade, according to the U.S. State Department.

The war on drugs in Honduras is led by the Joint-Task Force-Bravo, a U.S. military group posted in Comayagua, Honduras, that takes on the cudgels of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Honduras with the help of local authorities.

One of the biggest problems exacerbating the drug wars is the dire poverty in Honduras, which necessitates the drug economy. Nearly 65 percent of Hondurans live in poverty, according to the Central Intelligence Agency World Factbook.

This allows a few Hondurans to rise while exploiting the situation in the country. Miguel Facusse, a Honduran biofuels industrialist, is a major player in their economy, but has faced criticism after reports linked him to the drug trade.

A WikiLeaks cache described a plane holding 1,000 kilos of cocaine that crashed and burned on Facusse’s estate, said to be “the third time in the last fifteen months that drug traffickers have been linked to this property.”

Drug peddlers are also continuing to flood into Honduras, reportedly to flee from anti-cocaine crackdowns in Mexico and Columbia, two of the biggest exporters of U.S.-bound cocaine. Presently, Central America serves as the crossing point for 84 percent of all U.S.-bound cocaine, according to Joint Task Force-Bravo.

One of the byproducts of the Central American arm of the war on drugs is the high toll of civilian casualties. One example is the May killing of four Honduran civilians, including two pregnant women, in an attack by a U.S. helicopter targeted at drug peddlers, under a programme dubbed Operation Anvil.

That attack triggered angry protests in the isolated northeastern Mosquito Coast area on the Caribbean Sea.

Honduras is notorious for being one of the most violent countries on earth. According to a United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime report, there were 82.1 homicides for every 100,000 citizens in 2010, the highest homicide rate in the world. (In comparison, the United States had five homicides per 100,000.)

The U.S. has historical ties to Honduras, further complicating the situation and cementing its political role there. In the 1980s, Honduras was a strategic partner during the early stages of what would be known as the Iran-Contra Affair.

In 1990, Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan (1981-89) confirmed that there had been a quid pro quo agreement with Honduras during the mid-1980s, with U.S. military and economic aid going to Honduras in exchange for assistance to the Contra rebels in neighbouring Nicaragua.

Former Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed expressed concerns Monday about the state of democracy in his home country, noting the dividing effect of a rising tide of Islamist extremism.

In the midst of a tour of the United States – which includes an award from the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict – Nasheed, speaking at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), said, “People don’t want radical Islam to take over.”

Indeed, Sharia law, a source of dispute between Islamic fundamentalists and modernists over its modern-day implementation in the Maldives, serves as a supplement to Maldivian jurisprudence.

According to the country’s constitution, citizens are not allowed to engage in actions at odds with Sharia law, and judges must be “educated in Islamic sharia or law”.

According to the Pew Research Center, there were 309,000 Muslims in Maldives in 2010, a number that it projected to grow to 396,000 by 2030. According to the 2008 Maldivian constitution – the 13th in the country’s history – a non-Muslim is not allowed to become a Maldivian citizen, unless already a citizen.

At a press conference in New Delhi in April, Nasheed was even more forthcoming about what he perceives as a threat. “There are radical elements within the military and within the cabinet,” he said.

“These Islamist groups want to have a better hold on society, because they have found an inroad into power through the current government.”

In February, Nasheed was ousted from power in a coup d’état, replaced by his Vice President Mohammed Waheed Hassan. Conflicting reports have said that Nasheed stepped down peacefully or was forced out at gunpoint, by forces loyal to Former President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom or Hassan.

Nasheed had been president for four years, having taken over for the third president, Gayoom, following years of civil unrest. Gayoom was voted out of office in 2008, following 30 years as an autocratic ruler of Maldives.

One of his biggest critics was Nasheed, a journalist by trade, who, in a 1990 article in the political magazine Sangu, alleged that the previous year’s elections had been rigged.

Following the publication of the article, Nasheed was allegedly tortured twice, placed in solitary confinement for 18 months and has been detained more than a dozen times between 1989 and 2005. In the process, he has earned himself the moniker of the “Mandela of the Maldives”.

At the heart of the struggle between the two major political parties, the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP), Nasheed’s party, and the Progressive Party of the Maldives (PPM), Gayoom’s party, is a tussle over the role of Islam in newly minted democratic state. Religious tensions have often been at the root of politics in the Maldives, which has seen significant push and pull between secularism and fundamentalism.

In the aftermath, some officials and Nasheed himself pointed out that his more secularist views, including an attempt to have a school curriculum and law system based not solely on Sharia, might have led to small but powerful factions calling for his political demise.

The founder of the MDP, Mohamed Latheef, pinned a rise in extremism on Gayoom, saying that he had perpetrated the upsurge. “He is the person who brought Islamic fundamentalism into the country. Before he came into power, there weren’t all these madrassas exposing extremist forms of Islam at all,” he says.

“Now he has been using Islam as a tool of governance.”

Meanwhile, Gayoom and his supporters accused the Nasheed government throughout his presidency of being guilty of cooperating with Christian missionaries and Jewish parties, in an effort to “wipe out Islam” from the Maldives, according to the Minivan News.

One of the first signs of the growth of Islamic fanaticism in Maldives was when a Maldivian man named Ibrahim Fauzee was arrested in Karachi, Pakistan, in 2002. He was arrested for alleged links to Al-Qaeda and was taken to Guantanamo Bay, though he was released several years later.

Since then, Maldivian society at large has reportedly become increasingly restrictive.

In 2006, when the U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of religion and belief, Asma Jahangir, visiting a Maldives still under the rule of Gayoom, she stated that religious freedom was being “vigorously denied, and the few that dare to raise their voices are denounced and threatened”.

In December 2011, Ismail Rasheed, a Maldivian journalist, organised and took part in a demonstration in the Maldivian capital of Malé, calling for religious tolerance. He was subsequently arrested for his “involvement in an unlawful assembly”, according to the Maldivian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Watchdog groups around the world responded loudly to Rasheed’s detention. Amnesty International named the journalist a prisoner of conscience. Reporters Without Borders noted, “Religion is becoming a taboo subject in the Maldives and media workers are under threat of imprisonment every time it is debated.”

Earlier this month, Rasheed was nearly killed after he was throat was slit, barely missing a major artery. Reporters Without Borders, stating that Rasheed has made many enemies with his confrontational blogging, claimed that that it “has all the hallmarks of a targeted murder attempt”.

Nasheed’s ascension to power, a peaceful precursor to the Arab Spring, was viewed as a major step towards freedom of speech and religion, given his background as a journalist. However, it has taken a hit in recent months.

As political turmoil ensued in February following the ousting of Nasheed, a half-dozen men entered the Maldives National Museum and destroyed Buddhist artifacts, including a large depiction of the Buddha’s head, one of the few remnants of what once was a predominant Buddhist culture on the island centuries ago.

Ali Waheed, the director of the National Museum, however, bemoaned the demolition of the culturally and historically significant artifacts. “The collection was totally, totally smashed,” Waheed said. “The whole pre-Islamic history is gone.”

Officials claimed that the men attacked the figures because they viewed the sculptures as idols, thus illegal under sharia and national law.

While the situation in the Maldives mirrors the situation in Arab Spring, with the overthrow of a dictator, the vandalism of major museums and the attacks on journalists, Nasheed sees it as an opportunity.

“I feel that what has happened in the Maldives,” Nasheed said at the USIP, “would help us in trying to understand what might happen in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Libya, in Syria and so on.”

Activists are aiming to renew the fight against the Lord’s Resistance Army, the Ugandan rebel group made infamous by its ruthless leader Joseph Kony, despite noticeably diminished concern for the issue just months after the release of a controversial yet viral video about the leader.

Seeking to push the anti-LRA movement forward, activists have embarked on a tour across the United States to raise awareness. The most prominent are Father Benoit Kinalegu, a Congolese priest and president of the Dungu-Doruma Diocesan Commission for Justice and Peace, and Sister Angelique Namaika, who runs Dynamic Women for Peace, which provides assistance to female and child victims of the LRA.

Father Benoit and Sister Angelique testified before the U.S. Congress Jun. 19, hoping to maintain awareness in the U.S. of the LRA’s brutality. “Because of their trauma, the refugees and child survivors refuse to go back home as long as Joseph Kony is out in the bush and as long as the war is not over,” Sister Angelique told Congress’s Human Rights Commission.

The Ugandan rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army has killed hundreds of thousands and displaced even more, such as the South Sudanese refugees above. Credit: UN Photo/Tim McKulka

“They prefer to die of hunger than to return to their homes.”

In 2004, the BBC estimated the death toll of the LRA’s victims at more than 100,000. And while it is difficult to ascertain exact numbers, thousands more have been brutalised since.

Activists on the ground in Central and East Africa, however, are fairly resourceful, using whatever limited means at their disposal to combat the LRA, including using a high-frequency radio system to try to appeal to LRA soldiers to defect.

“These radios allow us to transfer the information around the world” and the region, Father Benoit explained. Nevertheless, “the number of devices that we have is not enough to cover the area,” he added.

Sister Angelique has been a voice of compassion in the region, trying to provide help to traumatised women and children in the area. “Until now, we have not seen any organisation address this issue because there is a war going on,” she said.

Other activists are calling for more political measures. “We need personal engagement from President Obama,” said Paul Ronan, the co-founder and director of advocacy, for the group Resolve, which works to end the LRA’s atrocities and create peace in affected Central African communities.

“Unfortunately, this administration has been slow in utilising funds,” he said in reference to the allotment of military funds towards the struggle.

In October 2011, the Obama administration deployed approximately 100 U.S. Special Forces agents to Uganda, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic. The U.S. troops mainly served in an advisory role to Ugandan troops in the hunt for Kony and the fight against the LRA.

It was the first time since 2003 that the United States specifically deployed troops to aid in an African conflict. In 2003, President George W. Bush sent a small number of troops—estimated between 500 and 2,000—to assist in the Second Liberian Civil War. (NATO troops intervened in Libya in 2011, although U.S. naval forces were involved in firing Tomahawk missiles at Libya.)

“Our advisers will continue their efforts to bring this madman to justice and to save lives,” Obama said in a speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in April. “It’s part of our regional strategy to end the scourge that is the LRA and help realise a future where no African child is stolen from their family, and no girl is raped, and no boy is turned into a child soldier.”

The region has seen some progress, Ronan said, thanks to two factors that have weakened Kony’s grip over the LRA. The first was “the relative isolation of Kony over his senior commanders”. According to Ronan, intelligence places Kony’s location possibly in South Darfur – though if his location were known, he would be dead. The second was the capture in May of senior LRA commander, Caesar Achellam.

Nevertheless, the LRA’s atrocities have not garnered quite the support that the hoopla surrounding it would seem to suggest. The original KONY 2012 video, produced by the advocacy group Invisible Children, went viral, and has been viewed more than 91 million times since March.

Many critics have branded this video as a “slacktivist” – a portmanteau term of “slacker” and “activist”- cause, which has not translated into any prolonged action.

After so much initial interest, support for the cause has subsided. A sequel to the original video, entitled “KONY 2012 Part II: Beyond Famous” boasts comparatively few hits – 2.2 million – since its release in April.

In a report released mid-June about the conflict, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the biggest challenge was providing aid and protection to the war-torn region. “The initiative itself lacks adequate and predictable funding for its operations,” Ban wrote.

“Without the necessary resources, the African Union will be unable to execute this important task fully.”

Asia has surpassed Latin America as the largest source of new immigrants to the United States, according to a major new report that found that Asian-Americans also enjoy the highest incomes and best education of any racial group in the United States.

The 214-page report, released Tuesday by the Pew Research Centre, said Asian-Americans now constitute nearly six percent of the total U.S. population, or some 18.2 million people. That’s a more than five-fold increase since 1965, when immigration laws were liberalised to permit more non-Europeans to come to the United States.

Asian immigration has risen steadily since 1965, according to the report, entitled “The Rise of Asian Americans”, but the growth rate appears to have accelerated in the last few decades, with nearly three out of every four-Americans with Asian ancestry having been born abroad. Japanese-Americans are the only sub-group in which the majority was born in the United States.

“A century ago, most Asian Americans were low-skilled, low-wage laborers crowded into ethnic enclaves and targets of official discrimination,” the report stated. “Today they are the most likely of any major racial or ethnic group in America to live in mixed neighborhoods and to marry across racial lines.”

This shift is part of a trend that would seem to indicate that Americans are becoming more tolerant towards immigrants, especially Asian-American ones. A 2010 Pew survey found that among white Americans, 62 percent “would be fine” with a relative marrying interracially, particularly someone who is black, Hispanic or Asian, up from 51 percent in 2001.

Chinese-Americans comprised the largest sub-group of all Asian-Americans, with about four million people, or about 23 percent of the total. They were followed by Filipino-Americans (3.4 million), Indian-Americans (3.2), Vietnamese-Americans (1.74), Korean-Americans (1.71) and Japanese-Americans (1.3). Together, those six sub-groups are the vast majority of the total Asian population in the United States.

Traditional values: Education and hard work

“Many Asians come to the United States because they still perceive it as a land of opportunity,” Andrew Lam, an editor at New America Media, an umbrella group of ethnic news organisations, told IPS.

The report, based in part on recent telephone interviews in English and seven other languages with a nationally representative sample of more than 3,500 Asian-Americans, also found that Asian-Americans place significantly more emphasis on attaining higher education and working hard than other racial groups in the United States.

While 93 percent of respondents in the poll said they believed that Americans who hailed from the same country of origin are “very hard-working”, only 57 percent of those respondents agreed that the same held true for their American counterparts as a whole.

Asian-Americans stand out for their educational achievements, in particular. While 26 percent of the U.S. population has a bachelor’s degree or higher, the comparable figure for Asians is 49 percent – nearly twice as high – and 18 percentage points higher than white Americans. The more recent arrivals have an even higher percentage – 61 percent among adults aged 25 to 64.

Asian-Americans also stand out compared to their cohorts in their home countries. On average, about 26 percent of Japanese and South Koreans in the same age group have a bachelor’s degree, compared to nearly 70 percent of comparably aged recent immigrants from those two countries.

Financial and economic aspects

According to the Department of Labour, the unemployment rate among Asians as a group is less than in America as a whole. The Asian-American unemployment rate stands at about 7.5 percent, lower than any other demographic, including white (8.7 percent), black (16) and Hispanic (12.5) and lower than the national unemployment rate of 8.2 percent.

The view among various Asian groups can differ significantly in terms of education and income. Indian-Americans, for example, lead all other sub-groups in both categories. Americans with Korean, Vietnamese or Chinese ancestry suffer higher poverty rates than does the general public, while those with Indian, Japanese or Filipino origins have lower rates.

And while the median household income in 2010 for the general U.S. population was nearly 50,000 dollars, for Asian-Americans the median figure was 66,000, according to the report.

Findings from the U.S. Census Bureau fall along the similar lines: between 2002 and 2007, Asian-owned businesses increased 40.4 percent – nearly twice the national rate – amounting to 1.5 million total businesses, generating more than half a trillion dollars in receipts and employing nearly three million people.

“Asian-owned businesses continued to be one of the strongest segments of our nation’s economy,” said Census Bureau Deputy Director Thomas Mesenbourg.

Asians’ success, however, has no helped alleviate racial tensions. In April, D.C. Councilman Marion Barry was caught on tape making derogatory comments about Asian-Americans and their businesses.

“We’ve got to do something about these Asians coming in, opening up businesses – those dirty shops,” Barry said, after winning his city’s Democratic primary, “They ought to go.”

Census data compiled by Pew suggests that Asian immigrants outnumbered Hispanic immigrants at some point between 2007 and 2010. In 2007, about 540,000 Hispanics – both documented and undocumented – came to the United States, while only 390,000 Asians did so.

But by 2010, about 430,000 Asians – or 36 percent of all new immigrants – arrived here, compared to about 370,000 Hispanics.

The reversal appears to have resulted primarily from a decrease in Hispanic immigration, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis, when a combination of harsh anti-immigrant legislation at the state level, tighter border security, and the slump in the U.S. economy (especially its construction industry, where many male Hispanic immigrants have found work) discouraged many would-be immigrants from crossing the border.

Although they are only five percent of the global population, indigenous people account for up to 15 percent of the world’s poor, according to a new study published by members of the World Bank.

The highest percentages of indigenous people in proportion to the total national population are in China (36 percent), South Asia (32 percent) and Southeast Asia (10 percent), according to “Indigenous Peoples, Poverty, and Development”, a treatise on indigenous peoples in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The Brookings Institute, a think tank here in Washington, recently cited figures that roughly 900 million people live in poverty – that is, they live on less than 1.25 dollars per day.

Two girls from the Chortí indigenous community in their doorway in a village in Chiquimula. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

The figure underscores one of the most significant issues facing development experts today: among many of the world’s poor, economic progress is being stymied, to the amazement of some of the world’s most highly regarded and reputable economists.

“You would think that the people at the lower end of the spectrum would be making more progress, but that hasn’t been the case,” Shantayanan Devarajan, the World Bank’s chief economist for Africa, said.

While there is no universally accepted definition of what constitutes an indigenous person, Marcelo Giugale, the World Bank’s director of poverty reduction and economic matters for Africa, defines it as “people bonded together by sharing” – primarily sharing resources, culture and experiences.

Typically, the 350 million indigenous people living in the world today have a higher rate of poverty because they are marginalised economically, politically and geographically.

The United Nations (U.N.) has recently increased its focus on indigenous people, with the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) holding the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples in May to discuss how to increase the participation of indigenous peoples in politics.

“The ‘poverty trap’ is not an economic poverty trap, it’s a political one” for indigenous cultures, argued Devarajan. He pointed to apartheid as an instance where indigenous people were politically excluded solely for racial reasons.

The increased emphasis on indigenous people is due partly to the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals – among them are ending poverty and hunger, and achieving universal education, gender parity, environmental sustainability – and the concentrated effort to improve the plight of the world’s poor.

“We will not be able to overcome poverty and inequality or achieve the Millennium Development Goals in our region if we don’t improve everyone’s lives, especially the most excluded,” said Heraldo Muñoz, director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the UNDP.

He pointed to “integrated social policies, financed through more progressive fiscal structures” to help bring about the necessary change.

The lack of economic progress for indigenous communities has been particularly prominent in Latin America. According to UNDP’s 2010 Regional Human Development Report on Inequality, extreme poverty, where people live on a dollar or less per day, in Latin America and the Caribbean is twice as high among the region’s indigenous peoples.

The only sustained progress in poverty for indigenous people in Latin America was in Chile, where levels fell from around 25 percent to about 15 percent between 1996 and 2005, according to Harry Anthony Patrinos, lead education economist at the World Bank.

Nevertheless, poverty levels in Latin America as a whole are at the lowest level in 20 years, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

“Poverty and inequality continue to decline in the region, which is good news, particularly in the midst of an international economic crisis,” said Alicia Barcena, ECLAC’s executive secretary.

“However, this progress is threatened by the…gaps in the productive structure in the region.”

Worldwide, the greatest success among indigenous people has been in China. China has been the only place where the reduction of poverty was higher in the indigenous minority than in the majority – in this case, the Han people.

There is one theory as to why the Chinese have been so successful in this regard. “China targets regions or areas rather than people,” Patrinos explained, by offering indigenous people more programs that allow for systemic changes, rather than vague political gestures meant to garner votes.

In the United States, Native Americans have historically had a difficult relationship with the European immigrants who took over their land and eventually condemned a significant of proportion of the native population to reservations and poverty.

The latest statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau put Native American poverty levels at 25.3 percent. But in 2010, they found that comparatively, only 15.1 percent of the total population was beneath the poverty line.

Yet those who viewed themselves as indigenous – that is, of Native American blood – in the 2010 U.S. Census comprised only 1.7 percent of the total U.S. population, or 5.2 million people.

Poor treatment of Native Americans has extended into modern times. In 2000, Congress allocated 1.6 billion dollars to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but not all of the funds were paid.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a five to four ruling, decided that the federal government was obligated to repay Native American tribes for the expenses incurred by Native Americans running federal programs such as education, homeland security and environmental protection.

President Barack Obama’s administration announced on Friday that the United States would no longer deport certain young immigrants.

While the move, made by executive order, was hailed by immigration advocates as a small but positive first step, many others pointed to the political motivations in play – an issue that President Obama implicitly acknowledged on Friday.

Undocumented immigrants who come to the U.S. as children and are deemed to pose no security risk will no longer be under threat of deportation. Credit: Stephen C. Webster/CC By 2.0

“As long as I’m president, I will not give up on this issue,” Obama said, “not only because it’s the right thing to do for our economy – and CEOs agree with me – not just because it’s the right thing to do for our security, but because it’s the right thing to do, period.

“And I believe that, eventually, enough Republicans in Congress will come around to that view as well.”

Reversing previous policy, undocumented immigrants who come to the United States as children and are deemed to pose no security risk will no longer be under threat of deportation. Instead, the administration ordered that the government begin to make available work permits for those who qualify.

A few other prerequisites also apply: The candidates must have come to the U.S. before they turned 16, must be in school or have graduated from high school (or have been honourably discharged from the U.S. military), and have a relatively clean criminal record.

The changes are to take effect immediately, largely skirting immigration legislation known as the DREAM Act. That bill would offer a route to citizenship for certain young immigrants, but has languished in Congress for years.

Following Friday’s announcement, the National Immigration Law Center here in Washington called the day “momentous … a hard-won victory”. The non-partisan Migration Policy Institute said that the policy reversal could have a direct impact on 1.4 million youths, while cautioning that implementation would be tricky with a programme of this size.

At Lafayette Park outside of the White House, a crowd of jubilant supporters cheered the news, holding up signs that read “Keep the DREAM alive” and “You have my vote now.”

“This is a matter of human rights,” Sebastian Roa, a student at the University of Maryland at the rally, told IPS. “I was undocumented for 13 years, and I always had to wonder what would happen to me.”

“It’s a Hispanic issue but it’s also an overarching issue for many races,” he continued.

Another at the rally, Deepak Bhargava, a community organiser, called the news a “big victory”, but cautioned that it was “not the final step”.

“The biggest challenge is to get people to vote in November,” he said. “Alienating Latinos now, is a recipe to becoming a minority party in the future.”

Political gambit

Indeed, despite the accolades, it is hard to see the timing of the issue outside of its political context.

The move comes as the 2012 presidential race heats up, with immigration receiving vastly increased attention from both of the frontrunners. Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate to oppose Obama, has in the past stated that he would veto the DREAM Act if he were to become president.

Romney is also fighting the president for the Latino vote. According to the Washington Post, Romney told supporters in April, “We have to get Hispanic voters to vote for our party” or they would lose the election.

President Obama, while keen to take credit for Friday’s announcement, has suffered severe criticism over the past three and a half years of his presidency for failing to push through a significant immigration overhaul, despite repeated promises.

When Obama took on health-care reform as a signature issue shortly after becoming president, many suggested that immigration would be next on the agenda.

As the health-care issue led to massive resentment from Republicans, however, the resulting ratcheted-up polarisation in Washington took away much of President Obama’s motivation – and political capital – to tackle another contentious issue so quickly.

Since then, the administration has been unable to deliver for those calling for immigration reform.

Meanwhile, the strength of the Latino vote has been growing. This is based in part on demographics, with an estimated 50,000 Latinos every month turning 18, the legal age to vote in the United States.

Some experts have suggested that whoever wins the presidency in November will need around 40 percent of the country’s 14 million Latinos to do so. A recent analysis put out by the Brooking Institution suggested that the broader minority vote would be even more important for an Obama victory this year than last time around.

In addition, however, reports suggest a higher political consciousness among Latino, particularly youths – spurred in particular by the country’s nasty immigration debate in recent years.

This week, Jeb Bush, the popular former governor of Florida and brother of former president George W. Bush, made political waves when he suggested that the Republican Party needed to change its tone on immigration.

On Friday, another Florida Republican, Senator Marco Rubio, thought to be a frontrunner to become Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential candidate, criticised Obama’s move for its unilateral legislation.

“Today’s announcement will be welcome news for many of these kids desperate for an answer, but it is a short-term answer to a long-term problem,” Rubio said. “And by once again ignoring the Constitution and going around Congress, this short-term policy will make it harder to find a balanced and responsible long-term one.”

Another Republican member of Congress, Steve King, went even further, saying that he plans to sue the Obama administration over the new policy.

King charged President Obama with “planning to usurp the constitutional authority of the United States Congress and grant amnesty by edict to one million illegal aliens”.

Protests at the Copenhagen climate summit against government failure to take action. Credit:Ana Libisch/IPS

By Ethan Freedman
WASHINGTON, Jun 15 2012 (IPS)

Just ahead of the start of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), many are worried about the influence that corporations will have on the summit’s agenda.

Friends of the Earth, a grassroots environmental group, is one of the groups concerned about the influence that private sector lobby groups hold over the U.N.

“Increasingly we see U.N. policies that do not serve the public interest but rather support the commercial interests of companies or business sectors,” the group said in a statement. “The U.N. is captured by the corporate sector.”

A petition released by Friends of the Earth, described as a “civil society statement to reclaim the U.N. from corporate capture”, has received several hundred signatures from activists from Catalonia to Canada.

One of the top priorities of the Rio+20 summit is to discuss ways in which to offset the global impact of consumption, urbanisation and pollution. Also on the agenda is the transition to a “green economy” – a new economic paradigm that limits the toll of ecological and environmental loss.

According to a United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP)-backed study on the 3,000 biggest public companies in the world, the total cost due to corporate environmental damage was 2.2 trillion dollars – approximately equal to the total GDP of the world’s eighth-largest economy, Italy.

Most of the cost is attributed to emissions of greenhouse gases, local air pollution and the depletion and pollution of fresh water.

There are numerous civilian protests and campaigns scheduled in anticipation of the Rio+20 summit. The Occupy movement is also planning to have a presence at the movement and have released a “people’s petition” online, with one of the main issues protested in the petition being the role of business lobbying at the talks.

Daniel M. Kammen, professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at U.C.-Berkley, disagrees that business involvement has a negative effect, saying that business plays a crucial role in the talks.

“It has to be part of a conversation, of a dialogue,” he says. “Without the private sector, the climate just becomes a debate between national leaders.”

U.S. President Barack Obama has received criticism for his policies regarding corporate interests, much to the chagrin of environmental activists and labour unions.

A document recently leaked by Public Citizen, a consumers’ rights group, found that under new trade provisions, multinational corporations operating in the U.S. would be able to appeal laws regulating trade to a more-lenient international tribunal, which has less strict measures on environmental policy.

Brazil has itself recently been the victim of corporate environmental pollution. In March, FUP, the Brazilian oil workers’ union, filed a lawsuit against the American energy company Chevron and the offshore drilling corporation Transocean, as the result of offshore oil spills off the coast of Brazil last November.

The lawsuit attempts to revoke those companies’ abilities to operate within the country of Brazil. The oil spill leaked about 3,000 barrels of oil into the Atlantic Ocean.

Transocean, one of world’s largest offshore drilling corporations, was also involved in the 2010 BP oil spill that released 4.9 million barrels into the Gulf of Mexico, the largest spill ever in U.S. territory.

Previous summits have dealt with these kinds of problems. The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio took place a year after the Kuwaiti oil fires and Gulf War oil spill, the largest oil spill in modern history.

The U.N. has taken steps to improve energy efficiency, in an effort to negate the rampant need for oil, through the Sustainable Energy for All initiative, spearheaded by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The proposal was meant to correspond with an increased focus on global economic and environmental sustainability.

“If current patterns of production and consumption of natural resources prevail, and cannot be reversed and decoupled, then governments will preside over unprecedented levels of damage and degradation,” said UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner.

In its quinquennial report, UNEP stated that globally there had been significant progress on only four of the 90 most important environmental issues that they had previously laid out, indicating that humans consume at their own expense.

The resulting depletion of biodiversity and resources in the two decades between the conferences threatens to get worse.

“We will face even greater economic and environmental disaster in the future if we do not urgently address the loss of our natural capital and reset our economic compass,” Pavan Sukhdev, an adviser to UNEP, said.

“We have an ethical duty to act now – to delay is immoral.”