By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, Jun 1 2014 (IPS)

Erwin Sperisen was chief of Guatemala’s National Civil Police from 2004 to 2007, when he left the country for Switzerland. In August 2010, the Guatemalan authorities issued an international arrest warrant, accusing him, among others, of extrajudicial executions in the prisons of Pavon and Infiernito.

The authorities of the canton of Geneva arrested him on August 31, 2012, but he could not be extradited to Guatemala because he also holds a Swiss passport. He is now standing trial in Switzerland and risks life imprisonment. The verdict in the trial, which started on May 15, is expected to be handed down on June 6.

Philip Grant

TRIAL (Track Impunity Always), an NGO that brings international crimes to justice in Switzerland and before international institutions, played a major role in bring Sperisen before the court. IPS talked to TRIAL director, Philip Grant.

IPS: What is at stake in this trial?  

Philip Grant: The capacity of the Swiss judiciary to judge facts or crimes committed thousands of kilometres away, in a completely different context and culture. Switzerland has not held such a criminal trial since 2000, when a Rwandan mayor was sentenced to 14 years imprisonment for his participation in genocide and crime against humanity.

More broadly, there is a wider trend that is pushing states to handle cases where the crimes are committed abroad and the links to the country are very weak or possibly not existent, except that the suspect is caught on the territory.

The legal basis is universal jurisdiction. International law, particularly the Geneva conventions and the Convention against Torture, require the international community to investigate and judge those crimes.

IPS: Is this a new trend?

Philip Grant: No, but it is growing rapidly. There have been dozens of cases, starting with the Eichmann case in Israel in 1961, then Pinochet in 1998 and now there are more and more cases. In Great Britain the Home Office indicates that hundreds of suspects have entered the country from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the Balkans, Sierra Leone and elsewhere."Nineteen people were indicted for extrajudicial killings around Sperisen. A lawyer has been assassinated, at least one witness has been assassinated and the mother of one of the victims may be in danger" - Philip Grant

No other country compiles similar figures, but the Netherlands has mentioned that dozens of suspected Rwandan genocidaires are present on its soil, and in France alone, more than 25 criminal complaints have been filed by NGOs against Rwandan suspects.

Several countries have set up war crimes units. The Dutch war crime unit has 35 investigators who regularly arrest people. The French one was created two years ago and a first trial earlier his year has ended in the conviction of a Rwandan man to 25 years in prison.

IPS: Is this limited to Western countries?

Philip Grant: No. Cases are currently being investigated also in Senegal – against Hissène Habré, a Chadian citizen, and in South Africa, against Zimbabwean suspects. Argentina tried to open up cases linked to Franco’s crimes in Spain.

Many countries may not be ready to investigate, but most of them have a criminal code that gives them the capacity to investigate and judge international crimes.

Another trend is that Northern prosecuting authorities start judging also their own nationals and not only people from the global South.

IPS: Does that refer also to economic crimes?

Philip Grant: Timidly. In Switzerland, the Swiss General Attorney opened a criminal investigation into the Swiss company Argor, one the most important gold refiners in the world, for its alleged complicity in the pillage of gold in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In France, prosecutors are investigating a company that sold surveillance material to Libya that allowed the former regime to track down and torture opponents.

The rationale is to judge not only the perpetrators of the crimes, but also those who profit from them.

The Netherlands investigated a Dutch company, Riwal, which contributed to erecting the separation wall between Israel and Palestine, a clear violation of international humanitarian law. The offices were raided by the Dutch police. The case was later halted, but the company had stopped its business around the wall.

When the decision was made public, another company working in the Occupied Territories put an end to its collaboration with Israel, fearing that it might be breaking international law.

So it is beginning to have real effects.

IPS: Could Erwin Sperisen have been tried in Switzerland even if he had not been a Swiss national?

Philip Grant: If you don’t have any close link to a country like nationality, the threshold to risk prosecution is the level of crimes you commit. For stealing a car, there is no universal jurisdiction.

You can become a target of universal jurisdiction if you commit human rights violations that amount to international crimes – like genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The system was not used very much in the past, but now more and more NGOs are working on this issue. In Switzerland, TRIAL is the only one that goes to the field to investigate such cases and comes back to file complaints.

IPS: What are the main difficulties in this kind of procedure?

Philip Grant: The protection of the witnesses and the victims. Nineteen people were indicted for extrajudicial killings around Sperisen. A lawyer has been assassinated, at least one witness has been assassinated and the mother of one of the victims may be in danger. She is the only plaintiff in this affair.

Though it involves ten cases of extrajudicial killings and ten families could potentially have filed a complaint, some were afraid, others are living abroad. The Swiss judiciary faces difficulties in ordering protection measures that would apply in Guatemala.

IPS: How do you work with organisations in Guatemala?

Philip Grant: By working with local NGOs and human rights defenders, or with the Procuradoria de los Derechos Humanos, we were able to gather evidence against Erwin Sperisen.

The United Nations established the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala to investigate crimes committed by illegal security forces because the national investigators themselves were considered too corrupt and unreliable. We also talked to them, even though they could not share the results of their investigations with us.

Although we have filed the initial complaint with other fellow NGOs, we are not party to the case. What we did for instance was to feed information to the authorities and to put them in contact with witnesses. During the trial, only the plaintiff is represented in court. If Erwin Sperisen is sentenced, she can ask for reparation.

TRIAL has filed many other cases, of which a few are still under investigation. Others are closed: when George Bush announced that he was coming to Geneva in 2011, we started working on a complaint for torture. At some point it was made public and suddenly he decided not to come.

Currently we are investigating a small number of cases of citizens of Western countries as well.

IPS: The verdict will come on June 6. What will be the consequences of this affair?

Philip Grant: Sperisen’s direct superior, the former Interior Minister Carlos Vielmann, is in Spain under investigation. If Sperisen is convicted, it will trigger strong calls to have Vielmann also judged there.

I can imagine that effects will also be felt in Guatemala. I assume that the current chief of police of Guatemala must be following the trial. If Sperisen is sentenced, I bet there will be changes in the way the Guatemalan police operates.

But whatever the verdict, it will be a further step in the fight against impunity across the board.

Excerpt:

As many as 700 people were sentenced to death in Iran last year, according to United Nations estimates. Most were charged with drug-related crimes and belonged to ethnic minorities, new studies show.

“Despite signs of openness with the election of President (Hassan) Rohani almost a year ago, the human rights situation in Iran has dramatically deteriorated,” Taimoor Aliassi, U.N. representative of the Association of Human Rights in Kurdistan of Iran – Geneva, told IPS.“Iran is the second executioner country in the world behind China, but the first one per capita." -- Raphaël Chenuil-Hazan, executive director of French NGO Ensemble Contre la Peine de Mort

At least 687 prisoners have been executed in 2013, 68 percent of them after the presidential election in June 2013, Aliassi said. This is the highest figure in 15 years.

The vast majority, he said, were from ethnic minorities such as Kurds, Baloch and Baha’is. “The repression of these minorities has accentuated.”

Aliassi’s comments followed a report by Dr. Ahmed Shaheed, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Iran, detailing the executions. The Iranian government labelled the findings “not objective” and “mostly a compilation of unfounded allegations.” It is opposing the renewal of Shaheed’s mandate.

“Last year, there were two executions a day,” Shaheed said at a meeting in Geneva earlier this week on rights in Iran. “Sixty percent of them were related to drug crimes. Many did not have access to lawyers, and confessions were got under torture. Three juveniles were among those hanged.”

Shaheed contested the Iranian government allegation that his report is based on opposition sources, or even terrorists. “Even though I could not get into the country, I talked to 700 people. I do my interviews by Skype. If I was able to go to Iran, there would be government views in my report. It would be in its advantage.”

“Iran is the second executioner country in the world behind China, but the first one per capita,” Raphaël Chenuil-Hazan, executive director of the French NGO Ensemble Contre la Peine de Mort, told IPS. The NGO was created in 2000 to investigate death penalties. It launched the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty that holds a congress every three years.

“The death penalty is a benchmark for human rights,” Hazan said. “It opens the door to the scrutiny of other human rights violations like juvenile justice, ethnic minorities, public executions, torture and unfair trials. We manage to work with grassroots NGOs in all countries, including China and Iraq, but not in Iran.”

The Iranian government, Hazan said, like North Korea “does not allow local NGOs to come to our congress. Our sources are individuals we identify in the prisons. Last year we counted 687 executions. We know it is more, but this is the figure we are able to prove in our report.” The U.N. report is in line with findings by NGOs.

Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, spokesperson of Iran Human Rights, an NGO based in Oslo with members both inside and outside Iran told IPS that “56 percent of the figures included in this report are official, and 44 percent have been confirmed by us independently.”

Last year, he said, the group “documented 59 public executions, all of them announced officially. Children are also watching executions since there is no age limit. But there are so many secret executions in prisons that we need independent investigations.”

According to the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, ratified by Iran, countries that have not abolished the death penalty can impose it only for the most serious crimes.

“Since 2010, more than 1,800 people have been executed on drug-related charges. But is the possession of 30 grams of heroin, morphine, opium or methadone a ‘most serious crime?’” said Hazan.

Other reasons for capital punishment are “corruption on earth”, rebellion, sexual offences including same-sex relations, organised crime, robbery and smuggling, murder and other religious offences. At least 28 women were hanged publicly in 2013, according to the Special Rapporteur.

Some NGOs accuse the government itself of fostering drug addiction for political reasons, particularly in the Kurdish area. “It is practising an anti-Kurdish policy of pushing youth into drugs and then arresting them,” Karen Parker, a human rights attorney based in San Francisco, told IPS.

Gianfranco Fattorini, of the Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l’amitié entre les peuples (MRAP), a French NGO that supports against racism and discrimination, told the meeting in Geneva that 20 Kurdish activists are known to be on death row and 25 Kurdish political activists have been sentenced to death for propaganda against national security and similar charges.

Diane Ala’i, of the Baha’i International Community, an international NGO representing members of the Baha’i faith, says the persecution of Baha’is is engrained in the constitution that recognises only three religious minorities – Christians, Jews and Zoroastrian. Members of the Baha’i religious minority are persecuted from the time they are born till they die, said Ala’i at the meeting in Geneva.

“Children are ostracised at school; youngsters are denied access to university and to jobs in the public sector. Today 136 Baha’is are in prison only because they are Baha’is. The accusation goes from enmity against god, to being spies or belonging to an illegal organisation. Some of these people are elderly; others are young mothers who have to take their children into prison.”

She added that their cemeteries are bulldozed and “it is clear that these horrible acts are condoned by the authorities.” Violent crimes and incitement to hatred are rising against Baha’is and other minorities, but none of these cases have been investigated by judicial authorities. “This is government orchestrated,” she said.

But more and more Iranians are showing solidarity with the Baha’is, she said. Last week, 75 prominent activists asked the head of the judiciary to give the benefit of Islamic law even to “unrecognised religious minorities” like the Baha’is.

Influential personalities like renowned film-maker Asghar Farhadi have signed an open charter to ask for abolition of the death penalty, following a campaign called Legam (step by step abolition of the death penalty) initiated last November.

“Since they are well known, they encounter fewer risks to go to prison. This shows that civil society is advancing. Now it is up to the government to show that it is opening up too,” said Hazan.

A Bangladeshi farmer shows off vegetables grown on his small, sustainable “dyke” garden. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, Mar 18 2013 (IPS)

The current growth model is not sustainable. Neither the green economy nor alternative sources of energy can prevent global warming. Solutions will come from concerted actions at the local and national levels, from the adoption of instruments and practices borrowed from other disciplines like peacebuilding, and from the move to a “no-waste economy”, according to experts here.

In its milestone report, “The Limits to Growth”, published in 1972, the Club of Rome warned that the human ecological footprint had grown dangerously quickly from 1900 to 1972. Shortly thereafter, the warning proved to be prophetic: by 1986 the human ecological footprint had overshot the carrying capacity of the Earth. At current production and consumption levels, we need 1.5 planets to survive; if everyone lived like a U.S. citizen, we would need five planets.

Land, water and biodiversity continue to decline. Global CO2 emissions are on the rise. The oceans are warming and the sea level is rising continuously. Forest cover has decreased by 300 million hectares since 1990.

In his new book, “The Crisis of Global Sustainability”, presented in Geneva on Mar. 15, Tapio Kanninen, co-director of a project on sustainable global governance at the City University of New York and member of the Club of Rome, warms that we cannot continue with the current model of economic growth whilst limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius.

Technology cannot help us – it would be environmentally damaging and too costly, he says. We cannot move to alternative sources of energy – the present alternatives like solar, nuclear and wind contribute relatively little of global energy needs and they are unlikely to replace fossil fuel completely. In short: humanity has reached a stalemate.

“Many U.N. summits after the (1987) Brundtland Commission have avoided concrete action,” Kanninen said at the book launch Friday.

The recent Rio+20 Earth Summit held in Brazil this past June is just one example of the limitations of these international gatherings. Though thousands of participants had hoped the conference would generate concrete solutions and commitments to reducing global warning, the concluding document made no mention of the 30-billion-dollar fund need to transition to a green economy, nor did it outline a blueprint for sustainable development post 2015.

“Institutions and policies have been weak,” Kanninen said. “The concept of sustainable development has not been able to compete with the neoliberal economic paradigm, the Washington consensus and the paradigm of globalisation. These have advocated fiscal and monetary soundness and economic growth rather than the health of the ecosystem. And developed countries have not met their commitments to developing ones.”

Most of these summits draw very high-level attendance, but in the end industrialised countries’ national interests dominate the bargaining universe. The global North wants to safeguard its neoliberal economic targets, while the South continues to defend its development goals.

“Unless societies build alternatives to carbon-emitting energy technologies over the next five years, the world is doomed to a warmer climate, harsher weather, drought, famine, water scarcity, rising sea level, loss of island nations and increasing ocean acidification.”

Kanninen advocates for a second review conference of the U.N. charter and a complete paradigm shift.

“It is impossible to know exactly how the latter is going to play out because it will be so big,” he admitted to IPS. “We need joint action (involving) all sectors of society.”

Kanninen advocates abandoning the old approach of viewing sustainable development as a battlefield and adopting instead instruments from peace-building processes.

Yves Lador, consultant and representative of the U.S.-based Earthjustice at the U.N. in Geneva, told IPS on the sidelines of the book launch that this was an interesting approach.

“Particularly (with regards) to climate change, we need some trust building measures inspired by the disarmament agreements”, through which governments allow outsiders to monitor their progress. He added that cross verification between different independent monitors could bolster the exercise.

“This would be very useful because we don’t know the reality of various countries’ emissions. China, for example, does not make this data readily available. India has problems in data collection, but welcomes outside advice on how to share this data with the public.

“It is an information and trust issue,” Lador said. “At the 2009 Copenhagen Conference, the U.S. put forward the idea of cross-checking greenhouse gas emissions, but China refused.”

He cited growing awareness of the link between climate change and human rights as a salient example of the right to information – namely, the right of the public to know the extent and impacts of climate change and to participate in decision-making.

Alexander Likhotal, president of the Green Cross International, has a different paradigm shift in mind. “All the euphemisms like green economy will not help,” he told IPS. “We need a circular economy to decouple economic growth from the use of energy and materials.”

A circular economy is, by definition, a restorative economy: products should be designed for longer use and materials reused and recycled, which would increase the demand for maintenance and repairs. The concept has been around since the 1970s but it has gained momentum again due to the activities of the U.S.-based Ellen MacArthur Foundation and to “Bankrupting Nature”, a recent report authored by Ander Wijkman and Johan Rockström, co-president of the Club of Rome.

The circular economy “is creating a new model for business”, Likhotal continued. “Rolls Royce, for example, in addition to providing luxury cars, constructs engines and turbines for aircrafts. But they have stopped selling the engines to air companies – instead, they lease them. They benefit not from the bulk sales of the engines but from maintenance and competitiveness of the services, and are dramatically reducing their expenses.”

He believes an increase in services like leasing would compensate for the loss of jobs resulting from the decrease in production. Other major companies like Caterpillar have stopped selling huge trucks, and have begun to lease them.

“It is a win-win situation that is gaining more ground,” he stressed. “The change is coming…but it will not come without legislation and taxation incentives – political systems should provide some motivation for more openness and competiveness in terms of services provision.”

Prolonged drought can sometimes result in desertification. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, Mar 15 2013 (IPS)

Scientists gathered in Geneva for the first High-level Meeting on National Drought Policy (HMNDP) in over 30 years have identified data collection and sharing as some of the main challenges to effective prevention of drought. Clear goals and strong political will are vital to building policies at the national level, they say.

Jointly organised by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCC), the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), the meeting from Mar. 11-15 is an attempt to open an international dialogue on national policies.

Despite obvious differences, particularly between the North and South but also within and between specific countries, some obstacles are the same across all regions, starting with the need to promote better data collection and information dissemination.

As Cesar Morales, coordinator of a project undertaken by the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC) to estimate the cost of inaction before and during a drought, told IPS on the sideline of the conference, “The problem is not only data collection, but also data sharing.”

He says that in Latin America, but also in the other places, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that some institutions refuse to make information and research freely available to civil society, the public or other organisations.

“Presently we are preparing a report for the government of Costa Rica and the national meteorological organisation wants us to pay for their data,” he lamented, adding that in the scientific community, where everybody is competing for the same limited funds, nobody wants to share their information.

“This is a system that comes from the U.S. Introducing some market mechanisms into scientific research can be good, as long as it doesn’t become extreme,” he stressed.

In response to this problem, Latin American scientists at the conference have proposed a transparency policy on data and the creation of national systems of drought-related information.

In Argentina, the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), the leading national agency for the promotion of science and technology, requires research undertaken using its own resources be offered for free to all users.

Scientists from Latin America also drew attention to the extractive industries, which are not only heavy consumers of water resources, thus aggravating water scarcity and drought, but also contribute to the decline of traditional wisdom on water management.

Experts highlighted the current model of forestry development that is being practiced and promoted throughout the continent — particularly the cutting down of natural forests to make way for monocultures of rapidly-growing water-dependent species like eucalyptus – as an obstacle to drought prevention strategies.

Mining is another major problem in some regions of Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina.

“Original Indian communities live in valleys…where they (use) just enough water to produce food. But mining activities in the region aim to capture all the water to make products with higher market value,” Morales told IPS.

The expulsion of indigenous communities from their lands contributes to the loss of traditional knowledge on how to manage water scarcity and mitigate the effects of climate change. The ancient peoples of Peru, for example, used to transport water in special channels designed to avoid losses and they had appropriate agricultural techniques, in harmony with available resources.

For instance, “This year was declared the year of quinoa,” Morales said. “Recently, this plant had almost disappeared, but it has suddenly become very popular for its high quality proteins. It grows almost everywhere and everybody wants to cultivate it since it is a very good business for export.

“But this plant cannot be cultivated alone and extensively. It needs to be grown with other crops to preserve biodiversity and the fertility of soils.” But agribusiness predominantly favours monocrops over holistic, natural farming practices and is a major driver of drought.

Experts at the conference believe that one way of developing a more efficient system for gathering and distributing information is to have a holistic and multi-sectorial approach to drought.

“Drought is a developmental, not only an environmental, issue. Investing in drought planning can increase gross domestic product (GDP),” Bai-Maas Taal, executive secretary of the African Minister’s Council on Water, told IPS. “But the problem is that the costs of drought are only ‘guesstimated’. Only the primary impacts are calculated, while the longer term ones on activities like agriculture are neglected.”

According to African scientists at the conference, developing coherent national drought policies does not require each country to reinvent the wheel.

In a continent that has experienced severe droughts — which have gone from being episodic to an almost permanent phenomenon — for decades, every country has some kind of institution, policy, or strategy dealing with the issue.

But capacity building and a strong political commitment are lacking, like almost everywhere in the world.

“(We) need coordinated management of drought,” Taal continued. “In Kenya, it is the office of the Prime Minister that coordinates the meetings on climate — since the initiative comes from the highest office, all ministers do participate.” Having directives come from the highest authority in government also enables faster and more efficient dissemination of information.

This was evidenced in the U.S. during the severe 2011-2012 drought, where damages were limited thanks to the National Integrated Drought Information System’s (NIDIS) early warning system.

Echoing the theme of HMNDP – the development of full-fledged drought policies at the national level — Adrian Trotman from the Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology, pointed out, “…A drought policy maintains a focus on the goals. Players can change, but goals remain and you can establish and maintain partnerships and coordinate actions while making sure that the policy remains flexible.”

Among the many plans and proposals on the table was one by African scientists to develop insurance schemes so farmers can be compensated in times of drought, and another by scientists from the Southwest Pacific region to explore the establishment of drought “safety nets” to assist specific communities, as was done in Australia, the only country with a comprehensive national drought policy that has enabled it to remove drought as a category from natural disaster emergency relief.

(END)

Drought has dramatically increased as a consequence of climate change. Most countries react to it only after it has occurred, but don’t have national policies to prevent it. The high-level meeting on national drought policies in Geneva this week is trying to match scientific knowledge with political awareness.

“Drought is a natural phenomenon, but over the last decades, as a consequence of climate change, it has been escalating in frequency and intensity, affecting millions of people across the world,” Loc Gnacadja, executive secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCC), said at the meeting.

The meeting, jointly organised by UNCC, the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), brings together scientists and government officials to “start a dialogue on national policies,” said Michel Jarraud, secretary general of the WMO. “We have to facilitate the transition from crisis management to catastrophes prevention, like it has been successfully done for tsunamis and other natural catastrophes.”

Drought affects more people than any other natural disaster: since 1900 more than 11 million people have died as a consequence of drought, and over two billion people have been affected. In Africa, a third of the people already live in drought-affected areas.

Half of the world population will live in areas of high water scarcity by 2020. And drought is the single most common cause of food shortages, severely affecting food security in developing countries and jeopardising the FAO’s effort to increase food production by 70 percent by 2050 in order to feed a world population of 9 billion.

“Last year, the U.S. was hit by a severe drought that cost 1 percent of GDP,” Ann Tutwiler, special representative of the FAO in Geneva told IPS in an interview. “It affected the livestock that had to be sent earlier to the slaughterhouse. Damages could be somehow limited since U.S. biofuel policies allow, in cases of emergency, to use the cereals to feed the cattle instead of fuelling the cars. But it did not have much impact of human beings, except for the increase in the prices of cereals.”

In the Horn of Africa, drought affected 13 million people in 2011. In the worst-affected regions of Somalia, cereal prices were up 260 percent and, in Kenya, wheat yields dropped 45 percent compared to the year before.

In the 2007-2008 drought in Syria, 75 percent of the country’s farmers suffered total crop failure. The drought in Northern Mexico between 2010 and 2011 destroyed 900,000 hectares of farmland, and 1.7 million head of livestock were lost.

“The only country in the world that has a full-fledged drought policy is Australia,” Mohamed Bazza, senior official at the land and water division at FAO told IPS. “Kiribati and Morocco have national policies on water that are first steps towards good drought policies, but they are still sectorial and not comprehensive. Water is not the only sector that needs to be well planned, but all sectors do, like agriculture. Or, the strategy exists, but it is not implemented.”

Tackling drought has been at the centre of the FAO’s mandate since its establishment. The Rome-based UN agency has implemented projects in emergency responses, but also in mitigation and preparedness, like establishment of regional drought management networks.

“We were able to work in specific countries and regions where challenges are recognised, but we cannot work in countries that don’t ask us to,” Tutwiler told IPS. “The purpose of this conference is to raise awareness at the political level. Not enough countries are able to organise interdisciplinary responses to drought, and in many areas it is much easier to respond to emergencies than to longer-term issues. And from the side of donor agencies, prevention and response to drought are often not well coordinated.”

On the financial side, Mohamed Bazza believes that countries can fit their policies in their own regular budgets, like the ones for agriculture. “Drought policy is country specific and it should accommodate economic and social conditions. Of course, the more funding you have, the better; but you don’t need to have extra funding to start. It is not the costs that prevent countries to have proactive policies. It is the lack of political awareness.”

According to Tutwiler, the private sector has a special role to play in preventing drought, for example by developing new irrigation technologies or systems, by providing training for farmers in production techniques that can mitigate drought, or in identifying drought tolerant crops.

What about the NGOs who maintain that there are enough traditional drought resilient seeds, that ecological agriculture is the best response to climate change, and there is no need to develop new varieties of seeds whose control will be in the hand of a couple of multinationals through patents?

“It is important that this issue of intellectual property has been addressed by NGOs because there is much more sensitivity to it now, and the international community is trying to find solutions,” Tutwiler said.

“A lot of lessons have been learned from organic agriculture that can be applied more broadly. But given the challenges of climate change, we cannot a priori rule out a particular technology. A single one will not be right for all countries. Whether you use traditional seeds or commercial ones, you must make sure that they are adapted to the local conditions and wont’ affect the environment.

“There is more and more integration of local knowledge with more sophisticated techniques that will help getting the local varieties that are found to be drought resilient, into a wider use.”

She added that the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture allows for flexibilities for smallholder farmers to be reimbursed if some of their traditional seeds are commercialised.

A tsunami is looming on the horizon and the world is unprepared for it. This one won’t be a massive wall of water but a tidal wave of disease – and experts say the international community needs to act fast to keep it from crashing.

“Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) – cancer, heart disease, diabetes and chronic respiratory diseases, among others – have become the leading cause of death worldwide,” Jeffrey Sturchio, senior partner at the U.S.-based consulting firm Rabin Martin, told a conference organised by the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA) on World Cancer Day in Geneva.

“Some 36 million people die from (NCDs) every year, 80 percent of them in low and middle income countries – a figure that will increase by 17 percent in the coming years and by 25 percent in Africa,” he added.

Tuberculosis and malaria, in comparison, kill one to two million people around the world every year.

“The disease burden is shifting to NCDs, but since developing countries still have to fight infectious diseases, they face a double burden,” Sturchio warned.

However, developing countries do not appear to be paying adequate attention to the impending crisis.

“In 2010 HIV/AIDS was responsible for 3.5 percent of deaths worldwide, malaria for 1.5 percent, cancer for 12.6 percent and heart diseases for 14 percent,” Cary Adams, chief executive officer of the Union for International Cancer Control, told IPS on the sidelines of the conference on Feb. 4.

These statistics alone should be sufficient for governments to put NCDs high on their list of national priorities. “But in sub-Saharan Africa, HIV/AIDS caused 13.3 percent of deaths, malaria 6.7 percent and cancer 4.5 percent”, he said, which explains why African health ministers keep putting cancer on the back burner.

“But the (reality) is, the problem will double in the next 15 years. There is a tsunami of NCDs approaching and we need to tackle it today,” Adams stressed.

To tackle this “tsunami”, four health federations – the International Diabetes Federation, the Union for International Cancer Control, the World Heart Federation and the Union against Lung Disease and Tuberculosis – came together to form the Non-communicable Diseases Alliance. With a network of over 2,000 non-governmental organisations based in over 170 countries, it seeks to amplify the voice of civil society in the global debate on NCDs.

The Alliance was also instrumental in pushing the United Nations General Assembly to organise, in September 2011, a high-level meeting that officially declared NCDs a “challenge of epidemic proportions”, which, if it is to be addressed, requires the cooperation of governments, civil society and the private sector.

“This is not an easy thing to do,” Adams, who chairs the NCD Alliance, conceded to IPS. “We have tried to work on a common agenda and find consensus, but some NGOs would not talk to us because we engage with the private sector. We try to embrace the private sector without compromising on integrity and independence and everything we do is based on science.”

Still, the mobilisation has borne some fruits. Five years ago, non-communicable diseases were barely on the agenda. The U.N.’s political declaration and a series of follow-up activities built tremendous momentum, resulting in a plan of action that stretches to 2025, with clear targets such as reducing NCD-related deaths by 25 percent in that time frame.

But financial resources are stretched thin, and it is unlikely that the funds needed to launch a massive global campaign will be readily available.

“The reality is that in the last 20 years, tens of billions of dollars in official development assistance have gone to developing countries, mainly (to fight) HIV/AIDS, and it is unrealistic to think that the same will happen again,” Sturchio admitted.

It will therefore be necessary to capitalise on existing investments and reallocate some of the resources already in circulation, he said.

“Hundreds of HIV clinics were created across sub-Saharan Africa that can also be used for NCDs. When patients come to these clinics, they can also be tested for other infections or provided with vaccines,” he suggested.

For Margaret Kruk, a professor at Columbia University’s school of public health, primary care must be reconceptualised to tackle NCDs in low and middle-income countries.

“In theory, many NCD services can be provided in primary care, like primary prevention of hepatitis B, immunisation, smoking cessation, cholesterol and glucose testing, mammography and opportunistic screening for depression,” she said.

“But primary care in (developing) countries is not able to meet NCD challenges. The patient is not seen in a holistic way.”

She added that the challenge is most severe in sub-Saharan Africa, where, for the last half a century, national health plans have been oriented towards the “traditional killers” like infectious diseases, and have also focused heavily on maternal and child health.

This is partly due to the fact that the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) laid out by the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000 placed a great deal of emphasis on these “preventable causes of death”.

But as the 2015 deadline for achieving these targets draws closer, priorities will have to be re-examined.

Adams believes that one of the Alliance’s most important tasks over the next two years will be to make non-communicable diseases central in the post-2015 international development process.

Indeed, relatively simple public policy measures can go a long way in reducing NCDs – such as pushing people to consume less sugar and salt, eat less fatty foods, give up smoking and exercise more.

Already developing countries are becoming conscious that they don’t need additional funding for those measures. But when it comes to drugs, costs are much higher in developing countries than in the United States, for example.

From the manufacturer to the wholesale distributor, to the intermediaries and the clinics, monopolies, taxes, regulations and administrative hurdles push the price of medicines up to prohibitive rates in the global South.

The Southern African Development Community and the East African Community have undertaken initiatives to harmonise regulations at the regional level, but for Sturchio these are not enough: “Countries must be able to make sovereign decisions on the medicines they use, but today a lot of duplications make the supply chain inefficient.”

He does not believe intellectual property issues constitute an obstacle to stemming the wave of NCDs.

“Most of the medicines needed to treat NCDs are off patent,” he told IPS. “The challenge is to find ways to bring them to the people. Hundreds of medicines (to treat cancer) are very inexpensive and yet unavailable.”

Mexico is facing its worst drought in seven decades. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, Dec 11 2012 (IPS)

While world leaders were wrapping up the United Nations conference on climate change (COP 18) in Doha, Qatar this past weekend with the annual vague promise to tackle the enormous crises brought on by extreme weather and global warming, a delegation of youth gathered far from the high-level conference halls to say “no” to advocacy without action.

At the invitation of the Club of Rome – a renowned think tank that turned heads 40 years ago with the publication of a groundbreaking report, ‘The Limits to Growth’, which brought the concept of sustainable development into mainstream discourse – artists, activists and representatives of major youth coalitions around the world flocked to the Change-Course-Conference in Winterthur, Switzerland, to discuss viable alternatives to the prevailing order.

Calling for a “change of mindset” to stop the warming of the planet, some 60 participants engaged in workshops from Dec. 8 to 11, stressing that high-level political summits such as the one in Doha have, once too often, proven the limits of their efficacy.

Fed up with politicians’ inability to reach binding agreements on carbon emissions cuts and find lasting solutions – beyond the paradigm of continued industrialisation – to the climate crisis, these young people have gone back to the basics, focusing on grassroots action to help communities adapt to climate change.

Referring to a pledge made by rich developed nations in Doha to provide funds to poorer states – particularly to the least developed countries (LDCs) – to deal with the loss and destruction brought on by extreme weather events, Ibrahim Ceesay, executive coordinator of the African Youth Initiative on Climate Change (AYICC), asked IPS, “How do we make sure this is translated into practice?”

The answer, he believes, lies in young people, who have “an important role to play in adaptation and mitigation because they are innovative, energetic and can make the bridge between those who make the policies and those who are affected by them”.

“When I go back to Gambia (his home country), my task will be to tell a woman in a village how she is going to be affected by the warming of the planet.”

The 27-year-old activist and filmmaker said that the AYICC, the biggest youth climate change network in Africa, comprised of 42 country chapters representing a total of 10,000 members around the continent, has done advocacy for the past five years.

“Now we want to stop and help the communities adapt to climate change. Practice what you preach and preach what you practice,” Ceesay added.

Africa currently contributes less than four percent of total global carbon emissions, but the impact of global warming on the continent is disproportionately severe.

This, combined with industrialised nations’ weak track record in adhering to their own emissions reduction targets, has pushed the youth network to work directly with local communities to identify and implement long-lasting solutions to climate change.

“We want to come up with resilience measures and coping strategies, because adaptation funds are not trickling down to those who need them. We have to develop contingency plans and help people to tell their stories. People are dying, we have to move fast,” Ceesay stressed.

A young Namibian named Justine Braby, programme director of AYICC, told IPS, “The new generation is pushing for change because with the world leaders that are in place nothing happens, we are not moving forward.

“Everybody at this conference acknowledges that the current economic system is a problem. We need a global paradigm shift.”

She believes Africa is in a unique position to nurture just this kind of systemic change. “We can either copy-paste the industrialisation (model), which does not work, or we can come up with innovative (alternatives) at the country level.”

A small group of AYICC members recently conducted a survey in a former township in Namibia’s capital, Windhoek, asking people about their values and what makes them happy – be it access to basic education or free time.

The results will feed into municipal and national development plans, in an attempt to move beyond gross domestic product (GDP) growth as the sole measure of a country or population’s wellbeing.

“We are not chasing financial growth, which is unrealistic, but the contentment of the people, the well-being of the society,” she explained.

Erdenechimeg Baasandamba, a 30-year-old biologist from Mongolia, is concerned not only about the rapid changes taking place in her country, but also the lack of awareness about the severity of the problem.

“The environment is damaged, rivers are shrinking, mining has become a big issue in my country. But since 60 percent of the population lives in the capital, they are not aware of the changes taking place in the countryside,” she told IPS.

In her opinion, the government doesn’t communicate effectively with mining companies, allowing some of them to wreak havoc on the environment, use up vast quantities of water and avoid conducting any rehabilitation work, thus fuelling conflict with the local population.

Through the People’s Centre for Conservation, a local NGO, Baasandamba has run a radio programme to educate listeners about individual responsibility in the face of a global climate crisis and the choices one can make: such as eating vegetables instead of meat; recycling paper; or riding bicycles instead of having two cars.

She also works with communities in rural areas and organises meetings between researchers and the general public. “Everybody is aware of climate change because it is obvious that it is happening, but most people don’t know how to solve the problem”, even though simple solutions are staring humanity in the face, she said.

Referring to the Mongolian government’s efforts to make changes in response to the climate crisis, she said, “We have wind and 320 days of sun per year, so we produce solar power and are even trying to export it to China.”

(END)

By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, Nov 28 2012 (IPS)

Remittances to the world’s poorest countries reached a record 27 billions dollars in 2011, according to a report released Monday by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Geneva.

Supachai Panitchpakdi, secretary general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Credit: Communications and Information Unit/UNCTAD

Analysing trends in the 48 least developed countries (LDCs), the report noted that remittances – monies sent back home by nationals working abroad – are now second only to official development assistance (ODA), which stood at 42 billion dollars in 2010.

Remittances were almost double the value of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows to these countries, which amounted to 15 billion dollars last year, making them a much more important source for LDCs than for other country groups.

Indeed, remittances amount to 4.4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in the LDC bloc as a whole and 15 percent of exports. These shares are three times higher than in other developing countries.

While these numbers are impressive, experts like UNCTAD Secretary-General Supachai Panitchpakdi believe governments are missing a vital opportunity to mainstream these financial flows into industrialised policies that favour long-term development.

Panitchpakdi sat down with IPS correspondent Isolda Agazzi to discuss how these private transfers, more beneficial to LDCs than trade and investment, can harness the potential of migrant workers to drive sustainable growth in their national economies.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Why have remittances to LDCs seen this sudden jump in recent years?

The primary purpose of these private transfers is to help (migrants’) families back home and very few countries are trying to (turn that money) into profits for the whole economy. Some migrant workers have managed to set up small businesses, but the potential is far from being fully harnessed.

Q: How can UNCTAD help turn a wasted opportunity into a profitable one?

A: UNCTAD has a unique position to deal with the LDCs and persuade governments to adopt specific policies to mainstream remittances into national development strategies. These private flows should be linked to new industrial policies. Development institutions should provide supplementary financing to returning migrant workers to encourage them to use their knowledge and accumulated savings in building productive capacities.

Governments should be able to protect small businesses by sequencing trade liberalisation. Infant industry protection may appear a bit naïve nowadays, but governments still need to support small and medium enterprises in certain areas, though not forever.  Adopting permanent trade distorting policies is not the way. We still believe in free trade.

Q: Given that 80 percent of LDC migrants move to other developing countries, shouldn’t industrialised countries revise their migration policies and open up their border to unskilled labour?

A: While full trade liberalisation would only add one percent to the world’s GDP, full labour liberalisation could (result) in a 100 percent increase since a person’s productivity can double when going abroad. Recently, people have been looking at migration through a different lens. The more mobile labour becomes, the more productivity increases. And there is no crowding out because most of the time migrant workers go into areas of employment where nationals don’t want to work.

Q: Is the emphasis on remittances an acknowledgement of the failure of trade and investment in the LDCs?

A: It is true that FDI and remittances have flowed in reverse correlation. For the weaker countries, FDI goes only into extractive industries that do not (create) jobs. And due to the ‘race to the bottom’ (competition between host countries to attract investment by lowering wages, taxes and standards), these countries have lost revenue.

UNCTAD is also worried by the involvement of transnational corporations. The problem with FDI is that it is tied to conditionalities and driven by gain, whereas remittances are not conditioned by anybody. Therefore, given that one in five people with university-level education from the LDCs lives abroad, mainly in developed countries, improving and mobilising FDI would be one way for LDCs to avoid the brain drain.

Indeed, brain drain is the downside of remittances: two million educated people from the LDCs live abroad. The loss of knowledge and know-how for the home countries in key sectors like health and education – there are more Ethiopian university professors in the United States than in Ethiopia – could outweigh the benefits of remittances. Other adverse effects are the potential distortion of local prices and the increase of the exchange rate.

(END)

Excerpt:

Nearly 2.5 billion people around the world don’t have access to sanitation. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, Nov 18 2012 (IPS)

Organisers of this year’s World Toilet Day, which falls on Nov. 19, are using the slogan ‘I give a shit – do you?’ to break the silence around the crucial issue of sanitation and remind the international community that 2.5 billion people around the world don’t have access to clean and private toilets.

Improving these figures, and achieving the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the number of people without basic sanitation by 2015, needs a change of mindset and strong political will, not financial resources, campaigners say.

“(One and a half) billion people, or 15 percent of the world’s population, are still defecating in the open. Of the MDG targets for 2015, sanitation is the furthest off track… (At) the current rate it will only be reached in 2026,” Saskia Castelein, advocacy and communications officer at the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC) told IPS.

This Geneva-based organisation, created by a United Nations resolution, was responsible for making sanitation an MDG target at the 2002 Johannesburg Summit on Sustainable Development.

“In the last ten years, sanitation has made a lot of progress in terms of awareness and community approaches,” Castelein continued. An increasing number of “people and organisations are working around the issue and (are using) the MDG framework to lobby governments. Now there is more money, but challenges are still enormous.”

Jack Sim, founder of the World Toilet Organisation and initiator of World Toilet Day, is of the opinion that “What we don’t discuss, we can’t improve.”

Sim has been instrumental in putting the issue of sanitation on the international agenda.

“Over the last 12 years, World Toilet Day has become an amazing movement for everyone to support better toilets and sanitation conditions around the world. It has also become a day of creativity as people all over the globe celebrate it in their own style,” he added.

Much progress has been made in India, China and other parts of East Asia, with China being the most likely to meet the goal on time.

But most of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are still riddled with problems, with only three countries – Botswana, Cape Verde and Angola – on track.

Various studies have shown that each dollar spent on sanitation brings a return of five dollars, yet the world has been slow to make progress because, according to Castelein, the issue is surrounded by taboos.

She argues that policymakers are reluctant to bring such an “unglamorous topic” into the limelight and governments are hesitant to interfere in this most private aspect of people’s lives.

Meanwhile cultural customs and habits are compounding the problem.

“In some places, it is a social tradition to defecate in the open,” a practice that often leads to the spread of diseases like cholera and typhoid, she said.

Diarrhoeal diseases, a direct consequence of poor sanitation, are the second most common cause of death among young children in developing countries, killing more than HIV/AIDS, malaria and measles combined, and resulting in one death every 20 seconds.

Thus, experts argue, improving sanitation in the developing would also expedite the fourth MDG – improving child health and reducing under-five mortality by two-thirds in the next three years.

Reluctance to embrace modern sanitation can be solved by “a community-driven approach,” Castelein said, with development practitioners going from village to village and “training the trainers” on the importance of proper sanitation.

According to Castelein, there is no need to invest millions of dollars into building water-flush toilets all over the world – all that is needed is a global effort to promote basic hygiene by educating people about simple steps like washing their hands with ash, which is a good disinfectant.

Many people, particularly in the developing world, are unaware that sanitation was proclaimed a basic human right by the U.N. general assembly in 2010. Increased awareness of this right could push people to pressure their governments to provide proper facilities.

Campaigners also point out that proper sanitation facilities are crucial for women and girls during menstruation; according to a study by Plan India, 23 percent of Indian girls drop out of school when they reach puberty. World Toilet Day demands safe and appropriate toilet facilities to keep them in school, thus overlapping with the MDG of eliminating gender disparities in primary and secondary education.

(END)

Since the restoration of democracy in 2008, Pakistan has undertaken steps to uphold human rights, but the situation of minorities has only worsened, according to a group of NGOs. Dalits are in the worst state, facing both religious and social discrimination, they say.

The Pakistan government claims otherwise. “2008-2012 has been the most active period of legislation-making on human rights in the 65 years of the history of Pakistan,” Hina Rabbani Khar, Pakistan minister for foreign affairs told the Universal Periodic Review in Geneva this week. After a first assessment in 2008, Pakistan was scrutinised again by the peer review mechanism of the Human Rights Council that all UN member states undergo every four years.

A new law was enacted in May 2012 to create a national independent commission on human rights, one member of which will be from the minorities. Pakistan has also ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Convention against Torture and it is now focusing on implementing them at the national level, the minister said.

“Our constitution is crystal clear on the rights of minorities to freely profess their religion and visit their places of worship,” the minister added. “They are an integral part of the Pakistani society and all citizens are guaranteed equal rights and status, irrespective of religion or caste.”

Independent groups cast their doubts. “Since the last review there has been some progress, but it is clearly not enough in terms of minority rights,” Shobha Das, director of programmes at Minority Rights Group International stressed in an interview with IPS.

“Pakistan has ratified ICCPR, but its implementation is very slow. It has a quota system in politics where 4 percent of the seats in the upper house are reserved for non-Muslims – which reflects their percentage in the population. But in the lower house, the national assembly, only 10 seats out of 342 are reserved for non-Muslims. Non-Muslims are not safe in Pakistan, particularly those who speak out for their rights. We are very concerned about religious freedom.”

Minority Rights Group International is particularly worried about direct, physical attacks on members of the minorities, and the inability, or unwillingness, of a “weak state” to protect them. It is also concerned over what it calls the institutionalised erosion of religious freedom – like having to declare one’s religion when applying for identity papers.

“Even if religious minorities are not directly affected by violence, there is a pervasive atmosphere of fear because the state does not provide adequate response,” Shobba Das said. “These people feel insecure. They feel Pakistani, but the message they get is that they are not.”

NGOs are concerned also over the blasphemy law, that they say constitutes a fundamental erosion of human rights. Instituted in the 1860s by the British to protect all religions against blasphemy, it has been amended so often that today it protects Islam and not other religions. The law is often misused to settle personal disputes with members of religious minorities.

Zulfiqar Shah from the Pakistan Dalit Solidarity Network told IPS that members of supposedly ‘lower’ castes, the Dalits, suffer acutely in Pakistan. “Dalits are discriminated against as much as in India and, in addition, they have the double disadvantage of being non-Muslim. Currently, there is no law against discrimination.”

In 1947, at the time of the partition of India when Pakistan was created, about 24 percent to 27 percent of the population in the area that is present day Pakistan was of the minorities. The majority of Hindus migrated to India, others converted to Islam. Today the minority population in Pakistan is only 4 percent, which is 7.2 million people. Most members of the minorities who are still in Pakistan belong to Dalit groups. Their numbers are 330,000 according to the 1998 census, but minority groups say the real number is between two and four million.

Getting the real figures is politically fraught. But it is also difficult since most Dalits live in rural areas, and with very poor access to health, education and employment. They are confined to jobs like agricultural work in bondage labour. “Forced labour goes on from generation to generation because these landless peasants cannot pay off their debts,” Shah said.

Currently, there is only one Dalit in Parliament and not a single one in a provincial assembly. “The government should set up a commission to implement affirmative action. Discrimination is built in Hinduism, not in Islam. Theoretically Dalits should have a better position in Pakistan than in India, but unfortunately it is even worse. India, at least, guarantees legal protection and affirmative action,” Shah said.

One of the most pressing issues is the kidnapping of young girls who are forcibly converted to Islam. In March this year, Rinkal Kumari, a 19-year-old Hindu girl, was kidnapped and forcibly converted. A few months later, 350 people from the upper Sindh left for India.

“Pakistan should set up a faith conversion commission with members from all religions. Whoever wants to convert should approach this commission first,” Shah said.

States participating in the interactive dialogue with Pakistan asked the government to adopt steps to amend the law on blasphemy and to uphold the rights of religious minorities. They asked it to investigate attacks against religious minorities and to hold those responsible for those acts accountable.

Ten years of campaigning by the World Coalition against the Death Penalty have brought fruit: the number of countries that have abolished capital punishment in law or practice has gone up to 140. But some countries have resumed executions this year.

“Today, 140 countries have abolished the death penalty in law or practice. They are either completely abolitionist or have not carried out any execution for at least ten years as an official policy, not a random phenomenon. This makes up 70 percent of the world states,” Jan Erik Wetzel, Amnesty International advocate for the death penalty, told IPS in an interview.

“In 2003, only 80 countries were completely abolitionist. Ten years later, their number has risen to 97. We have abolition or a dramatic decrease of the executions in all regions and legal systems of the world. Asia and the Arab region are more difficult than others, but the death penalty is surmountable everywhere.”

According to Amnesty International, 14 countries still retain the death penalty in Asia. But 17, including Cambodia, Nepal, Bhutan, the Philippines and East Timor, have abolished it for all crimes. China, that executes most people by far in the world, has abolished the death penalty for 13 mostly economic crimes.

In the Middle East and North Africa, four out of 19 countries – Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Yemen – accounted for 99 percent of all executions last year, with a dramatic increase in Iraq (mainly for “terrorist” crimes) and Saudi Arabia (particularly for drug offenders). An increase was noted also in the Hamas controlled part of the Gaza strip. But Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Albania, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Djibouti have either abolished or reduced executions dramatically. In Lebanon and Jordan the number of the death sentences has gone down, even though to a lesser extent.

“In Tunisia and Egypt, after the Arab spring, we have made sure that the death penalty becomes a part of the discussion,” Wetzel said. “In Tunisia, we suggested to abolish it and discussions are still ongoing, but the signs are not good. For these countries, we had high hopes after the uprisings, but they have not materialised.”

However, he finds it encouraging that Tunisia has not executed for more than a decade, and that President Moncef Marzouki commuted 122 death sentences in January this year. And that in Egypt former president Hosni Mubarak was sentenced to life imprisonment. “The death penalty has become part of the political conversation, when nobody talked about it before. There are very committed activists in both countries. Since the uprisings, they do a lot of grassroots work that may not bring success immediately.”

“In Egypt, for the first time people can shape the agenda,” Amr Issam of the Mission of Egypt to the UN told IPS. It would be difficult for the new government to go against the majority of the population, he said. “The key challenge is to have a constructive dialogue to encourage states to revisit the list of crimes that are punishable by death. And to bring in more safeguards and a more independent judicial process.”

States that retain the death penalty must limit it to the most serious crimes, which has been interpreted to mean the crime of murder, Kyung-Wha Kang, deputy UN high commissioner for human rights, reminded a conference to celebrate ten years of a campaign against the death penalty at the United Nations office in Geneva this week. Use of the death penalty for drug smuggling should be abolished, he said.

“In the early 1990s, we started cooperation between civil society and the Italian government for a moratorium,” said Emma Bonino, vice-president of the Italian Senate and a pioneer in the fight against capital punishment. “Many human rights groups were against the moratorium, they wanted to go for abolition. It has been a tough discussion. But today people recognise that having gone for a moratorium was a success. All the countries that have arrived to abolition have first gone through it.”

According to Amnesty International, each year, in addition to an unknown number of people executed in China, many countries including Iran, the U.S., Yemen and North Korea each carry out scores of executions. And there are backlashes: this year, Botswana, the Gambia and Japan resumed executions. Gambia had not carried out executions for the past 30 years.

A collateral and completely neglected effect of capital punishment is its impact on the orphans left behind. “There is very little research on this issue,” Helen Kearney, from the Quakers UN Office in Geneva, told IPS. “But evidence highlights serious emotional implications for these children, such as post-traumatic stress diseases and a huge social stigma.”

She deplores the lack of data collection, even in the United States, where no special programme exists to take care of the children. In some countries, especially the ones where the death penalty is routinely applied in cases of domestic violence and the children may lose both parents, they end up on the street. “We want a reframing of this question. It is a child rights and a public health issue, it is intergenerational and it reaches out to the wider community. States must take their responsibility.”

The new WWF Living Planet Report warns of a significant decline in biodiversity, particularly in low-income countries, and a huge increase in the ecological footprint of high-income countries.

Sam Smith, Jim Leape and Stuart Orr at the presentation of the 2012 Living Planet Report in Geneva. Credit:Isolda Agazzi/IPS

Released ahead of the Rio+20 Earth Summit, it calls on the world to modify production and consumption patterns and turn to renewable energy sources.

“Overall, biodiversity has declined by 28 percent around the world since 1970. But in low-income countries the loss is particularly important – it reaches 60 percent. The depletion of the natural systems is hitting hardest in countries that can least afford it,” said Jim Leape, director general of WWF International, introducing the 2012 Living Planet Report on May 14 in Geneva.

The most important publication of the renowned environmental organisation, released every two years, looks at biodiversity around the world and at humanity’s ecological footprint – namely the pressure we put on land and water.

The increase of the latter has been enormous since 1961: “We are using 50 percent more resources than the earth can support. Today we are living as if we had one and a half planets. If we continue like this, by 2050 we will need three planets. Our pattern of consumption is unsustainable,” Leape said.

On average, high-income countries have an ecological footprint that is five times that of low-income ones. The ten countries with the biggest ecological footprint per person are Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Denmark, the United States, Belgium, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and Ireland.

The report came out five weeks ahead of the United Nations Sustainable Development Conference, or Rio+20, in Rio de Janeiro, which will follow up on the commitments to sustainable development adopted two decades ago at the Earth Summit in the same city.

“It is an important moment to look at what is happening on the earth,” Leape added. “There are proposals to establish Sustainable Development Goals and to change signals to the market by adding social and ecological indicators to GDP.

“The marketplace continues to send the wrong signals because so many costs are not built into the price system. Prices should tell the truth. Governments must eliminate subsidies for fossil fuels and commit to clean energy access for all.”

Asked whether the green economy, the main theme of the conference, is the right solution, he told IPS that “the central challenge is figuring out how to move to a green economy. There is a lot of debate on the term; some like it, some don’t. But somehow we must get on a path that the earth can sustain, and define a new prosperity with the planet’s resources. We need a different model for future development.”

The report does indicate the WWF’s belief that another course is possible, and outlines possible solutions. The first is to preserve natural capital by protecting ecosystems, and land and water.

Significant progress has been made in the key area of deforestation, but there is always a threat of setbacks. While Brazil, for example, has been the leader in the trend against deforestation in the last few years, a new law passed there could severely weaken protection of forests.

Another proposal is to look at the “water footprint”, or the way water is managed on the production side. “We are providing incentives to talk about water in the economy,” explained Stuart Orr, freshwater manager at WWF. “We work very closely with businesses to help them understand their footprint. And some of the most progressive works on water are done in Africa.”

In Kenya, WWF has found out that 10 percent of foreign exchange was linked to the exploitation of one single river basin.

The environmental group has outlined incentives to better manage river basins, which have attracted the interest of different countries.

“We develop standards on the use of water for business, and we counsel governments on how to reach hydropower sustainability – for example, by building standards on hydropower development,” Orr said. “In China, we have worked with the government on a river basin allocation that applies to 270 rivers in the country.”

Sustainable production is another solution. And it starts with renewable energy. “We don’t need new technology to do it,” said Sam Smith, leader of the WWF climate and energy initiative. “Last year, investments in renewable power were greater than in fossil fuels. In Spain, 61 percent of electricity was provided by wind power (one windy day in April).”

This is also true in emerging countries. Mexico has set a goal for 50 percent of the country’s energy supply to come from renewable sources by 2020, and the government is promoting wind power and solar panels. And in Africa, South Africa and Kenya have taken significant renewable energy initiatives along similar lines.

Energy efficiency is another promising path. In Pakistan, thanks to an initiative launched by WWF in conjunction with Ikea, 40,000 farmers are now growing cotton in a way that reduces the severe environmental impact of conventional cotton production. According to the report, in 2010, 170,000 hectares of cotton production used 40 percent less chemical fertiliser, 47 percent less pesticide, and 37 percent less water.

On the consumption side, “each of us can play a role. Companies and consumers want better choices,” Leape said.

Labels can be a solution. In Chile, which supplies eight percent of the global pulp and paper market, WWF is working with the government and the forestry sector to strengthen and broaden the scope of Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification.

The same goes for fish. Overall, a nearly five-fold increase in global marine fish catch, from 19 million tonnes in 1950 to 87 millions tonnes in 2005, has left many fisheries overexploited.

Chile provides 30 percent of the global salmon market and 13 percent of the global market for forage fish. WWF is promoting the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification in the South American country, as an important mechanism to ensure the exploitation of fisheries in a way that is both environmentally sustainable and economically viable.

“The challenges underlined in the Living Planet Report are clear,” Leape said. “Rio+20 can and must be the moment for governments to set a new course towards sustainability. The meeting is a unique opportunity for coalitions of the committed – governments, cities and businesses – to join forces and play a crucial role in keeping with a living planet.”

(END)

Lingering violence, intolerance and oppression in Tunisia, following the ousting of former dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011, tells the revolutionaries who sparked the Arab Spring that their work is just beginning.

With extremist violence on the rise, many Tunisians believe the revolution never ended, and that a second wave of protest is not far off. Credit: scossargilbert/CC-BY-2.0

Islamic fundamentalists represented by Salafists have presented themselves as the biggest challenge to Tunisian democracy.

By sanctioning and inciting violence against more progressive forces in the country, they are filling the cultural and political vacuum left by Ben Ali, whose regime effectively shackled freedom of expression, especially among the youth.

On Apr. 21 and 22, Jawhar Ben M’barek, the speaker for the social democratic group Doustourna, was violently assaulted by fanatics in the southern towns of Douz and Souk El Ahad, with the perpetrators going so far as to call for his death.

An undefined group of Salafists and others, acting in the name of ‘Muslim identity’, are responsible for these acts of aggression, which are becoming increasingly commonplace as traditionalists try desperately to steer the country’s post-revolutionary development with conservative reins.

Adnan Hajji, a member of the national trade union UGTT and former coordinator of the upheaval in the Gafsa mines in 2008, told IPS that “the situation is blocked because this government doesn’t want to listen and to negotiate with representatives of the different regions or with the “outraged”. The police are aggressive; the Salafists, supported by the (recently elected Islamist) Ennahda party, attack the media and civil society activists,” he lamented.

“You cannot yet call this a revolution, because it did not go till the end. It was an upheaval and we are going to have a second one.”

Freedom for all, or freedom for none

Tunisia has long boasted a very progressive family code and Tunisian women are seen as some of the most liberated in the region.

Now these freedoms are at risk, with Salafists clamouring for a return to a more “traditional” society.

“The way Tunisian society is evolving is worrisome because some are trying to impose limits to individual freedoms. The biggest threat is the expression of violence,” Tunisian filmmaker Salma Baccar, currently in Geneva to chair the International Oriental Film Festival, told IPS.

“The situation of women is not isolated from… society as a whole. If we manage to strike a balance between those who want the veil and those who don’t, those who want to drink alcohol and those who don’t, then we will have an equilibrated society where everybody can exercise his or her rights.”

The renowned artist – whose movie ‘Fatma 19’ has been censored for 36 years because it attributed Tunisian women’s progressive status not to the statesman Habib Burguiba but to a long cultural evolution – had never before been tempted by politics.

In February 2011, when 280,000 sub-Saharan African migrants fled worn-torn Libya to seek refuge in southern Tunisia, she decided to build a “cultural tent” to play music and movies, for which she was assaulted by the Islamic fundamentalist Salafists.

It was then that she realised that culture needed to go hand in hand with politics. She joined the Democratic Pole and in October 2011 was elected to the constitutional assembly.

She considers the progressive status of Tunisian women to be “irreversible”, but admits to being “a bit worried” by the situation in the country, particularly after Ennahda won the constitutional assembly elections.

“But you cannot stop history. Our real gain is the mentality of the people, not the laws. If a woman wants to wear a veil, or even a niqab, she is free to do it as long as she is an adult. For secular people like me, accepting (that) is a good exercise in democracy. But imposing it on children is a completely different story. And if someone physically assaults me in the name of his ideas, then it is not acceptable any more.”

Baccar says she would like to see another revolution, but a cultural one this time.

“The worst aspect of Ben Ali’s regime was that it deprived people of culture and education.”

Because this fundamental right was violated for so long, young people today are starting to express themselves exclusively through violence. Most of those who resort to aggression and attacks come from neglected regions and impoverished neighbourhoods, she added.

For her, these “cultural losers” are the biggest problem in today’s Tunisia, more of a liability than the 800,000 unemployed. Even the youngsters who went to colleges and universities were not truly educated – rather, their minds were emptied of any form of free expression, and some have turned into fanatics.

“This (was) Ben Ali’s worst crime against our society and remedying it will be a long term task.” She warned that society should also keep a close watch on primary schools, where many children are indoctrinated with reactionary ideas at a very early stage.

“In some maternal schools, mothers are encouraged to veil their daughters. That is where the fight starts: we have to invest in childhood and in the youngsters,” she stressed.

Ennahda’s limitations

For Hajji, nothing has changed since January 14, 2011, the legendary day when Ben Ali was forced to flee the country. In fact, things are actually getting worse, “which is normal after an upheaval where people are allowed to speak out for the first time; but something must be done to cool down a social situation that has been rotting since independence.”

“This government doesn’t know where it is going,” he complained. The constitutional assembly, which was supposed to complete its work by March 2013, has to act quickly.

“Ennahda doesn’t have a clear social or economic programme. They have never dealt with economic issues, never supported any social movement. I personally negotiate with the government and I can see how scared they are of taking any decision.”

The lack of a strict time frame within which to draft the constitution worries him, since the initial date of March 2013 has not been confirmed.

Hajji believes Ennahda is quickly losing the trust and support of its voter base. Though the party won the elections quite comfortably, only 46 percent of eligible voters turned out on polling day, while the majority abstained.

Next time around, Ennahda might not be first in line if they fail to deliver concrete solutions in the post-revolutionary period.

In a world where governments are increasingly subservient to global finance capital, multinationals are gaining ground in the fight against state regulations that aim to protect the environment, public health or social policies.

According to the most recent data released by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the number of lawsuits brought against governments by companies evoking clauses in bilateral investment treaties (BITs) was 450 at the end of 2011.

These are only the known cases; most most are kept secret.

In the many instances in which these lawsuits have been successful, governments have been made to pay fines amounting to tens, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars or euros.

The highly controversial BITs – which establish the conditions for investment by companies of one country in another state – have handed multinational corporations an arsenal of clauses with which to fight state regulations against harmful investment.

In 2011, Argentina held the record of known cases (51), followed by Venezuela (25), Ecuador (23) and Mexico. Most of the claims against Argentina are related to the 2011 financial crisis and many to the privatisation of water. In total, Buenos Aires has been fined more than one billion dollars by multinational corporations.

Last year, Ecuador was forced to pay fines of 78 million dollars to the United States’ oil company Chevron, which claims that the country’s efforts to protect the Amazon from pollution have negatively affected business.

This year, Argentina may face a new case, after the government moved to regain state control over the country’s biggest oil firm, which had been owned by the private Spanish oil company Repsol for many years.

According to UNCTAD, the year 2011 saw 40 percent of cases decided in favour of states and 30 percent in favour of investors, while the remaining 30 percent resulted in settlements.

Ironically, BITs allow companies to sue governments but not vice versa.

In December 2011, for instance, the Stockholm-based Vattenfall threatened to sue Germany for the federal government’s decision, in the aftermath of the Fukushima catastrophe, to phase out nuclear energy by 2022.

The Swedish nuclear company was poised to rake in compensation amounting to more than a billion euros. Evoking the Energy Charter Treaty – a multilateral agreement that protects investment in the energy sector – Vattenfall first tried, unsuccessfully, to convince the federal government to accommodate its requests.

The deadline for peaceful dispute settlement expired last March and now Vattenfall could sue the government at any time.

“Germany has around 130 BITs that could potentially severely restrain its environmental policy,” Nathalie Bernasconi, of the Geneva-based International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), told IPS.

“Foreign investors may challenge, in an international arbitration process, any change in law and policy to protect the environment and public health, to promote social or cultural goals, or to grapple with financial or economic crises. However, it is impossible to predict the outcome with any precision because each will depend in large part on the composition of the arbitral tribunal deciding the case, which consists of three highly-paid individuals, typically specialised in commercial rather than public law.”

It is the second time that Vattenfall has attacked Germany on environmental charges. In 2009, it challenged the standards set out in an environmental permit required for the operation of its coal-fired power plant situated on the river Elbe, which runs through Hamburg.

Claiming that the regulations – aimed at limiting the increase in water temperatures caused by the plant’s operations – were too strict, the company brought the case to an arbitral tribunal at the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID).

In order to settle, Germany agreed to change the conditions under which the permit was delivered and the case was dropped.

“A legal analysis by a German law firm commissioned by Greenpeace confirms that the environmental standards in the permit were diluted in a way that was probably not required under German law. It is a typical case where a government… (has) abandon legislation or standards it originally planned to adopt out of fear of being sued or condemned in an international procedure,” Bernasconi commented.

Another emblematic example of the power corporations wield over governments is the case brought by Philip Morris International against Uruguay and Australia under BITs the countries had signed with Switzerland and Hong Kong respectively.

The U.S. tobacco giant is using these treaties to challenge new legislation concerning the health warnings and advertising on cigarette packages – even though the regulations are in compliance with and encouraged by the World Health Organisation (WHO) framework convention on tobacco control.

According to Veijo Heiskanen, a specialist in international arbitration at Lalive law firm in Geneva, “From the 1960s to the 1970, states had a direct role in economies. With the privatisation (wave) of the 1990s, this direct role was replaced by regulation.”

This led to questions about whether the implementation of these regulations was adversely affecting investors, particularly foreign ones, which is often the case.

While investor protection was initially necessary to regulate government measures like nationalisation, the trend now seems to be leaning heavily on corporations challenging these regulations.

For example, in the late 1990s, Mexico was fined 16.7 million dollars for forbidding the U.S.-based company Metalclad from dumping toxic waste in the Guadalcazar County in the northern part of the north-central state of San Luis Potosí.

“The real question is whether (BITs) regulations are appropriate and states should seek (sound) legal advice to make sure that they are in compliance with international standards,” stressed Heiskanen. “These disputes are politically sensitive because there are (millions of dollars) at stake.”

Prior to paying fines to Chevron last year, Ecuador was sentenced to the payment of 700 million dollars back in 2010. That same year the Swiss cement supplier Holcim obtained 650 million dollars from Venezuela, when the country nationalised cement production.

All experts are agreed that legislation and regulations need to find a better equilibrium so that they cannot be exploited by states or investors.

“Investment protection treaties must be modernised to strike a better balance between investors’ and states rights,” Bernasconi concluded. “The old model doesn’t work any more.”

States and citizens alike have become extremely mistrustful of the dispute settlement process. “The commercial arbitration model on which investment arbitration is built is just not adequate for resolving sensitive issues of public policy,” she added.

“A lack of transparency, unpredictability and conflicts of interest have simply become unacceptable. This discontent has led countries like Australia to disfavor investor-state dispute settlement entirely and others to terminate their investment treaties.

“Watching these developments, countries like Brazil, which never ratified any of its investment treaties, must count themselves lucky,” she added.

After almost a decade of major economic transformation, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic is on the brink of World Trade Organisation (WTO) membership.

But the small country’s Herculean effort to join the exclusive trade club is a reminder to the ten other least developed countries (LDCs) now seeking membership of the cumbersome process involved.

“LDCs think it is easy to accede to the WTO, like becoming a United Nations member, but it is not,” Nicolas Imboden, director of the Geneva-based Ideas Centre, told IPS. The non-governmental organisation has been counselling Lao PDR, whose accession will be completed in October, for fourteen years. It is now starting to assist Liberia and Comoros, two other least developed countries on a waiting list that also includes Afghanistan, Bhutan, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Sao Tome, Sudan, Vanuatu and Yemen.

“They have to adopt the rules of the WTO and this is a huge task for most of them,” said Imboden. “They must undertake reforms, completely revise their legal systems and establish rules that apply to all foreign investors and importers, without discrimination.”

Imboden noted that many LDCs justify clamouring for membership on the grounds that it will open up new markets, a motive he argued is “flawed”, since LDCs already have good trade relations with most countries.

Rather, the “benefits” of membership are mainly domestic: aligning national economic policies with the WTO regime sets up the basis for improved economic efficiency and attracts companies eager to invest in these countries, not because of their market size, but to export to the neighbouring region.

“Reforms related to WTO accession require a change of attitude, not only a change of law,” Khemmani Pholsena, vice-minister of industry and commerce for Lao PDR, told IPS. “Lao PDR has reviewed and enacted some 25 trade-related laws and 50 other legislations since 2000. And I believe that these reforms will strengthen the rule of law, thereby cutting down on undue privileges and possibilities of corruption.”

Laos is still a communist country and transforming its state-run economy into a free market system is a huge task, particularly when a part of the administration wants to open up the economy and some party members don’t.

For example, before the accession process began, exporters had to deposit their money in Laotian banks and convert it into the local currency, while importers had to pay for a special licence. If the government felt a particular import was undercutting state-owned enterprises, it simply did not issue the licence.

“I remember having seen a whole store of watches at the central market in Vientiane,” Imboden continued. “Importing watches was forbidden, but they were coming in illegally and the government would not acknowledge that it was unable to control the licences. Now all this (illegal licencing) is abolished.”

“From the experience of other recently acceded members, such as Cape Verde and Tonga, contentious issues (for Lao PDR) at this stage may include trading rights, customs valuation, and intellectual property,” Pholsena admitted.

Intellectual property has not hitherto been protected in Laos, so the country has had to build up a national institution and set up laws on patents and patenting rights.

“In 2003 there were few lawyers in the country and nearly half of them were working on intellectual property,” Imboden recalled. “This is not in line with Laos’ priorities. The WTO asks LDCs to adopt provisions on intellectual property that may be necessary and useful, but not needed at this stage of development and take up too many resources.”

Services liberalisation may also be a challenge, since acceding countries have to liberalise more aggressively than others. “Recently acceded countries have to pay a higher price for WTO entry,” Pholsena said.

For example, “Out of a total of 160 services sub-sectors, Cambodia committed to 110, in contrast to 24 sub-sectors made by existing LDC members. Lao PDR is facing pressure to liberalise at a similar level.”

“We are aware that there will be both winners and losers as a result of these reforms and the government has to do its utmost to help the latter overcome the negative effects and transform challenges into opportunities,” Pholsena added.

She believes sectors like tourism, agro-business and natural resource-intensive industries are in Lao PDR’s comparative advantage and will prosper.

Imboden, too, is positive. He doesn’t see many risks for Laotian industry. Competition from ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), with which Laos has a free trade agreement, already exists; and competition from the rest of the world is going to be limited since Lao PDR doesn’t have big industries or inefficient state-owned enterprises, like China did.

In agriculture, he argues, the accession process has already had positive effects. In flat lands, exports have increased. Lao PDR cultivates coffee that is processed locally and exported with a good value added. And the majority of people who live on small plots and produce mainly sticky rice will face little competition from abroad, he added.

A big chunk of the accession process is represented by the market access negotiations that are held bilaterally. Each WTO member asks the acceding country to reduce tariffs on certain items by a given percentage. Most of them don’t put excessive demands on LDCs, but some do.

Ukraine, for example, put a lot of pressure on Lao PDR at the end of the accession process, like it did with Montenegro, blocking the accession of this small European country for a year.

It asked Vientiane to reduce a substantial number of tariff lines below the applied rate, which had never before been demanded of an LDC.

“We told Laos not to give up and the other countries tried to convince Ukraine to be less demanding, particularly after the last WTO ministerial conference, where the decision was taken to ease the accession of LDCs.”

Lao PDR also had very difficult negotiations with the United States, but Washington has relaxed some of its requirements.

Though the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has long held that trade between African countries is too low, experts at the South Centre, an inter-governmental think tank of developing countries, say intra-continental trade is already significant in manufactured goods and promises a new path to industrialisation.

Valentine Rugwabiza, deputy director-general of the WTO, says Africa needs to strengthen domestic markets and integrate into the world market Credit: World Trade Organisation

“Trade among African countries is very low. Last year, it stood at 10 percent of the continent’s overall trade,” Valentine Rugwabiza, deputy director general of the WTO, which seeks to reduce barriers and promote aid for trade, told IPS.

“Though Africa’s share in world trade is also very small – less than three percent in 2011 – it is growing very rapidly, particularly with emerging economies; while trade amongst African countries is stagnant.”

With a rigid division of labour inherited from the colonial era, Africa relies on a narrow range of exports and is over-dependent on primary products: in 2010, fuel extraction and mining represented 66 percent of its total merchandise exports.

According to Rugwabiza, lack of investment in infrastructure and non-tariff barriers of all kinds make trade between the 54 countries cumbersome.

“Whereas it takes 18 days to export products from Latin America and the Caribbean, it takes almost 33 days to do so from Africa,” she added, noting that it is also more expensive to ship a container from Africa than from any other part of the developing world.

For instance, shipping a container from South-east Asia costs 900 dollars, compared to 2,000 dollars from Africa; likewise, it costs 935 dollars to import a container from South-East Asia, and almost 2,500 dollars to do so from Africa. The Geneva-based South Centre, however, has a more optimistic view.

“In absolute terms, intra-African trade is low,” Aileen Kwa, trade policy officer with the South Centre, told IPS. “In terms of non-oil exports Africa’s internal trade is almost on par with its exports to the EU. Furthermore, the trade growth rate within Africa is the second highest after China and before the United States and the EU. Therefore, it is very promising, also in terms of the quality of exports.”

She explains that, with the exclusion of South Africa, only 10 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s exports to the EU are in manufactured goods, a figure that rises to 27 percent for intra-regional trade.

“Most of Africa’s manufactured goods go to Africa. So if the continent wants to industrialise, the market that provides the best opportunities is Africa, not China, the U.S., or the EU.”

For Rugwabiza, however, the industrialisation of Africa will require not only strengthening of the domestic market, but also integration into the world market.

“Today, components of the same piece are produced in different countries all over the world. This is a huge chance for Africa to specialise in single tasks and insert itself into global value chains,” she told IPS.

“Some countries already do so, but they are still an exception. Mauritius, for example, produces pieces for H&M, (a major global clothing store). Since it has a reliable logistics and service sector, the multinational knows that it will receive the orders on time and, thanks to a stable and predictable legal environment, that there will be no unexpected regulations coming up,” she said.

Kwa notes that the picture is uneven: in some parts of Africa, intra-regional trade is larger than in others. The total exports of the East African Community (EAC) to sub-Saharan Africa already surpassed their total exports to the EU in 2000. Other countries like Zambia and Senegal also export more to Africa than to Europe.

Still, other regions display a bleaker outlook.

Rugwabiza belives that Africa, with its high dependence on trade with the outside world, is highly vulnerable to external shocks. This is particularly true of the agricultural sector, as the food crisis has shown.

“In 2008, Africa imported cereals for 15 billion dollars, with only five percent coming from the continent. Agricultural subsidies in developed countries, insufficient investment and low productivity in (domestic) agriculture and non-trade barriers (between African countries) are still a huge obstacle,” she added.

Shoprite (Pty) Ltd, for example, a South African multinational, spends 20,000 a week on securing import permits to distribute meat, milk and plant-based goods to its stores in Zambia alone. For all the countries it operates in, about 100 ‘single entry’ import permits are required each week, but this can increase to 300 per week during busy periods.

As a result of this legal red tape, there could be up to 1,600 documents accompanying each loaded Shoprite truck that crosses a Southern African Development Community (SADC) border.

But things can change. For example, the EAC has managed to substantially reduce the number of control points, while Uganda and Rwanda have set up a common border post that is now open 24 hours a day.

Kwa says that African countries’ over-dependence on imports from world markets, particularly in food, is mainly due to their loss of productive capacities.

She believes there needs to be some balancing between short-term and long-term goals. While in the short run countries must be able to import food quickly and as cheaply as possible to meet their immediate needs, they must, in the long term, produce their own food without relying on imports from developed countries that have an extremely unfair competitive advantage due to the latter’s massive government subsidies.

Relying on imports undercuts domestic producers and undermines their future capacity to produce. Therefore, countries may need to use tariffs and other trade policy tools to stop some of the imports, even from their neighbours, at least for some time.

“First countries have to increase their productive capacities and then trade will follow. The WTO always thinks about increasing trade, but the main question for Africa is how to increase its productive capacities. Then trade will naturally follow,” Kwa told IPS.

By Isolda Agazzi and - -
GENEVA, Mar 9 2012 (IPS)

Decades after peasants’ networks have advocated for a new legal instrument to protect the rights of small farmers to land, seeds, traditional agricultural knowledge and freedom to determine the prices of their production, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) may decide to start drafting a declaration on peasants’ rights next week.

Henry Saragih, the general coordinator of Via Campesina, a movement representing more than 200 million small farmers worldwide. Credit: Isolda Agazzi/IPS

For the Indonesian activist, labelled by some international media as “one of the twenty green giants of our world”, next week could mark the first victory in a battle that has gone on for more than a decade: the UNHRC will discuss a study of its Advisory Committee that recommends the elaboration of a new legal instrument on the rights of peasants, on the basis of a declaration proposed by the expert body.

This instrument would be modelled on the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, that has been replicated in some national constitutions and local tribunals.

It would complement another long-term battle of Via Campesina: the recognition of the principle of food sovereignty, namely the right of each country to decide what to produce locally and how much to rely on international trade, with a priority given to local production and consumption.

“Since 2001, we have brought the issue of peasant’s rights to Geneva,” Saragih continued. We have found understanding by some governments, non-governmental organisations like CETIM and FIAN, the expert Christophe Golay and the former rapporeur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, (along with his successor), Olivier De Schutter. And after the 2008 food crisis, the world has become more sensitive to the problems of the small farmer.”

“Today, almost one billion of the world’s people suffer from hunger and malnutrition. Among them, 80 percent live in rural areas and 50 percent are peasant families,” Melik Özden, director of the Geneva- based NGO CETIM (Centre Europe Tiers-Monde), told IPS.

“These violations are due, among others, to the lack of agrarian reforms and aid to family farmers, forced displacement of peasants, confiscation of seeds by transnational corporations through the enforcement of intellectual property rights and the criminalisation of activists and peasant leaders.”

He adds that in recent years large scale land grabbing by some foreign governments and transnationals, wide-scale production of agro-fuels and stock market speculation on agricultural commodities have significantly worsened peasants’ lives.

“Year after year, Via Campesina has alerted the HRC about the violations of the rights of peasants, their limited access to justice in most countries and the scarcity of complaint mechanisms at the international level,” Christophe Golay, author of the first drafts of the study and of the declaration told IPS.

“But it has also become clear that some important rights were not included in any available instrument, such as rights to land, seeds, traditional agricultural knowledge and freedom to determine the prices of agricultural products.”

Africa Mthombeni, from the Landless People Movement (LPM) in South Africa and also a member of Via Campesina, is convinced that a favourable decision in Geneva would be an important step forward. “The HRC is the intergovernmental forum that guides national policies and a declaration on the rights of peasants would oblige governments to take them seriously,” he told IPS.

“Land reform in South Africa is too slow,” he continued, “and as a result poverty and unemployment are very high. The majority of our people live on social grants. The land question in South Africa has improved only insignificantly since the end of apartheid and more than thirty million people are still landless.”

He explained that 100,000 commercial farmers and big corporations own 80 percent of arable land, with 13 percent left to traditional communities. Only seven percent of land has been transferred since 1994, yet the government pledged to release 30 percent by 2014. And most of this transfer takes place in the form of cash, not real land delivery.

But while most developing countries seem to be in favour of a declaration – particularly states like Indonesia, South Africa, Bolivia, Venezuela and Cuba – many industrialised nations are rather sceptical if not openly against the proposed declaration.

While officially these countries have declared that there is “no need” for a new instrument, NGOs believe the indsutrialised world is rather scared by the implications of the Advisory Committee’s draft declaration; especially clauses such as the right to reject intellectual property rights on resources and certification schemes established by transnational corporations.

The WTO has also declared its opposition to a model of agriculture that is hardly compatible with the current system of “free” trade.

The outcome of the discussion is still open. Jean Feyder, ambassador of Luxembourg to the U.N., considers it is “very important to support small farmers that were marginalised for so long. Therefore, we would be very satisfied if we could get a group of countries from all continents to support the proposal of the Advisory Committee and agree on a process: either the creation of a working group to draft the declaration, or the appointment of a special rapporteur on peasants’ rights.”

“This declaration would be very important for us,” Saragih concluded. “It would help us monitor the way in which countries respect peasants’ rights. Many international institutions have repeated it over and over again: to feed the world, we need to support small scale farmers.”

Excerpt:

A lack of long-term housing plans in Haiti's post-earthquake tent cities made the refugees even more vulnerable to natural disasters. Credit: Ansel Herz/IPS

By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, Mar 7 2012 (IPS)

As donors struggle to meet their aid commitments, and the number of people around the world in need of direct humanitarian and development assistance skyrockets, many experts and activists are asking the tough question: are donors being effective? A report published today by the Spanish non-governmental organisation DARA on donor effectiveness highlighted some of the biggest obstacles to aid reaching target populations, including insufficient consideration of women’s needs, politicisation of aid and lack of long-term plans for humanitarian assistance. “If donors want to make sure that money gets to the people, they must analyse the different needs of women and men,” Philip Tamminga, coordinator of DARA’s 2011 Humanitarian Response Index (HRI), told IPS. For example, after the 2010 floods in Pakistan, humanitarian agencies distributed inappropriate hygiene kits to women, and failed to address cultural norms that would have allowed women to be adequately cared for by men. Similarly, Tamminga explained, much of the gender-based violence that shook the post-earthquake tent cities in Haiti’s Port-au-Prince and outlying areas could have been avoided if women’s security at latrines and water and sanitation installations had been taken into consideration when building the refugee camps. Tamminga believes much of aid inefficacy is directly linked to a lack of preparedness for dealing with natural disasters and armed conflicts.

“In previous years four hurricanes hit Haiti,” he said. “Had donors focused on prevention at that time, Haitian authorities would have responded better to the 2010 earthquake and donors could have applied lessons learned there to (subsequent) earthquakes in Pakistan, Iran and Turkey. Donors have to make sure that the recovery stage takes long term solutions into consideration.” In most major disasters, donors and humanitarians work together to provide emergency shelter in transition to longer-term housing. In Haiti, however, there was no long-term housing strategy in place after the earthquake; as a result, when the hurricane hit, scores of people still languishing in temporary shelters were extremely vulnerable to the catastrophic impact of the winds. Another example of the dire consequences of insufficient preparation is the on-going food crisis in the Horn of Africa. Though the whole international community knew that a severe famine was brewing in the region, donor governments failed to scale up their funding, which resulted in the tragedy of over 100,000 preventable deaths. “There is no evidence that donor governments are changing attitudes in their transition from emergency to recovery and to the preparation of risk reduction. Emergency and long-term development are still considered as separate programmes,” Tamminga lamented. The situation is compounded by the increasingly politicised nature of aid. “When donors or host governments start to apply political considerations about to whom, how and when aid is distributed, the situation becomes very (precarious),” Tamminga stressed. “We have witnessed this in cases like Palestine, Somalia, Sudan or Colombia.” The most recent example is Syria, where the regime has failed to acknowledge the humanitarian crisis on its soil and refuses to act in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, which clearly state that besieged populations on all sides of a conflict have the right to humanitarian assistance. “We are very concerned when donor governments start to impose their agenda and tell humanitarian organisations where they can work,” Tamminga said. “In Somalia there are serious restrictions; Al Shabaab bear a grave responsibility for that.” He added, though, that countries like the United States, Canada and some European countries, bound by anti- terrorism legislations, also have a part to play. “They forbid humanitarian organisations from working with or having contact with those labelled “terrorists.” Yet humanitarian organisations are neutral, impartial and independent and they must be allowed to work with all parties,” he added. In 2011, only 62 percent of the U.N.’s appeal for 8.9 billion dollars to assist some 50 million people facing crises was met, resulting in huge gaps in the humanitarian response.

The HRI looked at 19 of the world’s biggest donors and ranked Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland and the Netherlands as the ‘best’ donors, with the U.S. coming in 17th and Italy receiving the lowest rank on the index. While traditional donor governments still provide 85 percent of global aid, 40 percent of the funds channelled into relief work in Haiti came from private sources and new government donors like Brazil, Venezuela and Cuba. In fact, DARA has tracked a sustained shift from traditional donors to new, emerging funders. “We want to encourage good practices with these new donors,” Tamminga told IPS. “If not for new donors like Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia, Yemen, for example, would receive little aid. And many of these Gulf donors are becoming much more aware of international standards – Qatar and the UAE are good examples.” He stressed the importance of new and old players working together and teaching each other about cultural norms and the needs of specific populations. The private sector also has a lot to offer in terms of innovation, quick responses and utilising existing networks and infrastructure. In Haiti, cell phones proved to be a useful tool for disseminating messages on cholera prevention, when an outbreak erupted after the earthquake. “If the private sector understands humanitarian principles and good practices – like standards on the donation of drugs, that forbid sending medicines that are close to expiration – then it can contribute to using aid appropriately and effectively,” Tamminga concluded.

Excerpt:

By Isolda Agazzi and - -
GENEVA, Dec 15 2011 (IPS)

As the Eighth Ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) kicked off in Geneva this week, a group of NGOs exposed the devastating potential of a free trade agreement currently being negotiated between the European Union and India. If passed, they say the deal would make a mockery of all WTO rules and regulations.

A recent impact assessment on the right to food of the EU-India FTA, researched and compiled by leading advocacy groups including the Delhi-based Third World Network (TWN), the Indian NGO Anthra and Germany charities Misereor, Glopolis and the Heinrich Böll Foundation, concluded that the proposed deal would violate the right to food of a vast segment of the Indian population, particularly those who rely on the poultry and dairy sectors.

Additionally, the zero-tariffs clause of the free trade agreement (FTA) could lacerate the retail sector by stripping small retailers of any protection against corporate giants.

Having sat on the table since 2007, the agreement could be sealed as early as next year, an outcome that many experts see as “disastrous” for the local economy.

“The EU is asking India to cut its tariffs to zero on at least 92 percent of all imports, including industrial and agricultural goods,” Ranja Sengupta, senior researcher at TWN told IPS. “Considering that trade with EU represents 60 percent of India’s total international trade, this would be a disaster, particularly in hitherto protected sectors, like agriculture.”

“Our (impact statement) focuses on the dairy and poultry sectors because they employ a large number of very small farmers, many of them operating in their backyards in order to subsist,” Sengupta explained.

Given that the dairy sector currently provides 90 millions jobs, slashing tariffs will likely result in a repeat performance of the 1999 milk crisis in India, when EU imports of skimmed milk powder rose from 600 to 25,000 tonnes, effectively destroying the country’s “white revolution” for milk self-sufficiency.

Similarly, the pending FTA will flood the market with imports, depress producer prices, reduce incomes and eventually increase debt.

The poultry sector, which consists of 96 million small, landless agricultural households that manage 85 percent of the poultry stock, is currently guarded by a robust ‘100 percent tariff’ that actually prohibits imports.

But the FTA could kill these protections. According to Sengupta, Indians consume more poultry legs than breasts and vice versa in Europe. If the EU dumped its poultry legs on the local market, India would not be able to retaliate by exporting poultry breasts to European markets because of the latter’s strict health and safety standards.

Currently, the WTO advocates lowering tariffs, not removing them altogether. Additionally, the agenda for the ministerial meeting this week includes the question of industrialised countries eliminating government subsidies.

“In sharp contrast, FTAs like the one being negotiated between India and the EU insist on the complete elimination of tariffs but contain no binding clauses about eliminating subsidies,” Sengupta lamented.

Experts are also concerned about the FTA’s impact on the retail sector, the second largest employer in India after agriculture.

In the WTO, services trade liberalisation is a relatively flexible mechanism because it allows countries themselves to decide which sectors to open up to foreign competition.

“But FTAs make very strong demands to liberalise services in high-employment areas like retail,” effectively backing the government into a corner, Sengupta stressed.

Small vendors have already suffered major losses as a result of burgeoning domestic retail chains: 15 percent have seen a decline of their profits against Indian retail stores and 4.2 percent face annual closure if located near bigger retailers.

Additionally, larger retailers exercise a stranglehold over the market and then discreetly increase the prices they had originally kept low to attract consumers.

Still, Indian domestic retailers, which have already lacerated the market for small retailers, do not even hold a candle to multinational behemoths like Tesco or Carrefour, against whom small retailers in India do not stand a fighting chance.

Though India invests 51 percent of the country’s capital in single-brand retail – one company selling a single, branded product – it has not yet allowed foreign direct investment, which would be “suicide” for smaller stores.

Carrefour has promised to create 1.8 millions jobs but the five NGOs who authored the study on the FTA’s impact consider this figure to be unrealistic. Furthermore, 1.8 million new jobs hardly compensates for the estimated loss of 2.9 million to a potentially staggering 6.7 million informal jobs as a direct result of the zero tariffs clause.

“This is a very sensitive issue in the country but unfortunately the public is unaware of the serious impact of the FTA because negotiations are often conducted in secret. Contrary to the WTO, the FTA does not need to be ratified by the national parliament and state governments are not even consulted,” Sengupta told IPS.

The EU-India FTA will also go much further than the WTO in the protection of intellectual property.

The EU is now pressuring India to accede to UPOV 1991 that grants seed breeding companies very strong rights at the expense of farmers, who will no longer be able to exchange, resell and use commercial seeds freely. This is a violation of their right to practise traditional forms of agriculture.

Many advocates are also concerned about the issue of “geographical indications (GIs)”, a scheme that assigns certain products special status – based on their production location – and therefore a market advantage. The EU has established 190 GIs for agricultural products, which it wants India to recognise.

“But India is lagging behind in registering its own GIs, which means that EU products will get additional access to markets in India,” Sengupta told IPS.

Experts believe that if substantial evidence finds the FTA to have potentially adverse consequences for the Indian people, it should be reviewed and renegotiated.

“There is no point in negotiating at the WTO if these FTAs are signed simultaneously,” Sengupta stressed.

Excerpt:

By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, Sep 13 2011 (IPS)

The Gandhian movement Ekta Parishad plans to organise a march for land rights in October 2012 in India, aiming to gather around 100,000 indigenous people, dalits and poor peasants. Support is shaping up around the world, at events such as an international mobilisation conference in Geneva Sep. 12-13.

“In India, a large number of adivasi (indigenous people) are pushed out of their land because of mining, huge dams, wildlife protection, industrialisation and tourism. Every time you have a new industry, they bear the cost of development. That is why there is a lot of agitation and uprising of adivasi, both armed and non-violent”, Ekta Parishad president P.V.Rajagopal told IPS in an interview.

Ekta Parishad is a federation of more than 900 associations all over India. Founded 20 years ago and inspired by the Gandhian non-violent movement, it struggles for the land rights and livelihoods of indigenous peoples, nomadic tribes and the dalits.

In October 2012 it will organise ‘Jan Satyagraha – the March of Justice’ that is meant to become the biggest march for land rights in history. The plan is for people to walk the 350 kilometres from Gwalior to Delhi over 35 days.

“In preparation for this big march, we decided to get support from institutions, NGOs, policy makers and activists from countries where land rights are an important issue too, like South America and Africa,” Margrit Hugentobler, coordinator of Ekta Europe told IPS. “Hence this international mobilisation conference on the right to land and livelihood.”

Next year’s march will follow one organised in 2007 by Ekta Parishad, where about 25,000 people – mostly adivasi and dalits – walked to Delhi to reclaim access to land. It resulted in the establishment of a land rights committee that produced several recommendations. But implementation has been poor after the decline of media coverage.

The government also passed the Forest Rights Act, under which those driven out of the forest must be given land. “Thousands of people did get land,” said Hugentobler, “but the distribution does not happen by order of the national government, but at the state level. State ministers play an important role and some have given land to people, but others have not. India is still missing an overall national policy that can be enforced. This is why we are organising a second and bigger march.”

Other marches will take place around the world to support the Indian event and to back food sovereignty and the right of access of indigenous peoples to natural resources.

“In India, displacement also results from land acquisition by government for malls and supermarkets,” Rajagopal said. “Farmers are losing land and they are agitating. The beautification of cities is also done at the expens of poor people like street vendors and shoe repairers, that have to go. For the 2010 Commonwealth games in Dehli, 200,000 people were removed from the city centre.”

Rajagopal sees this as a gradual process of displacing people from forest and land to give these resources away to large companies and multinational corporations.

“My job is to find a non-violent solution to this problem before it becomes too violent, and to organise people,” he said. “It is a very challenging period in India and across the globe – in Africa or Latin America you have the same situation. In Brazil 80 percent of the people are already driven to cities. In India 70 percent of the people still live in rural areas, but if this process continues, we will end like Brazil. People will have to move to slums and the resources in the villages will be controlled by companies.”

Maria Salete Carollo from the Landless Movement in Brazil agreed. “This march must strengthen the social fight for food sovereignty and land reform in Brazil. We have to support all the people who fight for their land rights wherever they are, with farmers and poor people at the forefront,” she told IPS.

Ekta Parishad is seeking political, moral and financial support. “We need one euro per person per day for food, water and medicine,” Rajagopal said. “That makes 100,000 euros every day, of which 30 percent will be raised in India and 70 percent internationally, so we appeal to the world community.”

Excerpt:

By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, Jun 24 2011 (IPS)

Egypt has initiated a proposal in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to ban export restrictions on farm products to poor countries that are net food importers. The Group of 20 has also exhorted the upcoming WTO ministerial conference to adopt a specific resolution on export restrictions.

Ambassador Hisham Badr: "You cannot deprive very vulnerable countries of sustenance." Credit: Isolda Agazzi/IPS

Some 77 WTO members are regarded as NFIDCs. They comprise all least developed countries (LDCs) plus another 26 developing countries that rely primarily on the import of agricultural products for food security. The proposal was introduced by the NFIDCs, with the support of the African group and the LDCs group.

A recent meeting on food price volatility, organised by the Geneva-based global think tank the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD), discussed the proposal of banning export restrictions on food to countries with vulnerable populations.

Food producers sometimes limit their food exports in favour of serving domestic consumption needs and to keep local prices low.

According to the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), global prices of wheat surged by 60 to 80 percent from Jul. to Sep. 2010 following the export ban by Russia, which is not a WTO member but should become one by the end of 2011.

Export restrictions on foodstuffs were one of the key drivers of the food crisis and price spikes during 2007 – 2011. At the beginning of 2011, 21 countries had imposed export control measures. Recently, Ukraine, Macedonia, Moldova and the Kyrgyz Republic, for example, placed export restrictions on different types of grains.

The WTO does not prohibit such measures, but it tries to curb them. “You cannot deprive very vulnerable countries of sustenance by banning exports of food to them,” Hisham Badr, ambassador of Egypt to the WTO, argued in an interview with IPS – especially, he said, “given the international food crisis, the energy crisis, the economic and financial crisis and the fact that the Doha Round seems to be in intensive care”.

Since Jun. 2010, as a result of price increases, the number of extreme poor people has increased by 44 million in low and middle-income countries.

Concretely, Egypt’s proposal foresees exempting NFIDCs from export restrictions on foodstuffs by both developing and industrialised countries. NFIDCs, however, would still be allowed to use such restrictions for their own food security.

The proposal also foresees the ban of export restrictions on food destined for humanitarian assistance delivered by the World Food Programme (WFP).

Egypt and the African group would like to see this initiative become part and parcel of the proposed “early harvest” of the Doha Round that could be adopted by the WTO ministerial conference in Dec. 2011.

On Jun. 23, the G20 also agreed to remove export restrictions on food destined for non-commercial humanitarian purposes. It also recommended that WTO members adopt a specific resolution on export restrictions at this year’s ministerial conference.

But, given the difficulties of the Doha negotiations, what are the chances of adding export restrictions to the controversial early harvest that some countries contest even for LDCs?

“Many countries sympathise with this initiative from different angles,” Badr replied.

However, according to Bridges Weekly, an ICTSD publication, major agricultural exporters like the U.S., Australia and Brazil would like export restrictions to be seen in the context of other trade distortions in agriculture. They don’t see why it should be singled out while there are large aspects of the Doha Round that are meant to redress those imbalances.

Developed countries like Switzerland and Japan, net food importers themselves, expressed support for the proposal. The Philippines, which doesn’t belong to the NFIDC but whose population has been affected by export restrictions, suggested that the proposal should include non-NFIDC too.

“Our endeavour is part of a greater strategy,” Badr continued. “The Dominican Republic and Egypt will propose another initiative at the WTO General Assembly in Sep. 2011 on food price speculation. And we work closely with FAO on an agriculture market information system to exchange information and effectively address price volatility.”

But he acknowledged that, given the state of the Doha Round, some members are not giving due consideration to the initiative. “We have not had yet countries that are against it. They have rather adopted a position of ‘wait and see’.”

Jonathan Hepburn, agriculture programme manager at ICTSD, told IPS that, “it is an interesting initiative, We have to see where it goes, but clearly export restrictions imposed in the last few years have had an impact on markets and price volatility.

“When markets are already tight, such measures risk worsening supply, especially when the country that adopts it is a major exporter.”

He indicated that WTO members are trying to address export restrictions in different ways. It could be in an “early harvest” of the Doha Round or, alternatively, be a separate decision outside the Doha package.

Excerpt:

By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, May 26 2011 (IPS)

In the Arab world, most trade unions are affiliated to governments, but independent labour organisations are starting to emerge.

From left to right: Ghassan Slaiby, Nassira Ghozlane and Belgacem Afaya. Credit: Isolda Agazzi/IPS

“In Tunisia, we say that reversible jackets are out of stock. Some UGTT unionists who were affiliated to the RCD (the party of ousted president Ben Ali) have reversed their jackets and are now fully in support of the revolution. But the process has reached its limit,” Belgacem Afaya, secretary general of the General Federation of Health of Tunisia, a member of the UGTT, told IPS in an interview.

The UGTT, the umbrella organisation of unions in Tunisia, played a central role in January in mobilising mass protests against Ben Ali, together with the association of judges and lawyers, students and cyber activists.

Afaya and other unionists have come to Geneva for a meeting of Public Services International (PSI), the global confederation of public service trade unions. In the Arab region, the PSI has 36 affiliates in ten countries.

“Most of the unions in the Arab region are close to the government and only two national federations have supported the recent revolutions: the UGTT in Tunisia and the brand-new federation of Bahrain, currently repressed by the regime,” Ghassan Slaiby, PSI sub-regional secretary for the Arab countries, told IPS.

In Egypt, two independent unions have recently been created, but they were illegal until the overthrow of former president Hosni Mubarak, in which they actively participated. Others are also emerging, but the old ones are still there and now serve the new government. “They know how to do it, they are used to it. In Egypt, reversible jackets are not out of stock,” Slaiby says ironically.

Unions in the Arab world have a tough life. Even among PSI affiliates in the same country, positions differ greatly. In Yemen, one union is in support of the revolution, while the other two are on the government’s side. In Libya, they can neither be with long-time leader Muammar Qaddafi, nor with NATO, which is suspected of pursuing its own interests – “Why doesn’t (NATO) also act in Syria, Bahrain and Palestine?” wonders Afaya, echoing a common feeling among Arab public opinion.

As for Jordan, even though things are moving slowly, some unionists are in favour of a radical political change, but they are still very isolated.

But overthrowing the government is one thing, and ensuring a viable economic transition is another. “In Tunisia, unemployment and insufficient purchasing power have taken people to the street,” Afaya said. “Today the situation is still tense, even though the government, denying persistent rumours, says it has enough money to pay salaries till July.”

With foreign debt representing almost 40 percent of GDP, he believes that the government keeps making the same mistake – borrowing abroad. Instead, it should try to recuperate the money that was stolen by Ben Ali and his clan, improve social and fiscal justice and equity between the regions, support quality public services and promote the right to health care.

“Ben Ali created a two-speed health system,” he said. “Hospitals have been neglected and people go to public clinics if they can afford it. Now we have to improve the system and one of our major recent successes is an agreement with the government to shift away from temporary and precarious jobs and forbid subcontracting in hospitals.”

Algeria is in a different situation. Nassira Ghozlane, secretary general of the national union of public administration workers (SNAPAP), believes that, despite two harshly repressed rallies in February, people are not ready for a revolution.

“They don’t want to repeat the scenario of the 1990s, when 200,000 people were killed and 10,000 disappeared,” she told IPS. “But we want to break down this wall of fear because we need a radical change. We don’t believe in the reforms that the government has just announced. The country is ruled by the military security and the entire system must change, not just president (Abdelaziz) Bouteflika. They must go. ”

Massive privatisations have led to the closing down of thousands of public enterprises, while the selling of water, oil and gas to foreign companies continues.

“We are against these privatisations,” she said. “Wages are the lowest in North Africa. Millions of Algerians are on a precarious contract and earn 25 euros a month. In the hospitals, emergency room doctors earn between 40 and 90 euros. The salary of a secondary school teacher is six times lower than that of a Tunisian and the salary of a university professor is four times less than that of his fellow Mauritanian.”

After three decades of squeezing of the public sector, Slaiby says the point of view of PSI on privatisations has evolved: “At the beginning, we thought we had to negotiate with them. Then we were in favour of public – private partnerships. Today we are clearly against privatisations. We have experienced them and we cannot pretend any more that the private sector is more efficient or that it lowers costs. We want quality public services, but we need to reform them.”

So how will the State finance quality public services? “With taxes, better distribution of income, and public spending, which has been rehabilitated by recent studies. The financial crisis has underlined the need for social justice again, because it could not have been overcome without the intervention of the State,” he concluded.

Excerpt:

By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, May 24 2011 (IPS)

Some of the decisions taken on trade in the Istanbul Plan of Action are likely to disadvantage poor countries while others are so vague as to be meaningless, says Abdoulaye Sanoko, counsellor at the mission of Mali to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Geneva.

TWN's Sanya Reid Smith: The Istanbul LDC conference sent out a message that LDCs should not be pressured or advised to liberalise imports. Credit:

“LDCs negotiated, but they had no choice. There had to be a result, so this is a compromise text which is not necessarily good,” Sanoko told IPS upon his return from Istanbul.

The International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD), a Geneva-based think tank that also had representatives in Istanbul, concurs that “trade proved to be the most controversial issue at the negotiations” for the plan of action.

Sanoko says, “when I see the chapter on trade, I have a feeling of setback when comparing it to what the WTO has already cast in stone regarding special and differential treatment.

“In the Doha Round, it is clearly said that LDCs will not have to cut any tariffs. They would do so only on a voluntary basis, while they are encouraged to consolidate their applied tariffs.”

ICTSD underlines that the final version of the plan of action only calls for a timely implementation of the duty-free and quota-free market access on a lasting basis for all LDCs, in line with the Hong Kong ministerial declaration of 2005, and the abolition or reduction of arbitrary or unjustified trade barriers.

However, for Sanoko, this language is “full of ambiguities”. “It is a contradiction and a setback from the Hong Kong commitment of duty-free and quota-free access, since it includes the possibility of ‘reduction’ alongside ‘abolition’ of unjustified trade barriers”, he notes.

While he welcomes the call to strengthen regional integration, he regrets the absence of innovative means to do so, particularly concerning the amendment of article XXIV of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), one of the issues currently discussed in Geneva.

This article stipulates that in regional so-called free trade agreements (FTAs) the parties have to liberalise most of the exchanges, without specifying how much. LDCs and developing countries are asking for it to be amended to include a good dose of special and differential treatment so that poor countries would not be asked to reduce their tariffs too much.

“We understand that such a conference cannot resolve problems related to trade rules, but we would have liked a reference to it,” Sanoko comments. “The UN Conference on LDCs is a common effort by the international community to encourage the development of our countries and one cannot talk about general concepts that are largely accepted without deepening them.”

Concerning trade agreements like the economic partnership agreements (EPAs) between the EU and the Africa, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries, he argues that, “they are supposed to be a partnership, but they are an FTA like any other one.

“How can you imagine a partnership between some hyper-developed countries and others that can barely stand on their feet? This is another missed opportunity to innovate.”

Sanya Reid Smith, legal advisor and senior researcher at Third World Network (TWN) points out that in the high-level debate in Istanbul a strong message was sent that LDCs should not be pressured or advised to liberalise their imports since, when they did that in the past, it had very damaging effects. TWN is an international nongovernmental organisation headquartered in Malaysia.

“Fears were also expressed about the free trade agreements and economic partnership agreements, which can cause similar kinds of damage and can prevent the use of export taxes to industrialise on the basis of natural products,” she told IPS.

“Due to the WTO impasse, there should be an early harvest package for LDCs which includes issues such as duty-free and quota-free market access and the elimination of trade-distorting subsidies for cotton,” Reid Smith concludes.

Another fuzzy point, according to Sanoko, is the request to LDCs to broaden their export bases so as to be able to double their share of international trade within 10 years. “But on what basis? Today they represent only one percent of world trade. You could even take it to three percent but, concretely, how?” he wonders.

He considers it is a “great pressure on LDCs” to ask them to avoid protectionists tendencies and to correct trade-distorting measures while agriculture in Northern countries is being distorted.

“For African LDCs, agriculture is a vital issue,” he stresses. “Take Malawi: it had a chronic food deficit, but within three years only it has become self-sufficient and today it even exports.

“Their solution was to put in place a new agricultural policy that gives some support to small producers, like seeds and fertilizers. At a time when the food crisis may erupt again, supporting small farmers can make a crucial difference and help a population to feed itself.”

“In 30 years, only three LDCs have shed that status. This shows little progress, particularly since the number of African LDCs is going to increase with the partition of Sudan,” Sanoko concluded.

Martin Khor, director of the South Centre, an intergovernmental organisation of developing countries based in Geneva, argues that it is untrue that LDCs are not integrated into the world economy. In fact, many LDCs have higher export ratios than some developed countries.

The way in which the LDCs are integrated disadvantages them as they are too dependent on raw materials export and, with prices of commodities being in long-term decline, they are suffering great revenue losses, he concludes.

Excerpt:

By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, May 19 2011 (IPS)

The World Health Assembly could adopt landmark resolutions asking governments to improve water and sanitation to eradicate cholera and guinea worm, the latter of which exists in just four countries in Africa. While safe drinking water and toilets are the most cost-effective public health measures, they have not been a priority for most developing countries.

Yael Vellemann, senior health policy analyst at WaterAid, at WHA. Credit: Isolda Agazzi/IPS

The guinea worm causes Dracunculiasis, a waterborne parasitic disease that exists in only four countries – Ghana, Mali, Ethiopia and Sudan. It lives in stagnant water. When people drink contaminated water, the parasite grows up to three feet and lives just below the skin, often crippling its human host.

There are no medicines to treat the disease or vaccines to prevent it. The only cure is to slowly, painfully extract it over days. While the disease is not lethal, its disabling effect prevents those affected from working or attending school, putting already vulnerable individuals and communities at further risk of chronic poverty.

“If potable water was provided, then guinea worm could be definitely eradicated,” Seidu Korkor continued. “But you cannot get 100 percent water supply immediately, because it is expensive and it takes time. Therefore, we also educate people on prevention measures, we look for cases and treat them, we use filters to improve the water supply and apply chemicals to kill the intermediate host.”

If completely eradicated, guinea worm would become the second disease wiped out by humankind – the first since smallpox was eradicated in the 1970s.

But safe water supply is also very important in other waterborne diseases, like cholera and diarrhoea. Cholera has appeared again in countries that had been free of it for decades, like Haiti after the earthquake and Nigeria, Uganda and Pakistan after the floods

“Ghana is cholera endemic, every year it gets reported and we have it in some regions at the moment,” Seidu Korkor confirmed. “As a public health agency, we are advocating for safe water supply”.

The issue, precisely, is being addressed by the World Health Assembly (WHA), the highest decision-making body of the World Health Organisation, which is holding its annual session this week in Geneva.

“The only way to achieve good public health is to invest in water and sanitation, more than in vaccines and antibiotics,” Yael Vellemann, senior health policy analyst at WaterAid, told IPS in an interview. “The issue has not been discussed by the WHA for more than two decades, but this year there are three resolutions on the table: on cholera, on guinea worm and on drinking water, sanitation and health.”

WaterAid is an international NGO created in the early 1980s by the UK water companies to improve access to clean water and sanitation in the world’s poorest countries.

Yael Vellemann argues that the promotion of sanitation and hygiene – basically safe drinking water, separation of human beings from faeces and hand washing with soap – is the most cost-effective public health intervention.

Some 884 million people in the world don’t have access to safe drinking water and 2.6 billion lack access to basic sanitation. In Africa, 4,000 children are killed by diarrhoea every day because of poor access to water and sanitation. “It is more fatal than malaria, AIDS and measles put together,” she stressed.

According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), half of the beds in the hospitals of developing countries are occupied by people suffering from bad water and sanitation diseases. “It is incredible that we still need to treat people for diarrhoea in 2011!” Vellemann said.

The WHO has repeatedly said that while vaccines are important, they cannot replace traditional prevention measures such as improved water and sanitation.

For cholera there are two oral vaccines, which are relatively low cost. But vaccination campaigns can be expensive and complicated. “In Uganda, for example, the health centre can be very far, you have to convince a mother to take her child there. And if you vaccinate your child against typhoid and next month he gets a disease that is not typhoid, but looks the same, then you will think that the vaccine does not work,” she says.

According to the World Bank, simply changing people’s practices and behaviour is the most cost-effective public health policy.

Vellemann is convinced that investing in water and sanitation will give the best return for your money. The U.N. estimates that for every dollar invested in this area, you get eight dollars back because people are healthier and don’t spend so much time fetching water.

Then why isn’t it a priority of the international community? “This is the million dollar question,” she replies. “In most developing countries, the water and health sectors don’t work together. Also, if you are a minister of health, you may get more votes by building a new hospital rather than going around talking about toilets.”

Excerpt:

By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, May 17 2011 (IPS)

Long-term investors like pension funds are probably the reason why the prices of commodities, including crops, have been driven to a higher level than in 2008 when food riots erupted in 30 countries, according to the British nongovernmental organisation Christian Aid.

It is predicted that, by 2020, up to 250 million people in Africa will experience increased water stress and many will be driven to cities. Credit: Christian Aid

The social justice organisation has just released “Hungry for justice: Fighting starvation in an age of plenty”, a study indicating that between Jan. 2005 and Jun. 2008, food prices rose by an average of 83 percent. And it is even worse now: in Feb. 2011, they trumped the record figures of Jun. 2008 when food riots erupted in some 30 countries.

While financial speculation in agricultural products has largely contributed to this increase, the study suggests that the main responsibility does not lie with hedge funds and “cowboy” speculators, as usually assumed, but rather with the more prudent institutional investors such as pension funds.

“While we are not able to definitively prove that investment in commodity futures is driving up food prices, we are saying that the similarities in increases makes a strong case for urgent investigation into whether this enormous amount of money is contributing to global hunger,” Hogg specified.

In financial jargon, “futures” are what is believed a crop would be worth at some defined point in the future when it will be harvested.

While these products have been around for hundreds of years – usually as a way of giving farmers an advance income to invest in production – today companies have a huge amount of money to invest in the respective values of crops.

Another major turn has been the creation of commodity index funds, that is, indices of commodities bundled together.

Goldman Sachs opened the first commodity index fund in 1991. The bank selected 18 commodities, including wheat, coffee, cocoa and pork, and invited investors to invest in this bundle of commodities rather than in individual ones. Since then, other indices have appeared.

Following the U.S.’s deregulation of commodities trading in indices in 2000, these funds began to attract an influx of non-traditional investors, such as pension funds and managed investment funds that were betting on the rise of commodities after the burst of the dot-com bubble.

The total value held by institutional investors in these funds increased from 15 billion dollars in 2003 to 317 billion dollars in mid-2008.

In contrast with hedge funds where selling and buying of shares happen at a rapid pace and where funds move “against the market” – they buy when the price is low and sell when it is high – long-term institutional investors look for “safe” returns. And since people will always need to eat, food crops are seen as low risk investments.

“Never again should policymakers agree to such regulatory changes without assessing their impact on the poor in developing countries,” Hogg exclaimed. “It is impossible now to ban investment in commodity futures but we send a strong warning that these consequences had not been predicted. People should have thought about this more.”

The Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that almost one billion people experience chronic hunger. “This is a scandal in an age where we should be able to feed everybody,” Hogg commented.

“There will always be shortages due to events like earthquakes, wars or cyclones, but they can be remedied with international aid. The persistent problem of hunger should attract our concern, particularly since things may get even worse in future,” added Hogg.

One of the main threats to chronic hunger comes from climate change. Some surveys suggest that if nothing is done, the number of malnourished children under five is going to be 24 million higher in 2050 than if the climate had remained unchanged.

In Africa it is predicted that, by 2020, some 75 to 250 million people in places such as northern Kenya will be exposed to increased water stress that will drive them to urban areas.

Another neglected issue is investment in agriculture. “We call for sustainable agricultural practices and more investment in agriculture,” Hogg continued.

“Agriculture has been badly hit because the West has tried to impose economic policies on developing countries that have not worked. What we suggest is that investment and research be increased. Ultimately the small-holder farmer could be the solution to the question of food security.”

In the first half of May a cabinet minister of Cameroon, speaking in Geneva, called it a “scandal” that the West African country imports 90 percent of the rice it consumes. He issued a plea to foreigners to invest in agriculture in Cameroon.

He insisted, however, that as his country aims to be self-sufficient, the resulting crops should primarily feed the local population with only the surplus being exported. Also, value addition should be done locally.

Hogg pointed out that Christian Aid does not believe that foreign direct investment (FDI) is necessarily devoid of benefits for locals.

If provisions are put in place to protect the livelihoods and land rights of people, FDI could be to their advantage. But it should be recognised that people living on the land might not have enough negotiating power to protect their livelihoods, therefore contracts have to be carefully scrutinised.

Excerpt:

By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, May 7 2011 (IPS)

While foreign direct investment in least developed countries (LDCs) in Africa has risen sharply over the past decade, most of it went to resource-rich economies and had little impact on employment creation.

UNCTAD's James Zhan: Emergent powers such as China and Brazil provide LDCs with more opportunities to attract investment. Credit: Isolda Agazzi/IPS

The study, called “FDI in LDCs: Lessons learned from the decade 2001 – 2010”, shows the results are at best mixed.

In terms of capital formation, figures are encouraging: despite an abrupt interruption in 2009 due to the economic crisis, FDI flows to LDCs grew at a rate of 15 percent during the last decade to reach 24 billion dollars in 2010.

This is significant when compared to the 7,1 billion dollars of FDI inflows in 2001. In international comparison, LDCs’ share of FDI in global flows almost doubled, going from 0,9 percent to more than two percent over the same period of time.

“FDI from developing and transition economies is increasing. (Emergent economies) provide LDCs with more opportunities to attract investment,” James Zhan, director of UNCTAD’s division on investment and enterprise, says.

The EU is still the largest investor but transnational corporations (TNCs) from emerging economies – particularly Brazil, China, India and South Africa – are becoming increasingly important, especially to many African LDCs. Nearly half of total inflows came from these economies in 2010, compared with one quarter in 2003, Zhan points out.

FDI inflows have trumped bilateral official development aid (ODA) from 2006 onwards. But there was a fall in FDI by 12 percent in 2009 and 14 percent in 2010. For UNCTAD, “this is a matter of grave concern, particularly when taking into account the global increase in FDI”, Zhan remarks.

Despite the overall growth, foreign investment has not lived up to the high expectations in terms of development that were set up 10 years ago. With over 80 percent of FDI flows in value going to resource-rich economies in Africa, the effects on job creation have been weaker than expected and the transfer of technology and skills limited.

“As a result, LDCs remain at the margin of the global value chain. The predominance of FDI has reinforced the commodity dependence of some LDCs and worsened their vulnerability to external shocks,” Zhan warns.

Also, the geographic concentration of FDI flows has increased, contributing to further divergences in economic performance.

However, the picture is not entirely negative and many LDCs have also succeeded in attracting more diverse forms of investment in value-adding activities, like telecommunications, banking, tourism, commerce, food and beverage and agriculture.

Poor physical infrastructure hinders the development of productive capacities that are key to sustainable development.

Therefore, UNCTAD proposes a plan of action that foresees the careful liberalisation of the infrastructure sector while, at the same time, establishing a regulatory framework – in particular in electricity, telecoms, transport and water.

Concretely, it suggests establishing an LDCs infrastructure development fund to support public-private partnerships and grant risk insurance to private investors.

Another idea is to boost aid for productive capacity. “The key bottleneck preventing benefits from trade is not just the rules but the capacity to produce,” comments Zhan. “Therefore, we suggest creating a productive capacities fund to increase investment in vocational training, among others.”

The third measure seeks to enable firms of all sizes (and not just TNCs) to capture investment opportunities in LDCs.

“Big firms may see LDCs markets as limited but others may see opportunities in sectors like solar energy. Solar energy does not require network infrastructure and the price of solar energy equipment has dropped. It is not high tech anymore but a mature energy,” Zhan explains.

“We need new ideas for TNCs. How can we change business mentality? Usually companies look at GDP (gross domestic product) rates and the size of markets. But we see business opportunities even in the bottom of the pyramid. There are more and more social entrepreneurs but we need to educate them on the concept of sustainable investment.”

UNCTAD wants to tap into the rising pool of “impact investors”. Masataka Fujita, head of the investment trends and issues branch of UNCTAD, explains that the concept of “impact investment” appears to have emerged from a variety of sources, but mostly from the investor community itself.

“These sources and initiatives are now converging to better define the concept, and perhaps even move towards some sort of regulatory framework. The U.S. department of state has bought into the concept and is now seeking to advance it through partnerships,” he explains.

The Global Impact Investing Network is a U.S.-based initiative aiming to provide a framework for “impact investment”, including through the impact reporting and investment standards (IRIS) initiative, an attempt to elaborate a set of tools to measure social and environmental impacts.

“The network has a strong U.S. focus but it looks like they are seeking to expand globally view,” he adds.

Excerpt:

By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, Apr 29 2011 (IPS)

The special session on Syria held by the United Nations Human Rights Council Friday agreed on neither an international mission of enquiry, as originally foreseen, nor a lower level fact-finding mission – only a mission by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Syrian ambassador Faysal Khabbas Hamoui. Credit: Isolda Agazzi/IPS

Nevertheless, it was the first condemnation of Syria in U.N. history.

From the start, the adoption of the resolution requesting the dispatch of an international mission of enquiry promised to be a lost battle, since the countries supporting the U.S. request for a special session of the Human Rights Council (HRC) on Syria – 15 Council members and 21 non-members – were only Western ones, except for Japan, South Korea, Senegal, Zambia and Mexico.

Therefore, even before noon, the U.S. circulated a revised draft resolution requesting a lower profile and less controversial fact-finding mission that would have presumably reported to the HRC and no further.

But even this proposal did not appear to be acceptable to the majority of the delegations, and the resolution that was finally adopted after long diplomatic struggles – by 26 votes in favour, nine against and seven abstentions – merely calls for the dispatch of a mission by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to investigate all alleged violations of international human rights law.

The Arab spring does not seem to gather the same support in diplomatic circles as two months ago, when the HRC held a special session on Libya, requesting that the General Assembly suspend Tripoli’s membership and dispatch an international mission of enquiry.

But Syria is not Libya and “the turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa has undermined regional security and threatened stability,” as stated by the Chinese delegate Xia Jingge, who added that “this session may split the Council, undermine its credibility and sharpen the situation on the ground. We are for impartiality and non-selectivity in the Council’s work, and against naming and shaming.”

A view shared, in more or less similar terms, by the African and the Arab group and several other countries. Many, however, condemned the use of violence against peaceful demonstrators, and called on Syria to release political prisoners and human rights defenders and to investigate alleged human rights violations.

“This is an historical resolution,” Adrian-Claude Zoller, director of the Swiss NGO Geneva for Human Rights, told IPS in an interview. “We have to see it in the context of Syria, a country that has never been condemned by the U.N., despite the fact that there are laws of exception since 1963. An absolute majority of the Council voted in favour of it and only nine opposed.”

He added that, “obviously, Bashar Al Assad is not Ghadafi. He does not have such a high international profile and his family has managed to become unavoidable for the stability – or instability – of the whole Middle East.

“Of course, it would have been better to have a commission of enquiry, but there was certainly not a majority, and the mechanism decided upon provides for an investigation by the Office (of the High Commissioner for Human Rights) and two reports to two consecutive sessions of the Council.”

U.S. ambassador Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe refuted the accusations of politicisation and double standards, saying “the purpose of this special session is to make clear that the international community strongly condemns the killing, arrest and torture of peaceful protestors taking place in Syria, even as we speak.

“To the Syrian government, we are sending a clear and unequivocal message that we will not turn a blind eye as you arbitrarily imprison, torture and kill your own citizens. To the brave people of Syria, who are demanding freedom and dignity, we are here to say that the world stands by you and we will not ignore your plight.”

In her introductory speech, Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Kyung-wha Kang warned that “information gathered since mid-March paints a disturbing picture: the widespread use of live fire against protestors; the arrest, detention and disappearances of demonstrators, human rights defenders and journalists; the torture and ill-treatment of detainees; the sharp repression of press freedom and other measures of communication; and attacks against medial personnel, facilities and patients.”

And the situation has been exceeded over the past weeks, with entire towns being besieged, delivery of food impeded, transportation systems shut down. “The gross disregard of basic human rights by the Syrian security forces led to 450 killings and around four times that number of injuries,” she said.

Noting that the catalyst for the peaceful protests that began in March was the desire to peacefully assemble and associate and fully participate in public affairs, she welcomed the initial move by the government “to embrace these requests by lifting the state of emergency and abolishing the State High Security Court.”

“But what followed was more excessive use of force,” she stressed.

Syrian ambassador Faysal Khabbas Hamoui expressed “astonishment and grave concern at the holding of this special session, including the pretext of humanitarian intervention, that takes us back to the era of colonialism. Syria is at the crossroads of civilisation, with many religious, confessional and ethnic groups. Any marginalisation and transgression against unity of this fabric by extremist or salafist groups will be rejected. Syria will never become a salafist principality.”

Damascus may even become a member of the HRC next month, despite the U.S. stating bluntly that it was “strongly opposed to its Syrian membership” and French ambassador Jean-Baptiste Mattei requesting that it withdraw its candidacy.

But with four candidates for the four seats available to the Asian group, Syria may well be automatically elected.

Excerpt:

By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, Apr 28 2011 (IPS)

The fifth conference of the 173 parties to the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, Apr. 25-29, could bring to 22 the total number of internationally agreed forbidden pollutants. Alternatives to DDT – one of the persistent organic pollutants (POPs) used in the fight against malaria – are gaining popularity, but its complete ban is not on the agenda.

POPs in recycled and new products. Credit: Isolda Agazzi/IPS

IPEN brings together 700 NGOs from over 100 countries. It was established during the negotiations of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, adopted 10 years ago to forbid or strongly limit the most dangerous chemical products.

When the treaty was adopted, 12 substances were put on the list. At the last conference, in 2009, nine new ones were added.

POPs are pesticides, industrial chemicals and by-products that spread easily through soil, water and air, accumulate in the fatty tissues of living organisms, including humans, and are toxic to both humans and wildlife. Notably, they can be transmitted through breast-feeding. They can produce cancer, reproductive disorders and disruption of the immune system. The Stockholm convention foresees their elimination – with a few exceptions for some of them, like the DDT.

There are three major issues on the agenda of this year’s conference. First, is the listing of endosulfan, “an issue civil society has been campaigning on for decades,” Beeler explains. Endosulfan is a toxic pesticide banned in 80 countries, but still used in China and India, in most of East Africa, Argentina and Mexico.

“Endosulfan is so harmful that even some of the countries that still use it are calling for an international ban via the convention, because it would help them to enact national legislation and fighting against illegal trade,” Beeler told IPS.

The second priority at the conference is the total elimination of pentaBDE and octaBDE – two POPs that were added two years ago, but with exceptions for their recycling.

“We have just conducted a study that shows that these BDEs are as toxic and dangerous as PCB and DDT,” Beeler said. “But the convention still allows their waste to be recycled into other products like foam and plastic.”

The IPEN study argues that carpet pads commonly sold to consumers in the U.S. and other developed countries contain dangerous chemicals that can cause nervous system damage, particularly in infants and toddlers. “The experts committee recommended to ban them and the conference should follow its recommendation,” Beeler said. “Ignoring it for political or economic reasons would be a crime.”

The conference will also consider the elimination of the exception of PFOS, another POP added to the list two years ago with exceptions. “This POP never breaks down, so it will be around for every generation!” Beeler stressed. “We hope that serious action will be taken to promote a phasing out of the exceptions because it is as toxic as DDT.”

DDT is probably the best know POP. Completely banned in most of the industrial world at the end of the 1970s, it is still used in many developing countries. Though forbidden by the convention, it can be used to fight malaria, under the strict control of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and under certain circumstances – only through indoor-spraying and if no effective alternatives are available.

India is the only country that still produces DDT.

“The conference will check if there should still be an exception for malaria,” Michael Brander, programme officer at Biovision, told IPS. “They could conclude that there should be none, but they won’t. Some countries in Africa would be in favour of banning DDT, but others are completely against it and the problem is that there must be a consensus.”

Biovision is a Swiss foundation that promotes alternatives to DDT and research on organic solutions in agriculture.

“The major malaria control program in Africa that uses insecticides inside houses is funded by the President’s Malaria Initiative through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID),” Brander argued. “In Uganda, the workers that do the house spraying are paid per bag. So to increase their income, they have to spray as much as possible.”

Ministries of health also think that DDT is an effective and cheap way to kill mosquitoes, “which is not true: it is not the cheapest solution and you have all sorts of side effects and problems when it spreads into soils and air,” he said.

The first Assembly of the Global Alliance for alternatives to DDT took place this week. Biovision presented a project implemented by its partner institute Icepe in which malaria cases were demonstrated to decline by 60 percent in Kenya and 70 percent in Ethiopia through the use of organic plants and an integrated approach that involves the local population.

“We don’t use DDT for malaria any more, we have alternatives,” Ali Mohamed Ali Mahmoud, a delegate from Sudan, told IPS on the sidelines of the conference. “But we are looking for funds for our national action plan to phase out POPs. We already have some money from the Global Environment Facility, but we are seeking additional means to implement some 28 projects. For example, we have old POPs that have been there for years, some electrical transformers that include PCB and POPs to control pests in agriculture. We want to get rid of them and update our legislation to cope with the convention.”

Excerpt:

By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, Apr 21 2011 (IPS)

“It would be bad news for poor countries in Africa if the Doha Round of trade talks fails. This round was meant to rebalance the rules of world trade in favour of developing countries. We have put a lot of resources and hopes into this process and a collapse would be a big betrayal for us.”

Mali's Abdoulaye Sanoko: "We don't want to conclude the Doha Round at any cost." Credit: Isolda Agazzi/IPS

“However, we don’t want to conclude the round at any cost, but rather to emphasise its developmental aspects. In contrast, the big stakeholders are stressing market access.”

Nobody knows exactly how least developed countries (LDCs) would be affected by a collapse of the round. A study requested by the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group has not been started.

But LDCs would be happy with a conclusion on the round on the basis of the current (2008) negotiating texts as “it would be better than losing everything”, Sanoko added.

However, Romain Benicchio, trade policy officer at Oxfam International in Geneva, differed: “We do need a multilateral agreement that responds to the needs of poor countries, but one can doubt that what is on the table now would really benefit them.” Oxfam is

Recently, WTO director general Pascal Lamy acknowledged that the round “could fail”. The U.S.’s demand that large emerging markets slash tariffs in entire industrial sectors have led to seemingly insurmountable differences with Brazil, India and China.

In Geneva, some diplomats are starting to look for a “soft landing” to salvage the progress achieved to date, in case the one-to-one high-level meetings organised by Lamy don’t lead to anything.

Benicchio agrees that a collapse would hamper the expected gains of the round. “However, what is on the table now is far from being a panacea and it is not clear whether these gains would effectively materialise”, he told IPS.

One of the expected outcomes was 100 percent duty-free and quota-free market access for LDCs to developed countries’ markets.

But the current text involves only 97 percent of tariff lines “and there is no clarity on which products would be excluded by the U.S. and other industrial countries. So, de facto, these exclusions could include the main exports of LDCs”, Benicchio noted.

The same goes for cotton where gains could be expected, “but we have not seen any progress since the Hong Kong ministerial conference of 2005”, he said, adding that the U.S. renewed its subsidies in 2008 and has not implemented the recommendations of the Dispute Settlement Body following Brazil’s complaint.

Instead, Washington has committed itself to giving 150 million dollars a year to a research fund on Brazilian cotton and to undertake the necessary reforms only in 2012. “And we still have to see if this will be politically feasible. So, today the U.S. is subsidising Brazilian producers in order to keep subsidising its own,” he commented.

“In many of the areas where LDCs have made proposals, there has barely been any progress due to the resistance by many developed countries,” Sanya Reid Smith, senior researcher at Third World Network (TWN) in Geneva, told IPS. TWN is an international nongovernmental organisation with headquarters in Penang, Malaysia.

“For example, the special safeguard mechanism that allows LDCs to address import surges, including by increasing their tariffs above pre-Doha bound rates if needed, has been made more and more unusable.”

She added that, although LDCs are exempt from cutting tariffs, many LDCs (especially in Africa) that are members of customs unions that include non-LDCs will have to cut tariffs by the amount that the non- LDCs are required to, unless the customs unions are given exceptions.

“So far these exceptions have not been given. Based on the current texts, LDCs in customs unions will have to cut their tariffs, resulting in a permanent loss of government revenue, increased competition from imports and worsening balance of payments,” Reid Smith noted.

For Benicchio, another lost cause in the event of a Doha collapse is the services waiver for LDCs, where industrialised countries would grant facilities to services exporters from LDCs, especially in mode four, the ability of their unskilled workers to work in developed countries.

“But this decision is not guaranteed anymore,” he said. There is only a proposal on the table and it could go one way or another.”

He admits that in some issues there will be no result anyway, like the proposal by African countries to limit the price volatility of agricultural products, or the request to facilitate WTO accession of LDCs without imposing too strict conditions on them.

“But there are alternatives for LDCs if the Doha Round is not concluded,” Reid Smith pointed out. For example, WTO members legally have the option to have an early harvest on certain issues, such as duty- free and quota-free market access and cotton. It is just a question of political will on the side of developed countries.

Sanoko concurred: “We have always asked for an early harvest and many things have been announced. Stopping everything now would be a real pity.”

He explained that a revision of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, the WTO’s predecessor) article XXIV is essential, but it is not going forward. “This article stipulates that in regional and free trade agreements (FTAs) the parties have to liberalise most of the exchanges but without specifying how much.

“It is most important that it should be amended to include a good dose of special and differential treatment so that, among other things, when poor countries negotiate FTAs with developed ones, they don’t have to reduce so many of their tariffs,” Sanoko stated.

Excerpt:

By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, Apr 8 2011 (IPS)

The international commission of inquiry established by the U.N. Human Rights Council to investigate alleged violations of human rights in Libya will start its mission next week, and report on all crimes, committed by anyone, including foreign powers.

The three-member commission – made up of Cherif Bassiouni, Asma Khader and Philippe Kirsch – will leave Geneva for Libya, Egypt and Tunisia on Sunday. The three experts will spend the rest of the month investigating alleged violations of human rights in Libya and present a report to the Human Rights Council (HRC) on Jun. 17.

“The HRC resolution gives us a broad mandate,” Professor Bassiouni, the chair of the commission, told reporters Friday. “It does not specify what human rights violations we can investigate; therefore it applies to all violations, committed by anyone or any party.

“We will also identify accountability for violations of humanitarian law, human rights obligations contained in U.N. covenants and agreements to which Libya is a party and customary international law,” Bassiouni added.

The mission will meet with the Libyan government, U.N. officials, various international organisations and NGOs, but also with people in prisons and hospitals, with civilians and combatants. It will go to zones under government and opposition control.

Asked whether, if found, they would also report on a crime committed by a foreign power, the experts replied that their mandate covers all human rights violations in Libya, regardless who committed them. “So whoever commits the violations will be reported,” they said.

Peter Splinter, Amnesty International representative to the U.N. in Geneva, told IPS that the Commissioners “are interested in looking not just at current violations, but also at the context within which they have occurred.”

This might involve a probe into “support by other governments to the Libyan regime,” he added.

Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch, who has just returned from a two-week mission to eastern Libya, says he had found massive amounts of unexploded ordnance, abandoned and unsecured weapons and munitions, and recently-laid landmines that pose a great threat to civilians.

“I was very surprised to discover that the Belgian government had sold weapons to Libya as late as 2009,” he told IPS, adding: “Western countries were selling arms to a government that has such a long record of abusing its own population and being involved in terrorist activities (abroad).”

Asked whether the commission of inquiry should also look into this aspect, he answered that the issue is broader and may be outside the commission’s mandate, “but governments that have supplied weapons have the responsibility to deal with the legacy, help secure and destroy them and pay for the removal of landmines.”

Many weapons date back to the 1970s and 1980s, when Libya was under embargo. “Many of them were clearly sold in violation of international law,” Bouckaert continued.

“We found weapons from North Korea labelled as spare parts for tractors and bulldozers. Arms sales companies have a responsibility to consider the use their weapons will be put to. If they know that they will be used for repression, they have the obligation to stop the sales.”

As a former staff member of the U.N. mission of inquiry in Guinea, Bouckaert believes that the HRC mission is important to establish what really happened and to call for accountability.

Libya has not directly replied to the request for visiting the zones under government control, but it has issued a press release announcing publicly that the commission will be welcome in Libya, starting Apr. 15.

“I believe that the commission will be allowed to go to Tripoli,” Bouckaert commented. “The question is whether it will be able to do the real work there or whether the government will try to manipulate its presence. The more important negotiations are about minimal working conditions. You cannot just go there and be put on a government tour.”

Bassiouni assures that sources of information will be secured and witnesses protected. The mission will cooperate with the International Criminal Court (ICC) that has received a mandate by a referral of the Security Council on Feb. 26. Five days later, the ICC Prosecutor announced his decision to open an investigation on the situation in Libya.

The experts insist on the need to have more information before discussing what they will do later. They do not want to point the finger at anyone before having accurately ascertained the facts. “Whether eventual crimes rise to the level of criminal accountability and whether they will be transmitted to the ICC, we will see,” they say.

But what is the credibility of such a mission, given the recent step back of Justice Richard Goldstone from his own report on the Gaza conflict?

The South African jurist was the head of the United Nations fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict that released a report in September 2009 which blasted both Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas for war crimes committed during the 22-day conflict in 2008-2009.

“There is a lot of back and forth in the press with the Goldstone report,” Peter Splinter replied. “He did not walk away, he reaffirmed his report. He just said that, if he had known, he would not have talked about a deliberate policy of targeting civilians. Why did he not know what he knows now? Because he was not allowed to go to Israel. But it is unfair to say that it discredits U.N. missions of inquiry.”

For Splinter, the mission to Libya has highly qualified and high profile international jurists, which gives ground for optimism about what can be expected. “It is an important step, but the timeframe is very tight”, he said.

“The conflict is still going on, people are still (being) killed,” Bassiouni acknowledged. “This is the fourth war I am going to investigate and many things come out later.”

The reason: “People (who may testify) are in hospitals, or have family inside and cannot talk till the dust has come down. Investigations of this sort are not like instant solutions,” Bassiouni said, adding “We will do the best we can, but our intention is to include a recommendation for an extension of the period of time to be able to continue our work.”

Excerpt:

By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, Apr 8 2011 (IPS)

“IBSA what?” is the question you most often get in Geneva when enquiring about the India-Brazil-South Africa (IBSA) dialogue forum, established in 2003 between these three multicultural democracies and emerging markets “to contribute to the construction of a new international architecture”.

El Hadji Diouf: South Africa will try to trump its IBSA partners when it comes to market access in Africa. Credit: Isolda Agazzi/IPS

They also called for an “early conclusion of the Doha Development Round with a balanced outcome which ensures the development needs of the developing countries, especially the least developed countries”.

A trade diplomat from one of the IBSA countries at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), speaking to IPS on condition of anonymity, says, “we don’t coordinate our actions formally as a group. We hold common membership in various coalitions, so we coordinate on an ad hoc basis.”

He explains that Brazil, South Africa, India and China are members of the Group of 20 (G20) in agriculture; of the NAMA-11 group in the non- agricultural market access (NAMA) negotiations; and that they share most positions on intellectual property.

The G20 is a coalition of developing countries but their interests in agriculture may diverge. Brazil, for example, tends to take the offence, while India adopts a defensive position, pushing for a strong special safeguard mechanism that allows developing countries to increase tariffs in the case of import surges or sudden drops in world prices.

The NAMA-11 is a group of emerging market states that asks for flexibilities in the implementation of tariff reductions and for greater market access in industrial goods.

“But, even though the interests of Brazil and India in agriculture may seem divergent, in practice they have been able to find a middle ground with regard to market access, the reduction of trade-distorting domestic support and the elimination of export subsidies,” the trade diplomat points out.

Christophe Bellmann, programmes director at the Geneva-based International Center for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD), explains, “the March Delhi statement is mainly in response to U.S. pressures on sectoral initiatives in the NAMA negotiations.” ICTSD is an independent non-governmental organisation based in Geneva.

Currently, the main divergences in the WTO Doha Round negotiations stem from the U.S. request to large emerging markets to deeply cut or even completely slash tariffs in entire industrial sectors, like chemicals, industrial machinery, electronics and forestry.

Brazil, China and India responded that these initiatives are supposed to be voluntary and must remain so. For Brazil, these sectors represent one third of all its industrial products and, for China, more than 55 percent of all its NAMA imports.

These deep differences have brought Pascal Lamy, WTO director general, to acknowledge last week that the Doha Round “may fail.”

For Bellmann, alliances are “not political or ideological,” but based on commercial interests and therefore very volatile, with the exception of the African group that works more along a regional line.

“Countries don’t think as a group, but in a strategic way, for example, how to increase their weight in negotiations by building alliances, ideally with big countries like China, India and Brazil,” he told IPS.

El Hadji Diouf, executive director of the African Agency for Trade and Development, regards “IBSA as a good initiative of South-South cooperation, but its impact in trade negotiations is limited.” The agency is a Geneva-based non-governmental organisation that specialises in issues regarding trade and Africa.

“The common interest of IBSA is to position itself as an alternative to the hegemony of traditional commercial powers,” he told IPS.

“But these countries must secure access to new markets and are therefore in competition with each other. They can cooperate sincerely on the elimination of agricultural subsidies but cannot make a common offer in market access.”

Neither do they have the same commercial partners. “Brazil has witnessed an incredible growth in recent years and it is globally becoming stronger and stronger. It has a vested interest in the conclusion of the Doha Round, more than the others. South Africa, in contrast, has many relations at the regional level, in addition to its EU relationship,” explains Diouf.

But what can the much smaller South Africa bring to this alliance? “South Africa is a good market for India and Brazil’s exports and, even more so, as an entry point into the African continent because of its membership in different African regional organisations,” Diouf argues.

Concerning the possible effect of IBSA cooperation on African least developed countries (LDCs), Bellmann explains that WTO requirements that apply to South Africa do not apply to LDCs since they don’t have to open their markets in agriculture, NAMA and services.

“We are looking to ways of implementing duty-free and quota-free market access for LDCs,” says the trade diplomat. “India and Brazil are taking steps in this direction.”

The Doha mandate asks developing countries that are in the position to do so to open their markets to LDCs’ products, but without setting a specific target as for developed countries, currently at 97 percent.

“However, because of its geographical position, South Africa could try and get better market access to African LDCs than its IBSA partners,” Diouf reflects.

“IBSA does not exclude competition. Pretoria, for example, does not favour trade liberalisation between its African partners and the EU in sectors like services, to avoid having to share the regional market in which it already has a hand. This is a pre-emptive fight with a commercial rationale that could crop up between IBSA partners.”

Excerpt:

By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, Mar 26 2011 (IPS)

An independent U.N. body has criticised the Global Compact, the largest initiative for corporate social responsibility, for not sufficiently monitoring the human rights and environmental commitments of participating companies.

The Joint Inspection Unit (JIU), an independent external evaluation body of the U.N., based in Geneva, echoes a longstanding complaint by NGOs that the Global Compact may just be helping companies don a positive marketing image.

“On the whole, the Global Compact has been successful in legitimating the progressive and generalised engagement of the United Nations with the private sector, and promoting new partnerships whose effectiveness is yet to be proved. However, it has been less successful in making business participants translate their commitment into real policy change,” the JIU says bluntly in a report.

Though the report was published at the beginning of the year, the JIU only drew public attention to it last week, by issuing a press release. The Global Compact reacted with a harsh statement, dated Mar. 24, that rejects the report as “flawed and inaccurate” and asks for corrections.

However, the intricacies of U.N. policies and the ping pong between Geneva and New York will remain a mystery since Papa Louis Fall, the main author of the report, is apparently not allowed to talk to the press.

The Global Compact is the largest initiative for corporate social responsibility. It was launched by former U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan in 1999 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Businesses that adhere to this compact commit themselves to ten principles relating to human rights, environmental and labour standards and anti-corruption practices. In exchange, they can make use of the U.N. Global Compact logo with a blue globe and a laurel wreath, which is very similar to the U.N. logo.

The world body’s independent inspectors see a threat to the credibility of the United Nations if any company can use its logo simply by subscribing to the Compact. It points to the Alliance for a Corporate-Free U.N., an NGO initiative that has long criticised the international organisation for “blue washing” companies that use its logo just for marketing purposes.

“It is curious that the report makes reference to that coalition, which ended its activities about five years ago, and not to the more recent articles and reports published on our blog,” Bart Slob, senior researcher at SOMO, told IPS.

SOMO is a Dutch-based NGO that monitors companies and does research on supply chains. In 2007 it funded Global Compact Critics, an informal network of organisations and people with concerns about the U.N. Global Compact.

“The general views of the authors that contribute to our blog correspond to the ones of the JIU,” he ensures.

The Global Compact is intended to exhort business to “learn and dialogue”, but it has become victim of its own success: in ten years, it has gathered 7,450 participants from 135 countries — mainly businesses, but also NGOs, business organisations and academia. Large companies make up 35 percent of the total and small and medium enterprises another third.

By region, the largest representation is in Europe (43 percent), with U.S. companies making up only 5 percent of the total, Middle East ones 2 percent, Asian 20 percent, Latin American 24 percent and African 6 percent.

But if quantity has steadily increased, quality is lagging behind. The report suggested more stringent criteria for admission. Presently, the CEO of a company only needs to sign a letter pledging to make the ten principles an integral part of its business strategy, without having to give sufficient guarantees that it will spread them throughout its supply chain and subsidiaries.

“The lack of company monitoring is the initiative’s Achilles’ heel,” stresses the report. NGOs like Amnesty International, Greenpeace, ActionAid and the Berne Declaration have long criticised the initiative for lacking teeth, but companies have always resisted any form of monitoring. Companies self-assess themselves and their reports are allegedly not verified.

The Global Compact rejects this criticism by pointing out that it has excluded more than 2,000 enterprises that did not meet the criteria.

But for the inspectors this is not enough. “There is an absence of adequate entry criteria and of an effective monitoring system and the voluntary nature of the commitments is not a guarantee of future good behaviour,” they write.

Bart Slob agrees with this point and with the criticism of the governance structure: “There are many business representatives on the Compact’s Board, but there is very little space for NGOs and U.N. member states,” he notes.

“I am very pleased with this report because it confirms what civil society has been saying since the beginning: lack of clarity, lack of teeth, lack of follow-up proceedings,” Andreas Missbach, joint managing director of the Berne Declaration, told IPS.

The Berne Declaration is a Swiss NGO that co-organises the Public Eye on Davos, an annual award attributed to the least responsible enterprise.

It does not participate in the Global Compact arguing that it “does not have any effect in the real world, since nobody is policing the companies if they don’t abide to their commitments. I have looked at the reports of UBS and Credit Suisse, they are extremely poor,” he added.

He points to Barrick Gold Corporation, a mining company that is a member of the Compact “despite having constantly run into human rights and environment problems, like in Papua New Guinea”.

So, should the Global Compact be reformed or does it have to be closed down?

“There are mixed views on that,” Bart Slob replied. “If the U.N. is unwilling to take rigorous reform measures, it would be better to consider an alternative course of action, like establishing a code of conduct for large companies, like it was suggested by the U.N. in the 1970s. An idea that unfortunately never materialised.”

Excerpt:

By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, Mar 22 2011 (IPS)

Part of the delay in the finalisation of the economic partnership agreements (EPAs) is due to the so-called non-execution clause that gives the EU the power to take steps against its African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) trading partners if they violate human rights, democracy and good governance principles.

West African activists demonstrating at the World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal, earlier this year. Credit: Isolda Agazzi/IPS

“Furthermore, the clause is not reciprocal since West Africa would not be able to take steps against the EU if Senegalese immigrants in France are put in jail in violation of basic human rights principles, for example,” he adds.

The EPAs are the implementation of the trade chapter of the Cotonou agreement between the EU and the ACP, which already contains a strong non- execution clause that has been used several times. The Caribbean EPA – the only complete one to date – does contain a non-execution clause.

“Negotiations need a clear strategy,” adds Jacob Kotchao, the civil society representative of the Central African EPA negotiating team. “Our countries have a long way to go with respect to human rights but we don’t want these values to be used to the detriment of our development.

“We have economic and commercial interests and we don’t want to give our partners arguments to preclude them.”

Marc Maes from 11.11.11, a Brussels-based nongovernmental organisation (NGO) that works extensively on the EPAs, admits that European NGOs have not thought through this issue. “We don’t have a common position,” he told IPS in an interview.

In more general terms, he explains that the first time the issue of introducing human rights clauses into trade agreements came up was with the EU’s trade agreement with Colombia that has still to be ratified.

“There has been a huge outcry about this agreement because of the situation of human and labour rights in Colombia, the most dangerous country in the world for unionists,” he notes.

“The agreement replaces the GSP+ (generalised system of preferences plus) scheme that gives trade preferences to developing countries that commit themselves to actualising human rights and environmental and social standards.

“Since the EU would no longer have an instrument to put pressure on Colombia, European and Colombian NGOs have supported the idea of adding a human rights clause to the bilateral trade agreement.”

David Hachfeld, trade expert at Oxfam Germany, argues that trade agreements and human rights relate to each other.

“The problem is that you cannot heal a negative effect on human rights caused by a trade agreement – for example on the right to food – just with a human rights clause. But, clearly, if these clauses are really enforced, they can play an important role.”

He explains that the EU always tries to include clauses on human rights, environment and labour standards but to different degrees: “In the Korea trade agreement there is such a clause but it is quite weak, even weaker than in the GSP.”

Apart from the issue of the human rights non-execution clause, another problem pointed to by African NGOs is the signing by individual countries of interim EPAs – rather than full EPAs by the designated blocs — that jeopardises regional integration.

“The EPA in its present form is not good and it cannot be signed,” affirms Dieye. “But if we stop there, countries that have signed interim EPAs will have to implement them and we will lose regional integration. The challenge is: how to refuse a bad agreement while preserving our integration?”

He points to three possible scenarios: the first and feasible one sees the EU accepting a 70 percent tariff reduction, renouncing the non execution-clause and dropping the most-favoured nation clause that automatically would extend benefits in future ACP trade agreements to the EU.

In the second scenario, everybody sticks to their current positions: there is no regional agreement, three different commercial schemes are in place and it is the end of the integration – a catastrophe.

“The third possibility sees no need for the EPA,” Dieye explains. “We stop everything, Côte d’Ivoire denounces its interim agreement. But then we would need regional solidarity mechanisms.

“We are trying to evaluate how much Côte d’Ivoire would lose from preference erosion and how the region could help them. Our obligation is then to negotiate a follow-up to the Cotonou agreement, not to sign it.”

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By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, Mar 21 2011 (IPS)

Investing in adding value to raw materials is crucial for the development of the African continent.

Some foreign entrepreneurs have created food-processing businesses in Africa and are making good money, despite an occasionally difficult business environment.

“A vibrant SME (small and medium enterprise) sector is key for employment, increased income, economic diversification, exports and foreign direct investment,” asserts Mohamed-Lamine Dhaoui of UNIDO, the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation.

“But, in Africa, manufacturing contributes only to 10 percent of gross domestic product,” adds Dhaoui, who is director of business, investment and technology services at UNIDO.

Raw commodities, like fuel, metals and unprocessed foods, form the most important part of African exports. In contrast, manufacturing export is limited to 29 percent of exports – low compared to other regions.

But the development of the private sector in Africa faces major challenges: a difficult business environment, inadequate technical support services, poor infrastructure and weak technological development, with high costs for processing and electrification.

Advantages of the African business environment include low labour costs, even though the labour force sometimes needs professional training. “And agriculture is one of the key sectors for manufacturing, with its agro- industry, cash crops and food industries,” Dhaoui notes.

Some foreign investors have taken up the challenge of manufacturing agricultural products directly in Africa. They are adding value locally, thereby contributing to local development while making good money.

Gary Hannam, CEO of the Swiss company Olivado Ltd, decided to create an international brand of extra virgin avocado oil that is manufactured in Kenya.

“In the Central Highlands of Kenya there is an abundance of good avocados and little domestic competition because local people don’t eat them,” he explains. “The possibility of having organic and fair trade certification is quick and the bureaucratic process is corruption-free.”

Despite some setbacks, a fair trade organic programme was set up in the record time of seven months. Hannam points out that Olivado is now the largest organic exporter in Kenya, with 820 small farmers certified. After extensive training programmes for farmers and the staff, they are now able to supply supermarkets directly.

“Our employment policy is to identify local people with good potential and train them. A former cleaner is now a fruit manager. And farmers’ incomes have doubled,” he explains.

Despite poor infrastructure – water, power and roads – Olivado has become a leading international brand of extra virgin avocado oil that has a presence in 22 countries. The number of farmers is expected to increase to 2,000 in the next four years, producing 460,000 litres of oil.

Based on the Kenyan model, the company is about to start a new factory in Colombia. “I am looking for partners to share this small Swiss company’s ideals,” he concludes.

Hans Peter Werder has another success story. The founder of HPW Ag, a small Swiss enterprise with only 12 employees, has built a dried fruit factory in Ghana. “Our strategy is to develop products with added value and target niche markets in Europe,” he explains.

“There are many advantages to beneficiation in Ghana, starting with the proximity to the production place and that you need only 15 kg of pineapples to make one kg of dried fruit. But there are also challenges, like unstable fruit supply, especially from small-holder farmers, inflation and the artificial value of the Ghanaian currency,” Werder notes.

Pineapples, coconuts and mangoes are prepared in Ghana, certified fair trade by Max Havelaar and sold in Switzerland and other countries.

In Ghana, fruits are prepared in partnership with a local company, Blue Skies, that employs 900 people in rural areas where the rate of unemployment is particularly high. This generates a demand for local hardware and other services.

HPW Ag helps pineapple growers to get fair trade certification. “Today we are the leading agricultural services provider in Ghana. We are responsible for the export of 35 percent of all pineapples from Ghana and possibly have the largest dried fruit factory in Africa. The factory is designed to pack consumer units at source and to supply retailers directly,” says Werder.

The key element is the procurement of fruit from multiple sources: 50 percent come from big growers and 50 percent from small ones. “If you stay only with big producers, who sell abroad, you depend on the export market. And with the small ones, you don’t know if they will have enough fruit,” Werder adds.

The processing of fruit is done in partnership with a South African dried fruit factory. Management is handled by a team in Ghana and through the relationship with the South African company.

Innovative ideas were required because of the high costs of electricity, gas and oil. HPW Ag decided to work entirely with renewable energy from the organic waste it produces.

Werder cautions that customers must take into consideration sustainability factors. “Whenever I send out my pitch, the answer is: send me the price list. Yes, I can send the price list, but Europeans should look also at sustainability.”

HPW assures consumers that approximately 37 percent of the consumer price remains in the country of origin.

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