In Aleppo, Karm al Jabal. This neighbourhood is next to Al Bab and has been under siege for six months. Credit: Foreign and Commonwealth Office/cc by 2.0

By Jim Lobe and Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, Jun 1 2013 (IPS)

A series of reversals for Syria’s rebels this month has prompted its supporters here to call for much greater U.S. military intervention in the civil war in order to give them a stronger bargaining position in advance of any peace negotiations.

In particular, some opposition advocates here are calling for President Barack Obama to go beyond providing arms directly to selected rebel groups, an option that the administration has reportedly had under active consideration since reports surfaced last month that the Syrian army had used chemical weapons against rebels.“A no-fly zone has mission creep written all over it." – Joshua Landis

Given the current weakness of the opposition, they argue, it makes little sense to go into negotiations next month in Geneva with representatives of the government of President Bashar al-Assad – as proposed by both Washington and Moscow – without first trying to decisively turn the tide of battle.

“(T)he only hope for an acceptable political settlement in Syria lies in an intervention that would decisively shift the balance of Syria’s war – through arms supplies to the rebels and airstrikes to eliminate the regime’s air power” (emphasis added), declared the lead editorial in the Washington Post Friday.

“If Mr. Obama is unwilling to take such steps, he ought also to eschew diplomacy that makes his administration appear foolish as well as weak,” the Post’s hawkish editorial board wrote.

Many of the rebels’ advocates here are urging the creation of one or more “no-fly zones” over Syrian territory to protect the opposition and permit it to set up a rival government on Syrian territory that could then request additional military intervention by its Western and Arab allies.

“Such a government would be entitled to request assistance in its defence from those who recognise it,” according to Frederic Hof, a former State Department special adviser on Syria at the Atlantic Council, who spoke earlier this week as part of a panel that favoured strong U.S. military intervention at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP).

“The United States and others would be entitled to offer defensive assistance to counter the (Bashar Al-) Assad insurgency and its foreign fighters.”

“This scenario would not preclude national unity negotiations between the new Syrian government and an entity in Damascus still recognised by Russia, Iran, and others,” according to Hof.

Hof’s proposal, as well as other options, came amidst a series of military, diplomatic and political reversals suffered by the opposition that have resulted in the perception that the Assad government – with critical help from key foreign backers, notably Russia, Iran, and Lebanon’s Hezbollah — has regained the offensive in the two-year-old civil war.

Hezbollah’s involvement in the fighting in and around the border town of Qusayr has enabled the government to secure key arms smuggling routes in and out of Lebanon and to re-open supply lines between Damascus and the Mediterranean coast, as well as northern provinces along the Turkish border, notably Latakia, Idlib and Aleppo.

Citing Germany’s chief intelligence officer, Charles Dunne, who heads Middle East programmes at Freedom House, wrote on CNN’s website that recent government advances on the ground meant that Assad’s rule “is more stable than any time in the last two years, and he is likely to retake the southern half of the country by the end of this year.”

Meanwhile, disarray in the opposition ranks was on vivid display during a meeting of the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces in Istanbul this past week as Islamist and secular factions battled over control and representation at any Geneva peace conference, to the evident exasperation of their backers in the West and Gulf states.

That disarray was increasingly reflected in Syria itself as four of the leading rebel groups on the ground sharply criticised the continuing discord in Istanbul amidst reports of increased tension and actual fighting between units of the Free Syria Army and Islamist groups, including the Al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra, filtered out of northern Syria.

While Britain and France managed to persuade the EU to lift its embargo on supplying arms to the rebels effective Aug. 1, Russia countered by announcing that it will proceed with the transfer to Damascus of its S-300 long-range surface-to-air missile system – widely considered one of the most potent anti-aircraft missile systems in the world.

While deployment of the system is unlikely before next year – assuming Moscow follows through with the transfer despite Israeli threats to destroy it on delivery – Russia’s announcement underlined its determination to trump any escalation of Western support for the rebels.

Moreover, the addition of S-300s to Syria’s already formidable air-defence system would make the implementation of a no-fly zone or similar action requiring U.S. and Western airpower that much more problematic, thus adding urgency to whether or not to intervene as urged by Hof and others.

The administration has so far confined its support to the rebels to humanitarian aid and “non-lethal” assistance – even while it has encouraged the Gulf states and Western Europe to provide arms directly – and has shown little enthusiasm for escalating its military involvement, to say the least.

When reports surfaced last week that it was indeed considering a no-fly zone, the Pentagon was quick to deny them, even while insisting that it is prepared for all contingencies.

At the USIP conference, Joseph Holliday, a fellow at the Institute for the Study of War, a spin-off of the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), presented four options for implementing a no-fly zone, ranging from supplying rebels with advanced surface-to-air missiles to a direct U.S. air attack on Syria’s air-defense system, aircraft, and related infrastructure followed by U.S. and allied air patrols over parts of the country.

But whether these ideas can be sold to the administration or to a war-weary public – for which there is virtually no appetite for providing anything more than arms to the rebels, according to recent polls — there is far from a consensus on the no-fly zone.

“A no-fly zone has mission creep written all over it,” according to Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma and publisher of the syriacomment.com blog “It does nothing to guarantee that the opposition would win, and it certainly doesn’t guarantee that the ‘moderate’ opposition would get the jump on the Islamists and al-Qaeda, who are better positioned to exploit an Assad defeat, should it come.”

“In Libya, the no-fly zone turned into a no-Gadhafi zone within 48 hours, because the only way to stop the killing was to destroy Gadhafi and his military,” he told IPS. “There is no point in imposing a no-fly zone on Syria, if the U.S. air force is not willing to destroy the Assad regime and his military.”

Wayne White, a former senior Middle East State Department intelligence analyst, agreed that, as in Libya, a no-fly zone would likely expand into something more, particularly “with the rebels on the defensive and losing ground…”

Indeed, he said, “another argument against (a no-fly zone) now could be that regime forces are doing so well on the ground that they might be able to continue making gains against the rebels without air support – relying instead on tanks, other armoured vehicles, heavy artillery, and heavy mortar fire.”

The result, he said, would likely result in “aerial interdiction against all manner of regime military targets on the ground, making it an even more demanding affair.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Women and children from the village where the Esparza family was murdered by soldiers in Mexico's "drug war" demand justice outside the schoolhouse.Mónica González /IPS

By Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, May 25 2013 (IPS)

Following the release of a major draft report on drug policy in the Americas, the secretary-general of the Organisation of American States (OAS), Jose Miguel Insulza, called for the beginning of debate aimed at reforming those policies throughout the region.

“Delivering this report today,” Insulza said Wednesday, “we are encouraged by the sincere aspiration, which I now have the privilege of presenting to the entire hemisphere, that this is not a conclusion but only the beginning of a long-awaited discussion.”"A one-size-fits-all response won’t work for complex problems that affect different countries in various ways.” -- John Walsh of WOLA

The draft report was shared with the 35 member countries of the OAS and is now scheduled to be discussed in depth at the upcoming organisation’s general assembly, on Jun. 4 in Guatemala.

The call for a new debate comes in light of a strengthened resolve on the issue throughout the region. This relates to the violence associated with drug trafficking as seen along the U.S.- Mexico border, as well as an increased prevalence of drug use and growing demand for health care services to treat addictions.

While acknowledging shortcomings in the implementation of current policies, some countries are continuing to defend the overall approach, and are encouraging a plan of action adopted by the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission (CICAD) branch of the Washington-based OAS. This approach calls for the continued concentration of efforts to reduce both supply and demand, as well as measures in line with United Nations conventions on drug law.

The new OAS discussion will inevitably be energised by the recent surprise legalisation of marijuana in two U.S. states in November.

“A one-size-fits-all response won’t work for complex problems that affect different countries in various ways,” John Walsh, a senior associate with the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), an advocacy group here, told IPS.

“The report points to the need for flexibility to pursue options that may imply national and international reforms, including legal and regulated cannabis markets. And it emphasises that this more open debate is really just now beginning.”

Many of the region’s leaders have expressed frustration with the limits and exorbitant costs of current policies and their desire for a fuller and more creative debate.

But according to Walsh, who participated in writing the OAS report, there is a lot of scepticism over whether the OAS will be up to the task, especially given U.S. domination of the issue. But he also emphasises that the new report represents a good first step in the direction of a more constructive and nuanced debate.

“Drug policy is an international issue as well as a domestic issue and it can be hard to separate them, especially when you’re talking about drugs trafficking across borders – if it’s an issue in Colorado, chances are it is related to the issue in Mexico,” Walsh, who released a paper on this issue earlier this week, told IPS.

“In the case of cannabis in particular, the U.S. has been the chief advocate for international drug conventions that place strict controls on cannabis. However, as the U.S. begins to revisit and alter its cannabis laws, this will certainly have an effect on how the drug conventions are seen within the U.S. – and, and in turn, in Latin America, because all countries in the Americas are signatories of the same treaties.”

The OAS draft report even explores the potential creation of legal and regulated markets that would reflect these changes taking place in the United States.

“Changing U.S. public opinion towards cannabis is being reflected in changes in state policy, which has already placed the U.S. at odds with the drug conventions,” Walsh notes. “And while some of the Latin American states might be feeling a bit puzzled by the U.S.’s new approach to drug policy, others are seeing an opportunity to have similar proposals.”

Yet significant differences remain in public attitudes on this issue outside the United States. Walsh suggests that while public opinion has led government policy in this county, governments would need to lead public opinion towards legalisation in many Latin American countries.

Cannabis disconnect

Following the November elections here, a looming disconnect has opened up between where the United States seems to be going on cannabis policy and how the U.S. is asking other countries in the region to act. This is most evident in the case of Mexico, with Washington continuing to push the Mexican government to use its security institutions to forcefully crack down on the illicit cross-border drug trade.

For the moment, it appears unlikely that this policy will change. Yet some analysts say they are already seeing a fundamental shift in this dynamic, with Latin American governments taking the lead for the first time, in trying to define drug policies in the region.

Depending on how it proceeds at the meeting on Jun. 4, the new OAS report could be a central component of this shift. Beyond the cannabis issue, for instance, the OAS report offers a range of proposals and alternatives to be considered which, if adopted, would dramatically change the way drug policies are implemented.

This is happening after years in which the U.S. government was able to largely dictate such policy. Very recently, however, Latin American countries have been examining the drugs problems they’re dealing with on an individual level – and to decide on the most appropriate policy responses.

“Most of the considerations of new cannabis policy involve examining the potential to separate the cannabis market from the wider black market for illicit drugs,” Colletta Youngers, a long-time Latin American drugs expert with WOLA, told IPS.

“This is both to protect the people who want to obtain cannabis from having to go into criminal markets, and also to the extent that cannabis is a big part of illicit drug revenues that are for now entirely in criminal hands and to put those revenues into the hands and control of the state.”

Still, she admits that for the time being the issue of legal, regulated cannabis markets is a priority for some U.S. states, but not yet for the national government. But Youngers also points to countries such as Uruguay – where such a law is currently pending – and others that are currently exploring such issues.

A nuclear-armed Iran would not pose a fundamental threat to the United States and its regional allies like Israel and the Gulf Arab monarchies, according to a new report released here Friday by the Rand Corporation.

Entitled “Iran After the Bomb: How Would a Nuclear-Armed Tehran Behave?“, the report asserts that the acquisition by Tehran of nuclear weapons  would above all be intended to deter an attack by hostile powers, presumably including Israel and the United States, rather than for aggressive purposes."An Iran with nukes will still be a declining power." -- Alireza Nader of the Rand Corporation

And while its acquisition may indeed lead to greater tension between Iran and its Sunni-led neighbours, the 50-page report concludes that Tehran would be unlikely to use nuclear weapons against other Muslim countries. Nor would it be able to halt its diminishing influence in the region resulting from the Arab Spring and its support for the Syrian government, according to the author, Alireza Nader.

“Iran’s development of nuclear weapons will enhance its ability to deter an external attack, but it will not enable it to change the Middle East’s geopolitical order in its own favour,” Nader, an international policy analyst at RAND, told IPS. “The Islamic Republic’s challenge to the region is constrained by its declining popularity, a weak economy, and a limited conventional military capability. An Iran with nukes will still be a declining power.”

The report reaches several conclusions all of which generally portray Iran as a rational actor in its international relations.

While Nader calls it a “revisionist state” that tries to undermine what it sees as a U.S.-dominated order in the Middle East, his report stresses that “it does not have territorial ambitions and does not seek to invade, conquer, or occupy other nations.”

Further, the report identifies the Islamic Republic’s military doctrine as defensive in nature.  This posture is presumably a result of the volatile and unstable region in which it exists and is exacerbated by its status as a Shi’a and Persian-majority nation in a Sunni and Arab-majority region.

Iran is also scarred by its traumatic eight-year war with Iraq in which as many as one million Iranians lost their lives.

The new report comes amidst a growing controversy here over whether a nuclear-armed Iran could itself be successfully “contained” by the U.S. and its allies and deterred both from pursuing a more aggressive policy in the region and actually using nuclear weapons against its foes.

Iran itself has vehemently denied it intends to build a weapon, and the U.S. intelligence community has reported consistently over the last six years that Tehran’s leadership has not yet decided to do so, although the increasing sophistication and infrastructure of its nuclear programme will make it possible to build one more quickly if such a decision is made.

Official U.S. policy, as enunciated repeatedly by top officials, including President Barack Obama, is to “prevent” Iran from obtaining a weapon, even by military means if ongoing diplomatic efforts and “crippling” economic sanctions fail to persuade Iran to substantially curb its nuclear programme.

A nuclear-armed Iran, in the administration’s view – which is held even more fervently by the U.S. Congress where the Israel lobby exerts its greatest influence – represents an “existential threat” to the Jewish state.

In addition, according to the administration, Iran’s acquisition of a weapon would likely embolden it and its allies – notably Lebanon’s Hezbollah – to pursue more aggressive actions against their foes and could well set off a regional “cascade effect” in which other powers, particulary Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt, would feel obliged to launch nuclear-weapons programmes of their own.

But a growing number of critics of the prevention strategy – particularly that part of it that would resort to military action against Iran – argue that a nuclear Iran will not be nearly as dangerous as the reigning orthodoxy assumes.

A year ago, for example, Paul Pillar, a veteran CIA analyst who served as National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, published a lengthy essay in ‘The Washington Monthly’, “We Can Live With a Nuclear Iran: Fears of a Bomb in Tehran’s Hands Are Overhyped, and a War to Prevent It Would Be a Disaster.”

More recently, Colin Kahl, an analyst at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) who also served as the Pentagon’s top Middle East policy adviser for much of Obama’s first term, published two reports – the first questioning the “cascade effect” in the region, and the second, published earlier this week and entitled “If All Else Fails: The Challenges of Containing a Nuclear-Armed Iran,” outlining a detailed “containment strategy” — including extending Washington’s nuclear umbrella over states that feel threatened by a nuclear Iran — the U.S. could follow to deter Tehran’s use of a nuclear bomb or its transfer to non-state actors, like Hezbollah, and persuade regional states not to develop their own nuclear arms capabilities.

In addition, Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst at the Brookings Institution whose 2002 book, “The Threatening Storm” helped persuade many liberals and Democrats to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq, will publish a new book, “Unthinkable: Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy”, that is also expected to argue for a containment strategy if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon.

Because both Brookings and CNAS are regarded as close to the administration, some neo-conservative commentators have expressed alarm that these reports are “trial balloons” designed to set the stage for Obama’s abandonment of the prevention strategy in favour of containment, albeit by another name.

It is likely that Nader’s study – coming as it does from RAND, a think tank with historically close ties to the Pentagon – will be seen in a similar light.

His report concedes that Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons would lead to greater tension with the Gulf Arab monarchies and thus to greater instability in the region. Moreover, an inadvertent or accidental nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran would be a “dangerous possibility”, according to Nader who also notes that the “cascade effect”, while outside the scope of his study, warrants “careful consideration”.

Despite Iran’s strong ideological antipathy toward Israel, the report does not argue that Tehran would attack the Jewish state with nuclear weapons, as that would almost certainly lead to the regime’s destruction.

Israel, in Nader’s view, fears that Iran’s nuclear capability could serve as an “umbrella” for Tehran’s allies that could significantly hamper Israel’s military operations in the Palestinian territories, the Levant, and the wider region.

But the report concludes that Tehran is unlikely to extend its nuclear deterrent to its allies, including Hezbollah, noting that the interests of those groups do not always – or even often – co-incide with Iran’s.  Iran would also be highly unlikely to transfer nuclear weapons to them in any event, according to the report.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

A Congolese man transports charcoal on his bicycle outside Lubumbashi in the DRC. Credit: Miriam Mannak/IPS

By Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, May 17 2013 (IPS)

With casualties in the long-running conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) now surpassing every conflict since World War II, U.S. policymakers and advocates are stepping up campaigns to raise awareness and push legislation aimed at encouraging new negotiations, assisting in government reforms, and pressuring the neighbouring countries that have propped up the DRC’s government.

Some advocates say the situation today could be better than at any time in recent years for a durable peace process.

The U.S. House of Representatives is currently preparing to consider a bipartisan bill, unanimously passed by a subcommittee Wednesday, aimed at supporting international efforts to forge a peace deal in the long-running crisis in Congo.

The bill is an “important step forward in raising awareness within the U.S. Congress and among all Americans of this horrific and tragic crisis in the DRC,” Representative Karen Bass, one of the bill’s lead authors, told IPS.

“To date, this legislation has the support of nearly 60 Democrats and Republicans in the House and efforts are currently underway to introduce a similar piece of legislation in the Senate. It has also received significant support from the NGO community.”

Supporters say they expect that number to increase.

Recent months have also seen a strengthening of advocacy on the part of the Congolese diaspora here in Washington, as well as from the rest of the country and Canada. Legislators say this support has been key in helping the House bill gain the legislative backing it has.

One element of the new bill would respond to a longstanding key demand, urging the creation of a special envoy from the president to the DRC and the surrounding Great Lakes region.

“This legislation calls for such an envoy, and Secretary [John] Kerry, in testimony before both the House and the Senate, has indicated his plan to make an appointment,” Bass said.

“I am pleased that this effort is making progress and urge the secretary to move swiftly to make his decision and develop a comprehensive strategy that relies on diplomacy and engagement to address the complex set of issues that stand as barriers to peace and stability in the DRC and the region.”

Conflict-free consumerism

The war in Congo has been running for almost two decades, taking the lives of nearly six million people as several peace processes have failed. Militias engaged in the war have often used rape and sexual violence as a tool of repression and intimidation.

The economics of the mineral trade have also defined this struggle, with armed groups having been able to control mines and trading routes to prop up their actions.

“DRC is potentially one of the world’s wealthiest nations, but has been unable to unlock the potential of the riches above and below the soil due to the ongoing conflict there,” Sasha Lezhnev, a senior policy analyst at the Enough Project, a Washington advocacy group that published a new report on the DRC today, told IPS.

“However, a couple of different policy windows have created the space for a peace process that today has a better chance of success than anytime in the last decade.”

Lezhnev refers to the recent emergence of international pressure on Congo’s neighbouring states – particularly Rwanda – for supporting armed groups within eastern Congo. The World Bank has now withheld 135 million dollars from Rwanda for this reason, and there has likewise been pressure on the Congo to enact greater transparency reforms.

In addition, U.N. Special Envoy to Africa Mary Robinson has been working to establish a more comprehensive and inclusive peace process that addresses the core drivers of violence in the DRC. In February, she and 11 African heads of state established a diplomatic framework to identify reforms that would enable Rwanda, Congo and Uganda to cooperate on the extraction and export of minerals.

“This is a first step, but we think this provides a good roadmap for where we think this peace process should go,” Lezhnev said.

“What needs to happen now is Mary Robinson needs to lead regional negotiations between Uganda, Rwanda and the Congo on economic, refugee and security issues so that all these interests can be put on the table and can be worked out in a transparent and legitimate way.”

Also helping to break the link between the armed groups and the minerals that have in part funded them is new U.S. legislation, enacted over the past year as part of comprehensive financial legislation known as the Dodd-Frank Act. A section of this law targets so-called “conflict minerals”, and is reported to have brought about a 65-percent drop in profits for armed groups from tin, tungsten and tantalum this year.

“The Dodd-Frank Act has resulted in armed groups and their supporters finding it significantly more difficult to profit from an illicit trade, and so there is an opportunity to take advantage of these changing incentives and create structures for legitimate cooperation,” Lezhnev says.

“This shows there is a growing global consumer movement against conflict minerals, and conflict-free products have created new momentum to say that enough is enough when it comes to buying untraceable minerals and turning a blind eye.”

Temporary window

A further sign of the weakening of the armed groups is the sight of one of the chief Rwandan warlords, Bosco “The Terminator” Ntaganda, sitting in The Hague at the International Criminal Court (ICC) after he turned himself in to law enforcement in Rwanda in March. Analysts say this turn of events has weakened his militia, known as the M23, and increased opportunities for peace.

Meanwhile, countries around the world have increasingly taken notice of the trade and investment opportunities throughout Africa, resulting in greater levels of engagement. However, groups like the Enough Project warn this policy window will not remain open indefinitely.

“We call on the Obama administration to deploy a high-level envoy and to work with Mary Robinson,” Lezhnev said.

“The administration needs to help shape this process, to incentivise the economic cooperation between the countries of the region by setting up a responsible investment initiative for working with the tech companies, metals companies and responsible investors to identify gaps and opportunities for investing in a conflict-free environment.”

Next week, World Bank President Jim Kim and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon are slated to travel to Congo and the region.

Twenty of the world’s most fragile states, including those currently affected by conflict, have achieved one or more of the development targets outlined under the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the World Bank said this week.

In a new paper, bank researchers offer findings that six more states are on track to meet individual development targets ahead of the MDG’s 2015 deadline.

“This should be a wake-up call to the global community not to dismiss these countries as lost causes. These signs of progress do signal that development can and is being achieved, even amid fragility and violence,” World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said Wednesday.

“But these challenges ahead for many countries are extremely tough. While these successes offer hope, the reality is that far too many fragile and conflict affected countries lag behind the rest of the world. We need to offer timely and critical support to improve the lives of people living in these fragile countries.”

The findings indicate significant improvements from a 2011 World Bank report that indicated that no low-income, fragile or conflict-affected country had achieved a single MDG.

The MDGs are eight international development goals, established in 2000 when all 193 United Nations member states and more than 20 leading international organisations agreed to a deadline for achievement by 2015.

According to the new report, the greatest progress has been on gender parity in education, the ratio of girls’ to boys’ enrolment in school. The analysis finds that eight fragile and conflict-affected states (including Guinea, Nepal, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Timor-Leste) have already met the goal to halve “extreme poverty”, those living on less than 1.25 dollars a day.

“The message that we feel these findings send is that fragile – and what some people refer to as ‘basket-case nations’ – can achieve and make progress in many of the areas associated with the MDGs,” Joel Hellman, director of conflict and fragile states at the World Bank, told IPS.

“It’s limited progress, but there are glimmers of hope that show that countries who make concerted efforts can and are making progress in individual areas. This is important because it highlights the areas that need further support in these countries. In addition, when you can see that progress tangibly, it creates further support for these goals.”

Hellman says the new numbers reflect both progress and better data-gathering and analysis on the part of the World Bank and the United Nations.

“We can’t make policies without information, and the MDGs have really galvanised countries and the international communities to support getting information to assess what is happening on the ground,” he says.

“With better information, we can start making better policy. Now that we have a lot more information about what is happening in these countries, this helps us assess where they are making progress in individual areas – targeting areas and sectors where particularly strong efforts have been made across the entire spectrum of targets associated with the MDGs.”

Still, Hellman cautions that there is a long way for these countries to go, noting that few of these countries will accomplish many more of the MDGs, with just 1,000 days left until the deadline passes. Further, these signs of success are in volatile countries, meaning that this progress could quickly be reversed.

Fractured model

Others suggest that this data could inadvertently paint an unduly rosy picture – and one that may not be filtering down to all of a country’s inhabitants.

“Countries are now in the midst of this global recession, facing really desperate conditions, so even in a country where you have growth, this growth is coming primarily from extractive industries, particularly oil, gas and mining,” Emira Woods, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank here, told IPS.

“So the successes on this list only represent the ‘one percent’, the elites who are benefiting. So for the World Bank to highlight that these countries are meeting at least one of the MDGs seems a bit superficial – remember, there are eight goals.”

Woods notes that countries of the global South need a role for government to determine their paths towards development, and she worries that the foreign direct investment-focused development model pushed by multilateral lenders has been shown to be detrimental to many developing economies.

“Foreign direct investment is mainly directed at extractive industries, and does not take into account environmental damage, worker’s health and rights, and the long-term cost for future generations,” she says.

“What we have seen is that this model for development continues to concentrate wealth in very few hands – often local elites – while large multinational oil, gas and mining companies benefit from an unregulated market where the role of government is kept out. Unless you change the fundamentals of those policies, countries will not be able to cut poverty in half.”

The alternative, she says, would create the space for national governments in developing countries to more actively choose their own development paths. This would include ensuring that those countries maintain the ability to protect particularly valuable sectors.

Countries with large rural populations and agriculture potential, for instance, need to be able to focus on creating opportunities for smallholder farmers to maintain their livelihoods.

“What we have instead, is the privileging of large corporations, many from the U.S. and Europe with heavily subsidised agribusiness, that create an uneven playing field where small landholders are unable to compete,” Woods says.

“The alternative is to have a local manufacturing base that creates jobs with liveable wages, so workers can feed their families and afford access to health care and housing. These are the elements of a stable community – and are needed not only in developing countries but even right here in Washington, D.C.”

Scientists with ICESCAPE, a multi-year NASA shipborne project, investigate Arctic sea ice and melt ponds in the Chukchi Sea in July 2010. Credit: NASA/Kathryn Hansen

By Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, Apr 24 2013 (IPS)

With climate change rapidly opening up new opportunities for shipping and resource extraction across the once permanently frozen Arctic, the United States and other northern countries are being compelled to re-examine their policies, both national and collective, towards this region of growing geostrategic importance.

Last week, the president of Iceland, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, was in Washington to announce the launch of a new group called the Arctic Circle, which would include all counties and entities interested in greater involvement in Arctic-related decision-making.“We have steadily seen what we considered ‘our Arctic’ becoming the ‘global Arctic’.” -- Icelandic President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson

On Monday, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, proposed a series of reforms to U.S. Arctic policy.

“U.S. Arctic policy must respond to the economic, environmental, security, and geopolitical concerns that confront the region,” the report states.

“It is now time for the Obama administration to enhance U.S. Arctic policy by updating and prioritizing national security … improving interagency cooperation, enhancing U.S. international and public diplomacy related to the Arctic, and increasing the focus of senior U.S. officials.”

The report warns that these activities must begin immediately “if the U.S. is to prepare for and fully maximize its chairmanship of the Arctic Council beginning in 2015.” It also suggests appointing an “Arctic envoy” with the rank of an ambassador.

Currently, Arctic-related international policymaking is made through a consensus organisation called the Arctic Council. Made up of countries with territory in the region, this includes the United States, Russia, Canada, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Sweden, as well as observer nations.

However, turning new U.S. policy – or that of any other country – toward the Arctic will be complex. Here in Washington, for instance, as many as six White House groups are currently involved in Arctic issues, with calls for streamlining of this process already being made.

“I believe there are three issues that should be guiding U.S. policy towards the Arctic,” Peter Troedsson, a captain in the U.S. Coast Guard and a military fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a Washington think tank, told IPS.

“First, is an enduring presence and an awareness of Arctic activity. Second, we need to promote the safe use of the Arctic. And lastly, we need to be able to work with other institutions and nations toward developing governance and best practices for the area.”

But beyond the Arctic Council, “We also have the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which the United States has signed but has yet to ratify,” Troedsson said.

“In two years the U.S. is going to take over the chairmanship of the Arctic Council, so we’re going to be in a position where we are chairing this eight-nation group and we’re going to be the only ones who haven’t signed on to the Law of the Sea. This will seriously damage our credibility.”

Although numerous U.S. political and military officials have urged the country to ratify the Law of the Sea – including, most recently, late last year – conservative members of the U.S. Congress have continually stymied the effort, suggesting that doing so would be akin to ceding U.S. sovereignty.

The “outsiders”

The melting of the Arctic Sea ice, and the opening of new shipping routes linking Asia to America and Europe, will bring along with it geopolitical considerations that have rarely existed. Already, China is preparing for a world in which it would be the world’s most important trading country, and the Arctic could be a key component of its evolving vision.

“We have steadily seen what we considered ‘our Arctic’, becoming the ‘global Arctic’,” President Grimsson said last week. “Now, countries from faraway places want to have a seat at the Arctic table … They want to discuss not if but when they would acquire a seat on the Arctic Council. This serves as a wake-up call for all the countries located [near] the Arctic.”

During the most recent Arctic Council discussions, in 2012, several Asian states that have no Arctic territory expressed their interest in the organisation.

“If they can send their ships through the Arctic Sea routes, they can shorten this distance by more that 40 percent,” President Grimsson said. “In fact, China is already building ships for this purpose, and Singapore is exploring the potential for an Arctic harbour.”

China has already conducted five Arctic expeditions since 2000, and has established a research station. India followed with the establishment of its own Arctic research station in 2007, while the South Korean government is becoming increasingly active in looking at possible Arctic ventures.

Currently there are two primary sea routes across the Arctic. The first runs north of Canada, while the second, known as the Northern Sea Route, runs from the Bering Strait to the Barents Sea.

This second one, which is currently open only in the summer, condenses the traditional route by about 2,500 nautical miles, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in fuel costs. The opening of this route would radically alter the transport of goods from Asian industrial hubs to Western consumer markets.

One fear relates to the future role these “newcomers” might have on the region as it is brought within their strategic spheres of interest, and whether this could result in a greater military presence. While the driving forces of these new interests is economic, geopolitical jostling of has already forced the Arctic Council countries to begin debating the “correct” role for these new entrants.

Iceland has welcomed China’s application to join the council, for instance, but it has expressed concerns that the European Union would try to impose a ban on whale hunting, which Iceland has long defended as a cultural tradition. Russia, meanwhile, has welcomed the E.U.’s attempt to become part of the council, but remains suspicious of letting in China.

Environmental responsibility remains another major concern. Increased economic development – including natural resource extraction– could bring with it, for instance, increased possibility of an oil spill that could devastate the pristine Arctic environment for decades.

International and United States Geographical Survey (USGS) research has indicated that the Arctic seabed holds up to 160 billion barrels of petroleum, located at a relatively shallow depth of 500 feet. Less conclusive projects based on preliminary soil samples have also speculated that the Arctic seabed holds substantial mineral and metal deposits.

“There’s already a lot of industrial infrastructure built up there, but there is very little oil-spill response planning,” CFR’s Troedsson says.

“You can imagine it’s going to take a long time to get that kind of response equipment [needed] anywhere in the Arctic, so that challenge can be added to the challenge of how you clean up oil in water that’s close to zero degrees or frozen. No matter how good a response plan is, if any significant incident takes place, the damage would be immense and the public will not be happy.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has dismissed a lawsuit against the Royal Dutch Shell Petroleum Company brought by alleged human rights victims.

The ruling, which was handed down Wednesday, is seen as a serious setback for the Ogoni community in the Niger Delta, who alleged gross human rights abuses during the mid-1990s by the military government in power at the time."What we have here are allegations of horrific acts of violence, including torture, facilitated by large multinational corporations in Nigeria, that essentially will go unanswered for." -- HRF's Raha Wala

In addition, the decision essentially cuts off the U.S. courts system from those attempting to redress wrongs allegedly committed by multinational companies, particularly in developing countries.

In the widely watched Kiobel vs. Royal Dutch Petroleum case, the victims had accused the oil company of being complicit in the crimes against them, including torture, extrajudicial killings, rape and crimes against humanity.

Yet the justices, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, found that Shell’s connection to the United States was too tenuous, despite the fact that it does business in the country, and hence could not be sued under U.S. law. Critics say this is precisely what the U.S. law in question, known as the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), was created to do.

“The ruling today is a real tragedy,” Raha Wala, senior council at Human Rights First, a Washington-based advocacy group, told IPS immediately after the decision.

“It means that the doors to justice will be shut for a large category of foreign individuals who really have nowhere else to turn to receive redress for international human rights issues including torture and extrajudicial killings. I think the Supreme Court really missed the mark today with its ruling.”

In the case, the plaintiffs alleged that the Ogoni had protested against widespread environmental destruction and land degradation resulting from oil exploration in the Ogoniland region of the Niger Delta. In response, they said, throughout 1993 and 1994 the Nigerian military systematically targeted Ogoni villages in terror campaigns of looting, rape murder and property destruction.

These attacks were said to have culminated in the executions of a group of people known as the Ogoni Nine, environmentalists who included the renowned playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa. The nine were hanged following a military tribunal widely condemned as illegitimate.

The Ogoni had hoped to find justice in U.S. courts by filing a civil action against Royal Dutch Shell under the Alien Tort Statute. For decades, the statute has served as a tool for holding individuals, corporations and governments accountable for international human rights violations.

Yet Tuesday’s ruling, coming after a decade-long fight, could now irreparably weaken the statute. (A full history of the case can be found here.)

“Essentially what the court said is that the ATS – which is designed to allow lawsuits for violations of both the laws of nations and international law – no longer applies extra-territorially,” Wala said.

“So what we have here are allegations of horrific acts of violence, including torture, facilitated by large multinational corporations in Nigeria, that essentially will go unanswered for because the Supreme Court construed this law very narrowly.”

Indeed, Wala says Wednesday’s decision goes against decades of use of the ATS.

“The Supreme Court has interpreted this law in a way that has been inconsistent with the last 30 years of legal precedent,” she said. “During that time, the ATS has been used repeatedly to bring human rights cases into federal courts. Today’s decision is really a disservice to victims of human rights violations.”

State courts open

The decision will almost certainly have a profound effect on the global effort to give redress to victims of corporate-linked human rights abuses. Some are also worried that it will now make it more difficult to deny safe havens to alleged torturers and war criminals.

While the case is viewed as a departure from a trend toward greater accountability for serious human rights violations, Marco Simons, the legal director for Earth Rights International, a Washington advocacy group, says that the door to the ATS has not yet been closed.

“From now on, if a foreign multinational corporation has participated in crimes against humanity in another country, you can’t sue them in the U.S. simply because they have a presence in the U.S.,” he told IPS.

“It’s not enough that the defendant is a corporation doing business in the U.S. – now there needs to be some greater connection to the United States than that.”

At the same time, he notes, Wednesday’s decision only applies to federal courts. Further, and importantly, the justices did not decide that corporations are immune from the ATS, as Shell’s lawyers had suggested.

“So, foreign corporations doing business in the U.S. can still be sued under the ATS for the crimes they have committed around the world, but only at the state court level,” he explained.

“Beyond this, we don’t really know what additional connection might be required. It could mean that only a case against a U.S. corporation can be tried, or maybe the case would have to require some company involvement within the United States, such as corporate decision-making being made here.”

He says this issue will be argued in court for some time to come.

Detainees in orange jumpsuits sit in a holding area under the watchful eyes of Military Police at Camp X-Ray at Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, during in-processing to the temporary detention facility on Jan. 11, 2002. Credit: Shane T. McCoy, U.S. Navy/public domain

By Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, Apr 17 2013 (IPS)

Public debate here over the military prison at Guantanamo Bay heated up again following Monday’s surprise publication of a highly charged article by an inmate at the prison, one of dozens currently engaged in a months-long hunger strike over detainees’ “indefinite detention”.

The op-ed follows just days after the head U.N. official in charge of human rights, Navi Pillay, said the indefinite detention of Guantanamo Bay inmates runs counter to international law, and called again for the prison to be closed."The majority of people who are at Guantanamo right now have been cleared for release, and they have been cleared for up to six years." -- CCR's Susan Hu

“I’ve been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity,” Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, a Yemeni national who has been imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for the past 11 years, wrote in the New York Times.

“I do not want to die here, but until President [Barack] Obama and Yemen’s president do something, that is what I risk every day.”

Moqbel is one of 43 prisoners at the U.S. military camp who are currently on a hunger strike.

His essay, which has received widespread attention, is not being interpreted as a plea of his innocence. Rather, many are seeing it as a testimony of the hopeless despair caused by the indefinite detention of detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

The essay also adds to pressure on President Obama to close Guantanamo, a pledge he made during the first year of his presidency, in 2009. Obama is facing widespread criticism now that the Guantanamo Bay prison has surpassed the two wars his presidency inherited.

“President Obama ran on a platform that he would close down Guantanamo and bring the United States back in compliance with international human rights law – but none of this happened,” Susan Hu, a legal fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights, and advocacy group representing some of the Guantanamo detainees, told IPS.

“In fact, he signed an executive order in 2009 promising that he would close the prison, and he has done absolutely nothing since then to do so. Even though he has the power to transfer people out of Guantanamo right now, he hasn’t done that in the past two years and transfers have all but ceased. The men see Guantanamo as the place they will be living until they die.”

Hu says her clients have consistently said they are falling into despair, reaching a point that refusing to eat is the only way they can express their loss of hope.

She also is clear that the onus is on President Obama to act.

“I think there is widespread misconception that Congress is the obstacle to releasing the prisoners in Guantanamo, when in fact President Obama needs to be taken to task for not using his power,” Hu continues.

“The majority of people who are at Guantanamo right now have been cleared for release, and they have been cleared for up to six years. I think the only reason these men have not been released is because President Obama is not willing to risk his political capital to move toward closing Guantanamo.”

Back to Bush

Despite keeping related criticism relatively contained during his first four-year term, the situation has taken a dramatic turn following the president’s signing, in January, of a defence bill that critics claim all but abandons the pledge to close the facility.

That legislation, the National Defense Authorisation Act (NDAA), barred the transfer of Guantanamo Bay detainees to the United States for any purpose, including for trial in federal court. It also required the defence secretary to meet rigorous conditions before any detainee could be returned to his own country or resettled in a third country.

“That bill requires certification from every agency that has a stake in the matter in order for a prisoner that was cleared for release to be transferred back to their home country or transferred out,” Hu told IPS.

“The bill also was used to prevent federal funding to be used to transfer prisoners into the United States – effectively barring them from federal courts. Obviously this makes it more difficult for Obama to transfer prisoners out of Guantanamo, and this has helped create the feeling of frustration among the prisoners that they will ever be transferred out.”

Previously, the U.S. government had been able to simply transfer a detainee who had pled guilty during military prosecution and served his time. But the NDAA provision effectively removed the ability to reach plea agreements or to push through promises already made to release inmates.

Yet Hu says it remains possible to transfer prisoners back to their home countries and close down the prison as Obama still has the authority to do so – despite having failed to exercise that power over the past two years.

“He is putting all the blame on Congress, when in fact he still possess the power to follow through with the his promise to close the prison,” Hu says.

“He closed the office in the State Department that was responsible for resettling the detainees, and he has not filled the White House position that is meant to oversee the closure of Guantanamo. These are all things that he could be doing right now, despite the restrictions created by the bill.”

Meanwhile, signs of the growing frustration on the part of detainees have manifested in a wave of hunger strikes in recent months, leading Guantanamo officials to engage in mass forced feedings. That process reached a new height last month when tensions escalated to become violent between detainees and prison guards.

“From what we’ve heard from our own clients there, the majority of the men in Camp 5 and Camp 6 are on hunger strike,” Hu told IPS.

“When the strike first began in Camp 6, it was all but two of the men, so that was 120 people, though now we are hearing it’s 43. We hear the guards are trying to retaliate against the prisoners on hunger strike by placing them in solitary confinement, like the conditions they were held in back in 2005.”

Guards are also reportedly moving prisoners out of communal areas and placing them en masse in solitary confinement.

“Its worrying to see that the conditions have worsened in such a way that it sort of like going back to the worse years under President [George W.] Bush, when prisoners were being abused and mistreated,” Hu says. “Today we are seeing this all over again.”

Egyptian protesters demonstrate against President Morsi and the new draft constitution outside the presidential palace in Cairo. Credit: Khaled Moussa al-Omrani/IPS

By Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, Apr 13 2013 (IPS)

Women and minorities should be a top priority in U.S. policy toward Egypt and its Muslim Brotherhood government leaders, experts here said on Friday, despite increasingly unfavourable public views towards Egypt.

While Egypt is a critical and longtime U.S. ally, the June 2012 election that resulted in the Muslim Brotherhood’s victory has severely strained those ties. The situation has been further complicated by a massive economic crisis that has roiled Cairo since the uprisings of the Arab Spring two years ago.

Even as Egyptian officials are currently engaged in talks for a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – an institution in which the U.S. has an effective veto – that could be upwards of five billion dollars, conservatives in the U.S. Congress have recently refused to offer their Egyptian counterparts more than token foreign assistance.

“The Egyptians are so firmly a part of the American patronage network that Egypt’s destiny will stay irrevocably linked to the United States, and will thus remain a client state of the U.S.,” Joshua Stacher, a fellow at the Wilson Center, a Washington think tank, told IPS.

“This limits to a great extent where it can turn for money, and I think they are content to remain part of this U.S. constellation. This is really a problem of the IMF serving as an auxiliary of U.S. power rather than an international financial institution that is neutral and providing balance of payment policy suggestions for member countries.”

Still, political disagreements here in Washington over how to engage with Egypt have not yet been cleared up.

“There is a fundamental tension between U.S. values and U.S. interests in our policy toward Egypt, whether it be about cooperation on regional issues, the rights of women, protest laws, freedom of expression or sectarian rhetoric on the part of the Muslim Brotherhood,” Michael Wahid Hanna, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a Washington think tank, said Friday.

“These issues aren’t just about values anymore. An embargo is off the table so it’s not just about affording support to an elected government that is polarising and we see autocratic tendencies coming to the fore that are destabilising. Before we can even talk about values, we must have a stable Egypt – and not just repressive stability.”

Hanna said there is no option of pulling back U.S. support, noting that the situation in Egypt was not like that in Syria. Yet compounding the political calculations, a public poll released last month found that U.S. attitudes toward Egypt have plummeted in recent years.

“Throughout the last two decades, Egypt’s favourability ratings in the U.S. were in the 60 percent range,” James Zogby, Director of Zogby Research Services, a Washington opinion research company, said Friday.

“In 2011 – at the beginning of the demonstrations against [former President Hosni] Mubarak, the numbers dropped down to 40 percent … In 2012, they dropped to just 30 percent. Americans don’t know Egypt, and their previously ‘soft’ associations of the country – like for instance, the pyramids –have now been replaced by its volatility.”

Budget crisis

Intensifying Egypt’s foreign relations issues with the United States, the Morsi government must still devise an economic plan to convince the IMF to hand over a pending 4.8-billion-dollar loan, a figure recent reports suggest could go up. The Egyptian government has said it hopes to reach a final agreement with the IMF within the next two weeks, while the government of Qatar has made repeated emergency cash infusions into Egyptian coffers.

The stakes are high for the Muslim Brotherhood-led administration. Foreign currency reserves are critically low, reportedly now covering less than three months of imports, and the local currency has lost a tenth of its value just since the start of the year.

With an IMF team currently in Cairo, Egyptian officials must convince the Washington-based fund that it will make reforms to boost growth and curb an unaffordable budget deficit. Economists say the situation will eventually require unpopular tax hikes and politically risky cuts to the current system of state subsidies for fuel and bread.

“The subsidies are definitely an important component of the economic problems facing Egypt, and it’s an important issue in a lot of low-income Egyptian households,” Hesham Sallam, co-editor of Jadaliyya, an online political magazine, told IPS.

“Yet the government has not shown publicly any intention of finding a fair way of distributing the costs, of dealing with the deficit, of easing pressure on the underprivileged in an open and fair manner.”

Despite being the world’s largest wheat importer, Egypt has been forced to cut back on these imports. Yet doing so is running down grain reserves and will almost certainly exacerbate its struggle to feed the country’s 84 million people.

Sallam also warns that the IMF negotiations have been notably opaque, leading to rising frustration.

“The terms of the loan do not have much transparency, and those terms are going to be very important in determining the orientation of the Egyptian economy,” he said.

“Social justice has been one of the main slogans of the revolution, but the decisions that will decide the future of the Egyptian economy are mainly taking place behind closed doors, with very little engagement with the Egyptian people or the stakeholders.”

Sphere of influence

The threat of future instability versus the current perception of the Muslim Brotherhood has defined much of the policy debate here in Washington.

Particularly conservative members of Congress have expressed discomfort sending aid to the Muslim Brotherhood government, with some suggesting not only a reduction but an outright discontinuation of U.S. aid to Egypt.

“Congress is trying to score some cheap political points on this, but the Defence Department, State Department and the president understand that disengagement would be against national security interests,” the Wilson Center’s Stacher said.

“They understand that there is a longstanding relationship with Egypt – that it’s not a perfect relationship, but is one that has long been cultivated, and they want to keep the country in the U.S. sphere of influence. So, Congress is going to keep putting up roadblocks and the executive branch – and the Defence Department – is going to find crafty ways to get around them.”

There are also major business interests involved in this situation. Egypt is a massive market, and has traditionally imported a significant amount of military hardware and industrial machinery from the United States.

“Certainly there is a domestic American economic consideration here about changing our relationship with Egypt,” Stacher continues. “If they are going to keep buying tanks, we would rather they buy our tanks.”

Heavy rains in Haiti’s northern city of Cap-Haïtien flooded streets, homes and fields in November 2012. Credit: UN Photo/Logan Abassi

By Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, Apr 5 2013 (IPS)

Following the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti, more than a billion dollars of U.S. aid money has gone to that country with little transparency or accountability on how the money is being used, according to new data released by a watchdog group here.

A report by the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a Washington think tank, identifies significant problems with the delivery of U.S. aid to Haiti, citing a lack of audits and evaluations, particularly on the part of the USAID, the country’s main foreign aid arm.There is a lot of resistance to change, especially when some of the largest recipients of contracts in Haiti are the for-profit development companies that have hired a lobbyist to push back on these reforms.

Since the 2010 earthquake, CEPR authors Jake Johnston and Alexander Main write, the few evaluations that have been carried out on U.S. aid to Haiti present “a troubling picture of the manner in which U.S. relief and reconstructions efforts have been conducted so far”.

They note, for instance, that contractors have hired far fewer Haitians than promised, while Haitian businesses have been largely excluded from U.S.-funded projects. In addition, goals have reportedly gone unmet, grantees have received inadequate supervision, and USAID had not conducted internal financial reviews of contractors.

Of the 1.15 billion dollars in U.S. contracts and grants awarded since the earthquake, Johnston and Main report that “over half went to the top 10 recipients of global USAID awards”, particularly a for-profit company called Chemonics International. In addition, less than one percent of USAID awards went directly to Haitian businesses or organisations.

“There has been some coalescing in the development community around changing the traditional aid model, which involves increasing local procurement, and working closer with host countries,” Johnston, a research associate with CEPR, told IPS.

“That’s part of the frame of this report, as we have not seen these kind of things happening from USAID. One of the main findings is just how little of the money, in the form of contracts and grants, have gone to Haitian organisations or Haitian companies.”

In addition, there is very little information available on the subcontracting done by the direct recipients of USAID awards. According to the report, of the 540 million dollars in contracts awarded by USAID, “only one of them, [to] MWH Americas, has reported any information on the use of subcontractors to the USASpending.gov database. Among grantees, only five have reported sub-grant data.”

“I am very much in agreement – we just don’t know where this money has gone. There is a real lack of transparency around this money,” Vijaya Ramachandran, a senior fellow at the Centre for Global Development (CGD), a non-profit Washington think tank, who has also written extensively on U.S. aid to Haiti, told IPS.

“I estimated that three billion dollars in U.S. public funds has been distributed to various NGOs and private contractors around the world and we just don’t know what has happened afterward. These groups are supposed to be doing quarterly reports for the U.S. government, and presumably they are doing that but we just don’t know, as they are not available to the public – we don’t even know if anyone is really reading them.”

She says no hard data is publicly available on how many people U.S. funding has helped in Haiti, and echoes the report’s terminology, calling the whole situation a “black box”.

“I think this kind of situation is worse when money has been distributed following a major disaster, like the earthquake in Haiti, where money is rounded up and sent quickly,” Ramachandran said.

“It may be that USAID does not have enough resources to make some of this information public, as the agency has been understaffed for a long time. That said, with technology today, there are many ways to make information public, so that’s becoming less and less of an excuse.”

Some have also argued that certain information should not be released given that countries are competing with each other for contracts. But Ramachandran rejects this on the basis that public money requires greater transparency regarding cost-effectiveness – on both sides.

“It is important that the citizens of Haiti be actually helped by these funds, and we can only know that if we can see how the money was spent,” she said. “So I think this information is important also to the recipient side.”

Wake-up call

Johnston and Main also note that USAID has taken further steps to keep this information out of the public realm, having reportedly blocked various attempts at disclosure, including through Freedom of Information Act requests.

“Issues like accountability and transparency are incredibly important, especially to ensure the Haitian government is taking a leading role in the reconstruction of their country and that they know what is actually going on with all the different aid agencies that are operating there,” Johnston said.

“It’s also important that U.S. taxpayers, who are funding these operations, have faith they are being carried out efficiently.”

Johnston says he personally was blocked by USAID while doing research for the new report, in both the United States and in Haiti, where he says agency officials refused to meet with him during a recent month of research in the country. (USAID did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)

“It’s hard to say if this is totally unique to the Haiti experience … in other countries, USAID has gone further in terms of a reform agenda,” he continued.

“For instance, in 70 other countries, USAID missions have published reports stating that they have developed a new framework for publicising information as part of a reform agenda. But this has not happened in Haiti, nor is it planned to happen in the next couple years.”

Still, he says he hopes the new report can act as a “wake-up call”, potentially strengthening reformers within USAID.

“Of course, there is a lot of resistance to change, especially when some of the largest recipients of contracts in Haiti are the for-profit development companies that have hired a lobbyist to push back on these reforms,” Johnston said.

“Still, USAID’s stated goal is to conduct more local procurement, like awarding contracts and grants to local organisations and not always relying on the big development players. For those large companies, which receive a vast majority of their income from government contracts, they see these reforms as a threat to their business model. “

Caudalosa workers clean up mining tailings in Peru's Opamayo River. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, Mar 26 2013 (IPS)

Researchers have unveiled new data warning that governments in Latin America are infringing on the rights of their indigenous populations in a bid to fuel development through the extraction of natural resources.

The Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), a Washington-based organisation, says it has documented a “natural resources giveaway” in Latin America, which highlights how an outdated development model is trampling on human rights and the environment throughout much of the region.Governments are at a pivot point. Will they pursue massive resource extraction at any cost or create a detailed and regulated development plan?

“Without recognition of local rights, transparency of deals and decisions, and mechanisms to ensure accountability of governments and investors, there will be a rollback of environmental, human and tenure rights of forest communities,” Omaira Bolanos, RRI’s programme director for Latin America, told IPS from Bogota.

“Foreign investors prefer countries with weakened regulations to expand their investments. So, governments, citizens, civil society and businesspeople must work together to address the risks and opportunities of advancing the economic development and prosperity of all Latin Americans.”

She added: “But this must be done without harming the human and tenure rights of rural, indigenous and Afro-descendant communities.”

A new study from RRI (available in Spanish here) finds that even while some governments in Latin America are increasingly looking to natural resources extraction to fuel their economic development, several are paying scant attention to the impact of mining, oil exploration and other activities on the environment or local landowners.

Margarita Florez, executive director at Asociación Ambiente y Sociedad, an environmental and human rights group in Colombia, analyses the impacts of the extractive industries on the collective land and forest rights of people and communities in Colombia, Peru, Guatemala and Panama.

Florez writes that the mining activities in those countries increased in intensity and range over the last two decades, particularly focusing on lands owned by indigenous and Afro-descendant communities.

“A lot of the real impacts aren’t coming to light,” Augusta Molnar, director for country and regional programmes at RRI, told IPS.

“Governments think they can dramatically expand mining or petroleum exploration in their countries because it is a small percent of the total land area and, therefore, they believe the environmental impact will be small – despite the fact that 90 to 100 percent of these areas are in the middle of forests and indigenous lands. So in fact, the impacts are quite massive.”

All four countries, for instance, reported destruction to vital water sources for indigenous communities, due to the very high water demand for mining operations.

Little oversight

In each of these four countries, foreign direct investment (FDI) was found to be focused mainly on the extractives sector. In Colombia, for example, oil and mining investment accounted for 92 percent of FDI in 2011 – around 13.2 billion dollars.

FDI also increased in these sectors in Guatemala, Peru and Panama. Indeed, the states evidently competed to attract FDI, often reducing or eliminating restrictions or regulations in order to attract companies.

In addition, the report says little consultation appears to be taking place between affected communities and governments – let alone with the private mining companies. This sets the stage for conflict and creates precedents that undermine both legal and governance issues at the national level.

“There are some companies with high standards and some companies with very poor standards,” Molnar said.

“Broadly, we found that the institutions are not in place at the state level to oversee the environment impact assessments and their implementation. There is not a broad set of standards for prior consent, and there is a prevailing assumption that a set of consultations have been carried out when in reality there is no mechanism in place for oversight.”

Opposition movements have attempted to push back, but these have been countered by government efforts to paint indigenous communities as obstacles to eagerly awaited progress.

“If you fully recognise a people’s rights, than the engagement with these peoples and decisions to go ahead with an investment make them very much in the middle of negotiations between the companies and the state,” Florez writes.

“This will require the state to be much more accountable. We know that indigenous people are very important actors in managing forests and living in harmony with forests. We also know that poverty increases if you don’t work with these local people.”

She continues, “A company cannot just collect revenues and expect the local economy is going to grow. There needs to be a balanced development.”

Need for consultation

In 2011, James Anaya, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, published a report questioning the current development model in much of Latin America. The idea that the extraction of natural resources leads to progress, Anaya stated at the time, constitutes a violation of indigenous peoples’ cultural, social, environmental and economic rights.

Florez furthers this line of inquiry. For instance, she highlights an inequitable distribution of royalties garnered from the exploitation of the region’s non-renewable natural resources, and finds that this money has failed to translate into greater well-being for local communities.

Over the weekend in Bogota, representatives from the four governments, including leaders from indigenous and Afro-descendant groups, gathered to discuss the effects of resource extraction on nearby communities. According to Molnar, both the government and indigenous representatives were happy to be able to talk face to face.

“We hope this demonstrates that the governments are at a pivot point,” she says. “Will they pursue massive resource extraction at any cost or create a detailed and regulated development plan?”

According to Melissa Blue Sky, project attorney with the Washington-based Centre for International and Environmental Law (CIEL), it is a precedent that is gaining force. A consultation law just came into force last year in Peru, and other Latin American countries are creating similar national laws.

“An increased level of dialogue and an effort to protect the rights of indigenous peoples is being seen in Latin America as more countries are beginning to implement national consultation laws,” she told IPS.

“High oil and gas prices are giving countries new incentive to extract from previously undisturbed regions where indigenous people often live. National consultation laws are giving strength to these voices.”

Critics say says the plight of the workers is part of a larger systemic problem, including one overseen by Washington. Credit: Indi Samarajiva/cc by 2.0

By George Gao and Joe Hitchon
NEW YORK/WASHINGTON, Mar 19 2013 (IPS)

A spate of legal battles in the southern state of Louisiana has shed new light on the unfair recruitment and employment practices of Filipino guest workers at several companies in the United States.

On Monday, a federal judge awarded nearly 4.5 million dollars to 347 Filipinos after finding that a Los Angeles company had lured them into slave labour, working as teachers in Louisiana public schools.The exploitative immigration system of the U.S. works hand-in-hand with the corrupt labour export policy of the Philippines.

The decision comes as more than 100 Filipino workers at a shipyard in the New Orleans area are alleging that they suffered discriminatory treatment, threats and abuse at the hands of their recruiters and employer, and have joined a class action lawsuit.

The shipyard, Grand Isle Shipyard (GIS), put the Filipinos to work on an oil production platform owned by Black Elk Energy, a U.S. company that, according to federal regulators, had racked up 315 documented “incidents of safety non-compliance” offshore since 2010.

The problems at Black Elk Energy were amplified following an explosion in November on a platform in the Gulf of Mexico that claimed the lives of three Filipino workers, while three others were seriously injured.

The incident brought increased attention to the practice of U.S. companies hiring foreign guest workers for potentially hazardous jobs – and the exploitation that can come with such arrangements.

According to BAYAN USA, a coalition of progressive U.S.-based Filipino organisations, U.S. guest worker programmes have historically bound workers to one employer at a time, making them susceptible to exploitation. The list of grievances filed against the Grand Isle Shipyard range from wage theft, unlawful deductions and theft of tax refunds to labour abuse, discrimination and unsafe working conditions.

“The main [hazardous condition] is the sleep deprivation that they experience – just long hours of work that the [U.S.] workers don’t face,” Josef Calugay, a member of Katarungan, an advocacy organisation based in Washington, told IPS. “They’re forced to work sometimes for two weeks straight, 70 hours a week.”

According to BAYAN, Filipino welders, pipefitters and scaffolders were trafficked under “fraudulent” contracts that promised high pay and safe working conditions. But many were placed for work on dangerous oil rig platforms.

By that time, former GIS workers “were already gearing up for the campaign [and lawsuit], but the explosion sort of fast-tracked everything,” Calugay says. After the November explosion, he notes, more GIS ex-employees gained confidence to speak out against the company.

The media dug into working conditions on the oil rig. A local television reporter, for instance, launched an investigative report that captured testimonials of abuse and detailed a complicated web of private contractors associated with GIS.

Systemic problem

The Philippine government has long lauded the fact that, every day, some 4,500 Filipinos are sent abroad to work. The remittances they send back keeps the Philippine economy afloat.

But the Filipino community and diaspora are increasingly questioning why the Manila government continues to support such a strategy for development.

“The government doesn’t seem to provide any protection when these overseas Filipino workers run into distress,” Calugay says. “Yet this labour export policy is still one of their pillars of development – pushing people to other countries instead of addressing poverty or lack of jobs at home.”

Yet Jackelyn Mariano, deputy secretary-general of BAYAN USA, says the plight of the workers is part of a larger systemic problem, including one overseen by Washington.

“The exploitative immigration system of the U.S. works hand-in-hand with the corrupt labour export policy of the Philippines to maintain a steadily increasing flow of cheap, temporary migrant labour,” she said in a recent press release.

Indeed, there are relatively few regulations regarding foreign worker recruitment practices here. Many of these workers have already incurred substantial debt just to get these jobs, and this inevitably puts them in compromising situations – particularly if they encounter poor working conditions of any kind.

U.S. immigration policy allows these workers to work only for whatever employer who sponsored their visa.

“Their options are to pretty much to stick it out with the employer – who may not be paying them properly or exposing them to dangerous working conditions – or to go home,” Jim Knoepp, the deputy legal director for the Immigrant Justice Project at the Southern Poverty Law Centre, in Montgomery, Louisiana, told IPS.

“But they are often in such massive debt from the recruiters that they cannot go without first earning the money to pay off those debts first, so it puts them in a really difficult position.”

Such a situation provides employers with a near exemption from the normal supply and demand of the labour market, Knoepp says.

Pursuit of justice

In early February, several of the former GIS guest workers were recognised as human trafficking victims and granted a “T visa” – a human trafficking visa, which allows them to legally remain in the United States for up to four years.

Filipino activists are now calling for the resignation of the Filipino ambassador to the United States, and demanding a policy overhaul that would put an end to the exploitation of guest workers.

In late February, a fact-finding mission sponsored by the National Alliance of Filipino Concerns (NAFCON), Bayan USA and the Southern Poverty Law Centre took place in Louisiana as part of the Justice for the Grand Isle Shipyard Filipino Workers campaign. At that time, those on the mission learned that GIS had filed a motion of contempt against the Filipino ex-workers, which prevents the labourers from discussing details related to the case.

“The motion for contempt shows … how threatening it is to the company that more people are becoming aware of this issue,” Katrina Abarcar, a paralegal who participated in the mission, told IPS.

“The defendants are doing whatever they can to keep a lid on the exploitation … even going so far as to allege that the Justice for GIS Filipino Workers campaign is just a façade set up by lawyers.”

She adds that all of the groups supporting the campaign have extensive involvement defending migrant and workers’ rights, and they now “pledge their continuing support of the former GIS workers until the truth is revealed and justice is served.”

Maize is a food staple in Guatemala's "Dry Corridor," which has been hit by both drought and flood. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, Mar 16 2013 (IPS)

The world’s food security remains “vulnerable”, new data suggests, with some 870 million people experiencing sustained hunger and two billion suffering from micronutrient deficiencies.

The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a Washington think tank, says such numbers are “unacceptably high”, and warns that anti-hunger programmes have been “piecemeal”.

In an influential annual report on the state of the world’s food policy, released Thursday, the organisation said there were some positive achievements made last year, but that a number of policy changes are still required.

Growing jobs

The report identifies agricultural development as an important potential job creator, particularly for young people. In developing countries, however, it warns that youths are no longer seeing agriculture as a viable career, looking instead to urban areas for work.

Leaders in sub-Saharan Africa – a region with the world’s fastest-growing population as well as youngest – are today looking to create job opportunities in agriculture, using new technology and farming techniques. In doing so, they are hoping to encourage the young and innovative emerging workforce in such a way that they can have a transformative impact on both economic growth and social development.

Higher production yields, after all, would simultaneously create jobs, lower food prices, and reduce hunger and malnutrition.

“Agriculture in most developing countries is a labour-intensive sector and makes up a big chunk of the labour force,” Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington advocacy group, told IPS.

“In recent years, large firms have introduced a type of agriculture that is very capital intensive and highly mechanised, but employs very little labour, so there has been a huge loss of employment. Further, modern agriculture requires modern infrastructure– electricity, grain elevators, fertiliser storage and mechanical expertise. To get there requires a lot of investment, but if done properly the nonfarm sector will grow alongside the farming sector.”

If properly managed, however, food policy experts say the sector’s employment potential is significant.

“Agriculture in Africa is now recognised as a source of growth and an instrument for improved food security,” Sheggen Fan, director-general of IFPRI, said Thursday.

“Africa’s agriculture can absorb large numbers of new job seekers. But in order for agriculture to be a technically dynamic and high-productivity sector that contributes to food security, it will need an influx of educated and innovative young labour.”

Conflict fuelling hunger

IFPRI’s researchers identify violent conflict, particularly in Central Africa, as both a cause and consequence of food security.

“Violence in Central Africa, especially in Nigeria, which accounts for more than a quarter of agriculture of sub-Saharan Africa has reduced output growth and food security, and has had dramatic social and economic consequences,” Mary Bohman, an official with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said at a panel discussion Thursday.

Armed conflict in northern Mali and renewed violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo reportedly resulted in the displacement of approximately three million people within the region and forced a further 70,000 people to flee to neighbouring countries.

Fighting in Somalia and Yemen, the civil war in Syria, and unrest across the region in the aftermath of the Arab Awakening was compounded by low rainfall.

Drought in Central Asia, Eastern Europe and the United States had a dramatic impact on agricultural production and supply throughout the world. Approximately 80 percent of farmland in the United States was hit by the most severe drought in half a century, while high temperatures and low rainfall reduced wheat production in Australia, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine – among the top producers and exporters of wheat.

According to many environmentalists, such extremes will only be further exacerbated as global climate change progresses – with further risks to food security.

“2012 was an extraordinary year for climate change researchers,” said Andrew Steer, president of the World Resource Institute (WRI), a think tank.

“During the past year, it has become generally accepted that the world will see a two-degree increase in average temperature. But even then, food production, land degradation, deforestation are not the only problems – we’re talking about water risks across the spectrum and skyrocketing food prices.”

He said the new IFPRI report propels the issue of food into the centre of the discussion on climate change.

Gender factor

Experts are increasingly focusing on the centrality of gender equality in promoting agricultural growth and food security. Indeed, at Thursday’s event, presenters exhibited particular excitement over this new emphasis.

Over just the past year, new evidence on the role of gender in agricultural productivity has emerged, including in the World Bank’s annual World Development Report. This new data indicates that agricultural performance and food security improve through both agricultural and non-agricultural reforms that increase women’s access to production resources.

Further, women’s contributions to agriculture in developing countries have been shown to bring overall gains in agricultural productivity as well as increased nutritional benefits. Such contributions also improve women’s access to education, technology and financial services.

“When you look at statistics on the number of women farmers in the world, it is commonly anywhere from 40 to 80 percent in developing countries,” Danielle Nierenberg, co-founder of Food Tank, a think tank here, told IPS.

“These women, however, don’t have access to the same resources as men; don’t have access to extension services, credit or the ability to make financial transactions, they often don’t own land or are prohibited from owning land.”

Nierenberg says it is very encouraging to see donors and investors beginning to tailor their production projects to the inclusion of women.

“While men more commonly grow cotton and maize and other industrial crops, women are the ones who grow the food that feeds the family,” she says. “To be effective, initiatives will need to focus on women’s overall equality across all sectors, not just the food and agriculture sector. Until we do that, we’re not going to see the gains we need – like higher yields, economic growth, the protection of environmental resources or the reduction in malnutrition and poverty.”

IFPRI director-general Fan agrees that the status of women is “critical” to poverty reduction, particularly in bringing down levels of malnutrition.

“Women have higher standards, and have been shown to better allocate the household budget as well as feed their families with more nutritious food,” he says. “One of the biggest links between poverty reduction and malnutrition is directly related the status of women.”

A typical cellblock at Guantanamo's Camp Delta. Credit: public domain

By Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, Mar 13 2013 (IPS)

In an unusual public testimony, the U.S. government has publicly stated that no “indefinite detention” is taking place among detainees at the military prison in Guantánamo Bay.

“The United States only detains individuals when that detention is lawful and does not intend to hold any individual longer than is necessary,” Michael Williams, a senior legal advisor for the State Department, told a hearing at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

The testimony took place Tuesday as a panel of human rights lawyers appealed before an international human rights body over what they called an “unfolding humanitarian crisis” at the military prison, calling for an end to ongoing human rights violations they say are being committed against the detainees.

The hearing, at the Organisation of American States headquarters here in Washington, marked the first time since President Barack Obama’s re-election that the U.S. government has had to publicly answer questions concerning Guantánamo Bay. Legal representatives for the detainees also presented disturbing eyewitness accounts of prisoner despair at the facility, brought on by prolonged indefinite detention and harsh conditions that has led to a sustained hunger strike involving more than 100 prisoners at the U.S. base in Cuba.

Established in 2002, the Guantánamo Bay military prison held, at its height, more than 700 suspects of terrorism. The facility currently holds 166 prisoners, of whom 90 – most of them Yemenis – have reportedly been cleared for repatriation, while another 36 are due to be prosecuted in federal courts, although those trials have yet to take place.

The remaining are being held indefinitely without trial because evidence of their past ties to terrorist groups is unlikely to be admissible in court. In some cases, this is reportedly due to its acquisition by torture, while in other cases because the U.S. government believes that the suspects would return to extremist activities if they were to be released.

The IACHR has repeatedly called for the closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention centre, and has requested permission to meet with the men detained there. The U.S. government has failed to allow the hemispheric rights body permission to make such a visit, however.

The IACHR held Tuesday’s hearing to learn more about the unfolding humanitarian crisis at the Guantánamo prison. It also focused on new components to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), signed earlier this year, which has been criticised for authorising indefinite detention and restricts the transfer of Guantánamo detainees.

Tuesday’s hearing saw testimony from experts in law, health and international policy, covering the psychological impact of indefinite detention, deaths of some suspects at Guantánamo, the lack of access to fair trials, and U.S. policies that have restricted the prison’s closure.

On taking office four years ago, President Obama famously promised to close the prison and ordered an end to certain interrogation tactics that rights groups called “torture”, including “extraordinary rendition” to third countries known to use torture. Yet he has since relied to a much greater extent on drone strikes against “high value” suspected terrorists from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, while failing to close the prison.

“In the 2008 campaign, both [presidential candidate John] McCain and Obama were squarely opposed to Guantánamo and agreed that this ugly hangover from the Bush/Cheney era had to be abandoned,” Omar Farah, staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), told IPS. “But four years later, the political whims have completely reversed and there is almost unanimity that Guantánamo needs to remain open aside from occasional platitudes from the president.”

Yet Farah is clear in his view that reversing this trend is still well within President Obama’s power.

“This is something that really calls for leadership from the president – he needs to decide if he wants Guantánamo to be part of his legacy,” Farah says.

“If the U.S. isn’t willing to charge someone in a fair process and can’t produce proper evidence of their crimes, then those prisoners have to be released. There is just no other way to have a democratic system. We’ve never had this kind of an alternative system of justice, and yet that’s what we have in Guantánamo.”

Pervasive health crisis

Human rights activists claim the Obama administration has not only broken his promise to rapidly close Guantánamo, but that his administration has also extended some of the worst aspects of the system. They point to the administration’s continuance of indefinite detention without charge or trial, employing illegitimate military commissions to try some suspects, and blocking accountability for torture.

At Tuesday’s hearings, the State Department’s Williams made extensive note of the health facilities and services that the U.S. government has made available for the detainees. And while critics do admit that the government facilities do meet international standards for detainees’ physical needs, they note that the mere fact of indefinite detention inflicts a toll all its own.

“The hopelessness and despair caused by indefinite detention is causing an extremely pressing and pervasive health crisis at Guantánamo,” Kristine Huskey, a lawyer with Physicians for Human Rights, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“A person held in indefinite detention is a person deprived of information about their own fate. They are in custody without knowing when, if ever, they will be released. Additionally, they do not know if they will be charged with crimes, receive a trial, or ever see their families again. If they have been abused or mistreated, they also do not know if this will happen again.”

At Tuesday’s hearing, however, Williams refused even to admit that indefinite detention was taking place at Guantánamo. CCR’s Farah called the whole experience “very disheartening”.

“It was shocking – they explicitly denied that there is indefinite detention, despite the fact that most of the prisoners there have been there for more than a decade without charge or trial,” Farah said. “So we are looking for the IACHR to remain actively engaged and hope that they will continue to put pressure on the U.S. government to comply with their international legal obligations toward these prisoners.”

Farah says the CCR wants to see Guantánamo closed and all prisoners Washington does not intend to charge with crimes to be allowed to return home or be sent to a safe country. “That’s just a base level international legal requirement,” he said.

Reconstruction at the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared in Lebanon. Credit: Ray Smith/IPS

By Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, Mar 7 2013 (IPS)

A top United Nations official is warning that the plight of Palestinian refugees is being neglected amidst the ongoing crisis in Syria.

Currently in Washington, Filippo Grandi, commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), is urging U.S. lawmakers to maintain financial support for the roughly five million UNRWA-registered Palestinians in the Middle East, even as broad budget cuts threaten U.S. overseas aid.

“From a strategic interest point of view, the biggest competitor for attention and resources to the question of Palestinian refugees today is the crisis in Syria, which is monopolising political attention, funding and humanitarian efforts,” Grandi said at the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank.The problem is the conflict in Syria has become so big, so widespread, so violent and so present to everyone’s lives that keeping the Palestinians out has become increasingly difficult.

“Of course Syria is important, but I encourage people not to forget that the Palestinian refugee element in this crisis is extremely sensitive.”

As profound changes sweep across parts of the Middle East, Palestinian refugees have once again found themselves stuck in a position of stagnation, their interests marginalised. A present-day reminder of the war of 1948, they remain scattered across an unstable region, particularly vulnerable to events in Syria.

There are an estimated 500,000 Palestinian refugees living in Syria – mostly descendants of families who fled their homeland as a result of the Israel-Arab wars of 1948 and 1967 – where they have lived in relatively stable conditions compared to their compatriots in Lebanon, Jordan the West Bank and Gaza – poor but given access to jobs and services by the Syrian regime.

The changes that the “Arab Spring” brought to the region have had little positive effect on Palestinian lives. In the case of Syria, it has only made things worse.

Grandi says his office estimates that almost half of the 500,000 Palestinians in Syria are currently displaced.

“They cannot go to Jordan, as Jordan has issued a very stringent policy of no admission for Palestinian refugees from Syria,” he says. “They claim they are already doing enough for the hundreds of thousands of Syrians coming over the border and for the two million Palestinian refugees they have already hosted in the country over the last six decades.”

He notes this “worrying policy” is preventing desperate people from fleeing violence across borders.

The only way out, then, is to go to Lebanon. An estimated nearly 30,000 Palestinians have done so, joining the almost 200,000 Syrians that have likewise fled to that country.

“These Palestinians are a heavy burden for Lebanon, however,” Grandi says. “There is a very sensitive balance between the communities and religions, which makes the presence of more Palestinians more sensitive than in any other country. Even without this influx, they are already living in appalling conditions and in a very difficult situation.”

Neutrality under fire

Since the beginning of the conflict in Syria, UNRWA has sought to remain neutral, as has the Palestinian leadership. Even Hamas, whose political headquarters had long been hosted in Damascus by the al-Assad government, moved its offices to Qatar more than a year ago.

This was due to the deteriorating security situation and to avoid any repeat of the violent backlash directed at Iraq’s once-protected Palestinian community, for the perceived favouritism allotted them during the reign of Saddam Hussein.

Indeed, Palestinians have a difficult history of being involved in the conflicts of others. This includes in Lebanon, Jordan and the first Persian Gulf War, during which Yassir Arafat sided with Saddam Hussein, resulting in the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the Gulf States allied with Kuwait.

Today, however, the conflict in Syria is complicating Palestinian lives throughout the region.

“The problem is the conflict in Syria has become so big, so widespread, so violent and so present to everyone’s lives that keeping the Palestinians out has become increasingly difficult,” Grandi says.

“Today, there are groups of Palestinians that are supporting the [Syrian] regime and some groups that are siding with the opposition.”

Perhaps the most difficult situation, he notes, is in a suburb of Damascus called Yarmouk, an unofficial camp densely populated with the largest Palestinian refugee community in Syria. It is a strategic area that is considered vital to controlling Damascus, and the fighting there has been particularly intense despite its neutral designation.

“Devastating” cuts

Here in Washington, broad budget cuts kicked in on Friday, forcing 85 billion dollars in spending reductions across all federal agencies. Some worry these cuts, known as “sequestration”, could now threaten vital U.S. aid to UNRWA.

Although it is not known yet the extent to which sequestration could affect foreign aid coffers, Chris McGrath at UNRWA’s Washington office emphasises that a cut of just five to 10 percent would be “devastating”.

“This would literally mean bringing a stop to services on the ground,” McGrath told IPS.

“We have a 67-million-dollar budget deficit this year, and any cut would mean closing schools or health care centres. Our services are always increasing – especially in Gaza, where the economy is so poor, and in Syria. Funding is always our biggest challenge and now is no exception.”

Amidst the broader discussion over how or whether to cut U.S. foreign aid spending, many groups are ramping up efforts to highlight the significant returns the United States receives for its foreign spending.

“The U.S. has invested a lot of time, energy and resources in terms of developing a ‘smart power’ way to engage the world, and an important part of that is being able to work with countries that need support – in terms of moving toward democracy, bringing people out of poverty, and moving toward conditions where peace can prevail,” Don Kraus, president of Citizens for Global Solutions, a grassroots organisation headquartered in Washington that focuses on encouraging cooperative and multilateral foreign policy, told IPS.

“If you take away this funding, it will only come back to haunt us, in terms of higher military expense, greater conflict and mass migration. The value we get from spending less than one percent of our budget on foreign aid is incredibly important.”

The lights of El Paso, Texas, seen from Ciudad Juárez. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

By Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, Mar 1 2013 (IPS)

A group of business executives, civil society leaders, policy experts and former government officials from Mexico and the United States are recommending that the two countries expand cooperative law-enforcement efforts along the border.

They also assert that both countries need to develop a joint plan to address the negative effects that the current immigration system is having on individuals, families and communities.

Established in 2009, the Pacific Council on International Policy and the Mexican Council on Foreign Affairs (COMEXI), a Mexico-based non-profit association, convened for the fourth time on Wednesday here in Washington in order to evaluate bilateral progress in managing the U.S.-Mexico border.There are drug demand issues on the U.S. side, but there are weapons demand issues on the Mexican side.

“The concerns of the report address issues related to both border security and immigration reform,” Rob Bonner, the task force co-chair and a former commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said Wednesday.

“Migration remains one of the most important features of the U.S.-Mexico relationship, but beyond political rhetoric it has played a smaller part of the policy agenda between our two countries. Now, both domestically and bilaterally, implementing comprehensive immigration reform is within our grasp.”

When it was created, the principle objective of the task force was to introduce a set of policy recommendations for both governments on how to strengthen border security and cooperation, focusing on public safety, migration, facilitation of legal transit and commerce, economic development and border institutions.

The COMEXI report, initially published in 2009, was widely welcomed by government officials in both countries.

“The task force outline posed a specific set of approaches in looking at border management,” Christopher Wilson, an associate at the Mexico Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center, a think tank here, told IPS.

“Many of them fell under the category of shared responsibility, looking at trans-national challenges, taking responsibility for them and then finding ways to work together for a common solution.”

Wilson says the new set-up replaced an older model of bilateral relationship in which one party would typically blame the other for challenges in dealing with the border.

“Look at the example of drugs and weapons smuggling,” Wilson says. “There are drug demand issues on the U.S. side, but there are weapons demand issues on the Mexican side, where there are also rule-of-law issues and violence. The task force sought ways to share responsibility and work together to confront these interconnected problems.”

Since that time, many of the recommendations have been implemented. For instance, the U.S. and Mexican federal governments have made large investments in staffing, infrastructure and technology and have refocused cooperation on security efforts.

Task force members say that several issues remain outstanding, however, including better law enforcement against illegal migration and weapons smuggling, as well as environmental issues like illicit dumpsites, pollution and the reintroduction of native trees.

At Wednesday’s meeting, the task force emphasised the current opportune timing for implementation of these remaining responsibilities, given new administrations in both capitals.

Dealing responsibly with the migration issue is particularly pressing, the task force says, noting that of the hundreds of thousands of people who cross the border illegally each year, the vast majority are economic migrants from Mexico seeking work.

They propose that Mexico and the United States establish a joint commission of economists, demographers, business and labour leaders to analyse the labour market effects of these long-term demographic trends and economic integration.

21st century border

Wilson says this process is about “changing the concept of the 21st century border”, a concept he notes was adopted by Mexican President Felipe Calderon and Barack Obama in 2010 and was largely envisioned by the task force report.

“The idea is that you can have security gains without sacrificing the efficiency of moving people and commerce and still have joint economic prosperity,” Wilson says.

“There is a new Mexico today, one that is in many ways different from the Mexico of 20 years ago. It’s a richer country, largely middle class, with fewer children per family – and thus fewer young people entering the labour force.”

These lower fertility rates have translated into a dramatic reduction in the pressure put on Mexicans to migrate, legally or illegally. Apprehensions at the border are currently at their lowest point in 40 years, for instance – a reflection of both the recent decline in the U.S. economy as well as changes on the Mexican side.

In line with these changes, the U.S. government has instituted a new programme that expedites travel for pre-approved travellers deemed “low risk”.

However, the task force says more needs to be done to fully realise the potential economic partnership. Its members suggest, for instance, that the two countries jointly develop a plan for better managing the relaxation of U.S. federally imposed restrictions on legitimate commerce between border communities.

“The border should be as thin as technologically and politically possible for those engaged in legitimate travel or commerce while remaining difficult to penetrate for those engaged in criminal activity or unauthorized transit,” Bonner said.

“There has been a lot of focus on security but relatively less focus on ports of entry. There is a lot that can be done to improve economic efficiency.”

With talks in Washington currently under way in a major push towards bipartisan immigration reform, the task force believes today’s realities make their recommendations particularly timely.

In January, a bipartisan group of senators unveiled a set of principles for comprehensive immigration legislation that includes a “pathway to citizenship” for the 11 million immigrants already in the country illegally, contingent on first securing the country’s borders.

While the U.S. provides permanent residence to more than a million immigrants a year, critics argue that legal permanent residents often must endure years of separation before they can be united with spouses and children, and prospective immigrant workers with approved petitions also often have to wait years for green cards to become available.

People at Labor Square in Gulshan-e-Maymar, Karachi, Pakistan wait for food aid after the 2010 floods. Forced migration and the displacement of vulnerable communities are issues of concern to U.S. national security experts. Credit: M Fahim Siddiqi/IPS

By Walter García and Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, Feb 27 2013 (IPS)

More than three dozen national security officials, members of Congress and military leaders are warning of the threat climate change poses to U.S. national security, the latest in an indicator that U.S. intelligence and national security circles are increasingly worried about a warming planet.

In a new bipartisan open letter, they stress the need for urgent action and call on both public and private support to address issues that included forced migration and the displacement of vulnerable communities, as well as the dangers related to food production during extreme weather events.

“We tried to accomplish two things: First, to make a call to action on the whole issue of climate change,” Lee Hamilton, a former member of Congress and a founder of the Partnership for a Secure America (PSA), a bipartisan Washington group that organised the letter, told IPS.It’s very weird we’re getting ‘100-year floods' every five years.

“Many people are frustrated that the political system doesn’t seem to be able to deal with question of climate change. It’s not on the agenda – the president has mentioned it, politicians have mentioned it, but we really have no action taking place.”

Hamilton continued, “The second thing we did was put it in a national security context, which I think was a unique way to frame it, and hopefully it will provide an additional stimulus for action.”

Signatories to the letter include former secretaries of state (George Schultz and Madeleine Albright), secretaries of defence and homeland security (William Cohen and Tom Ridge), a former director of central intelligence (R. James Woolsey), several generals (Gen. Anthony Zinni, Gen. Wesley Clark) and others.

They join the State Department, Defence Department, National Intelligence Council and a growing number of other security voices here in emphasising the national security implications of climate change.

“Even if you’re sceptical about any single part of climate change, it’s hard to get away from the … combination of feedback loops together with population growth and increasing consumption, which lead to a number of national security concerns,” Woolsey said here Tuesday, referring to “millions upon millions of hungry, thirsty neighbours to the south [of the United States], looking for somewhere to go.”

Unless precautionary steps are taken, the letter warns that “climate change impacts abroad could spur mass migrations, influence civil conflict and ultimately lead to a more unpredictable world.” And “protecting U.S. interests under these conditions would progressively exhaust American military, diplomatic and development resources as we struggle to meet growing demands for emergency international engagement.”

The new letter also comes against the backdrop of unfulfilled promises of action from the White House and a highly polarised Congress on the issue.

The national security aspect of climate change for the United States was given high prominence in December, when a major report from the National Intelligence Council (NIC), a high-level body coordinating all of the country’s intelligence agencies, listed climate change as one of four “megatrends” that will shape the world over the next two decades.

Other megatrends included factors relating to greater empowerment and prosperity of the individual, the growing political and economic power of developing countries, and dramatic changes in demographic patterns like rapid urbanisation.

The “Global Trends” report emphasised that climate change will severely impair the ability of food producers to meet a growing global demand for food, water and energy, each of which is forecast to increase by between 35 and 50 percent. Adding to this strain are the expanding consumer demands of a swelling worldwide middle class.

Most exposed

All of these issues will be exacerbated by the disrupted weather patterns associated with global climate change.

Scientists predict that the severity of existing weather patterns will intensify, with wet areas getting wetter, and arid areas becoming drier. Much of the decline in precipitation is expected to occur in the Middle East and North Africa as well as western Central Asia, southern Europe, southern Africa and the U.S. southwest.

“We are going to be see evidence of climate change beyond rising temperatures,” Jack Goldstone, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, said during an analysis of the Global Trends 2030 report Tuesday here in Washington.

“But as more thermal energy is put into the climate as a system, we will see more extreme events like the snowfalls across the country over the past couple of weeks, the floods in Thailand, floods in Pakistan, fires around Moscow … It’s very weird we’re getting ‘100-year floods’ every five years.”

Even as members of the U.S. Congress fail to arrive at any consensus on how or whether to overhaul the country’s energy sector, the Global Trends report notes that the United States is indeed moving towards “energy independence” – albeit not on the backs of renewable sources as pushed by environmentalists and others.

In fact, the U.S. recently regained its position as the world’s largest gas producer, largely due to its introduction of new “hydraulic fracturing” (or “fracking”) technologies. Experts now say U.S. reserves will be able to continue producing for the next century.

“It seems we are going to be stuck in an oil and gas world for quite some time, and we will see the impacts accumulate along with the temperature,” Goldstone said. “The poorer countries are precisely the ones left most exposed and vulnerable to climate change, and we need saleable, efficient, cost-effective solutions – and we need to keep vulnerable cities viable.”

Despite the expanding middle class and swelling urban populations and the resulting pressures on critical resources like food and water, the scientists point out that shortages are not inevitable, particularly through the effective management of natural resources.

Here in Washington, the close timing of the new letter and the report indicate a clear and growing recognition of the climate change threat as a national security issue. Yet whether this growing consensus can influence members of Congress has yet to be seen.

“It is quite clear that our national security establishment, especially over the past couple of years, has been keenly aware of the threat of climate change – but now its time to act,” Hamilton said.

A soybean harvest in the state of Michigan. Between 2006 and 2011, U.S. farmers converted more than 1.3 million acres of grassland into corn and soybean fields. Credit: public domain

By Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, Feb 23 2013 (IPS)

The rush for biofuels in the United States has seen farmers converting the United States’ prairie lands to farms at rates comparable with deforestation levels in Brazil, Malaysia and Indonesia – rates not seen here since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

A new study finds that, between 2006 and 2011, U.S. farmers converted more than 1.3 million acres of grassland into corn and soybean fields. Driven by high crop prices, biofuel subsidies and a confluence of other factors, states like Iowa and South Dakota have been turning some five percent of prairie into cropland each year, according to the report’s authors, Christopher Wright and Michael Wimberly of South Dakota State University.

The researchers suggest that farmers are growing crops on increasingly marginal land, in part because the federal government offers subsidised crop insurance in case of failure. In Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota, for instance, corn and soy are planted in areas that are especially vulnerable to drought.

Numerous incentives have encouraged the ploughing of grasslands. The federal system of financial payments to grain farmers has long encouraged conversion of grasslands to farms, but in recent years new subsidies for corn ethanol and other biofuel production have significantly stepped up this inducement.

The resulting increase in crop prices encourages the owners of livestock to plough prairieland in order to grow crops in favour of using that land for grazing. This has lead to the growth of industrial farms and industrial confinement methods for meat production, while genetically modified seeds now allow corn and soy production in semiarid regions that before were suitable only for ranching.

According to the new research, farmers are increasingly willing to take that risk because corn and soy have become so lucrative. Further, the study finds evidence that many farmers are no longer enticed by federal conservation programmes that pay for grassland cover.

“The big drivers that are often overlooked are the federally subsidised crop insurance and commodity support programmes in play,” Greg Fogel, policy associate at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“If a lot of farmers didn’t have this support, they wouldn’t choose to produce on this land, because it is quite marginal and risky for them. But when they’re getting a 65 to 80 percent subsidy on their crop insurance premium, the risk is dramatically reduced because it has already a built-in revenue guarantee subsidised by the American taxpayer.”

While recent years have subsequently seen a shifting of risk from producer to taxpayer, Fogel warns that the latter will end up being forced to pay twice, “when we later have to pay for a conservation programme to rehabilitate and protect the destruction done to the environment on the back end.”

The loss of pasture itself could also have significant environmental impacts. According to conservationists in the Midwest, the United States’ prairie lands should be seen as a vast “carbon ocean”, with an enormous capacity to reduce climate change by sequestering heat-trapping carbon from the atmosphere.

“Native grasses are a stable repository of carbon, creating organic carbon below ground, much as trees create it above,” said John Davidson, a professor emeritus of law at the University of South Dakota.

“Grasses store carbon quickly, providing an immediate mitigation against global warming, and the carbon is stored safely underground, secure it from catastrophic events such as fire. However, ploughing releases that carbon, adding significantly to greenhouse gas concentrations while eliminating habitat used by hundreds of species.”

Indeed, an area covering the five northern states of the Midwest contains thousands of shallow wetlands and is one of the continent’s largest breeding grounds for ducks and other ground-nesting birds and waterfowl. But cornfields are now encroaching on this habitat, with wetlands disappearing and bird populations dropping.

Davidson is urging a public discussion on whether it makes sense to spend large amounts of money on attempts to control the release of carbon from coal-fired power plants and the cutting of tropical forests “while simultaneously releasing an immeasurable ocean of carbon by ploughing up our prairie”.

Further, a 2008 paper in the journal Science argued that fuels like corn ethanol and soy biodiesel lose a portion of their carbon advantage over gasoline if farmers are simply digging up virgin grassland to grow the crops.

Sodsaving

Environmental groups and policymakers are currently pushing initiatives to ensure that federal farm and crop insurance subsidies do not exacerbate the loss of these vital natural resources. A bipartisan group of members of the House of Representatives recently introduced legislation that would create a nationwide “sodsaver” law that would slash subsidies that contribute to the destruction of native grassland and prairie.

This would dramatically lower the amount of money the government provides for native grasslands that have been recently ploughed. This doesn’t mean that farmers can’t keep farming, just that they won’t have as much of an incentive to convert prairieland to agricultural land.

The Protect Our Prairies Act, a provision of the 2013 Farm Bill, which was passed by the Senate in June 2012, would prohibit federal payments and reduce crop insurance premium subsidies by 50 percent on newly broken native sod. The bill would also close loopholes by requiring that newly converted prairieland be isolated from other crop acres when calculating insurable yields.

Proponents say these two provisions are crucial to removing the federally subsidised incentive to move agricultural operations into native grasslands. The bill would also save an estimated 200 million dollars over a decade, while ensuring that taxpayer dollars do not continue to facilitate the destruction of prairielands.

Further, proponents say doing so would result in more ranching opportunities, stronger ecosystems, increased hunting opportunities, less soil erosion and net economic gains for rural communities.

“As the House of Representatives begins developing its version of the Farm Bill, we will work to ensure that chamber does not make the same deep cuts to conservation,” said Jamie Rappaport Clark, president of Defenders of Wildlife, in a statement.

“And we will fight to make sure the House also requires farmers who receive subsidies to take appropriate measures to protect our lands, water and wildlife, as the Senate has done. We simply must find a way to provide a crop insurance safety net for farmers that doesn’t also encourage the widespread destruction of wetlands, forests, grasslands and America’s waters.”

In Africa’s Sahel region, agroforestry techniques using traditional plantings known as “fertiliser trees” to increase soil fertility, as well as harvesting and grazing regulations, are offering new solutions to both food and human security.

Such approaches were nearly lost in recent decades following devastating droughts in the Sahel. Now they are making a belated but welcome comeback. According to a 2012 U.S. Geological Survey, “regeneration agroforestry” in the Sahel stands at over 5 million hectares of agricultural fields newly covered by trees – and growing.

Recurring droughts destroyed many harvests in the Sahel. Credit:Kristin Palitza/IPS

“Agroforestry is the future of agriculture in the drylands and sub-humid regions,” Chris Reij, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based think tank, told IPS. “In southern Niger, for instance, farmers have improved millions of hectares of land through regenerating and multiplying valuable trees whose roots already lay beneath their land.”

The effect for local communities over the past 20 years has been immediate and staggering—”more than 500,000 additional tonnes of food per year,” Reij said.

Collectively known as “evergreen agriculture”, these techniques have not only been changing landscapes and breathing new life into soils long depleted of their nutrients and productivity, but also affecting political and social realities.

The ideas behind evergreen agriculture began during the 1980s, in the midst of a severe and prolonged period of drought in the Sahel. This period was disastrous for the region’s inhabitants as crop production plummeted and vast numbers of livestock had to be killed off.

The region’s trees also began to disappear, since local communities were forced to offset their lost assets through practises that slowly destroyed the forests – the only profitable resource left in the Sahel. These communities resorted to cutting and selling wood to buy food and survive, with multiple effects of this deforestation felt in the intervening decades.

For eons, farmers in the Sahel grew trees on their farmlands because they acted as a natural fertiliser. Not only did they improve fertility by adding nitrogen to the soil; they also offered a critical shading effect, which improves moisture conditions in both the local atmosphere and the soil.

Buffering crops of maize sorghum and millet below them, the trees used by farmers in the Sahel are unique and known as Faidherbia albida. According to the World Agroforestry Centre, the tree exhibits the unusual characteristics of becoming dormant and leafless in the wet season – when crops are growing – but leafing out thereafter, when farmers can harvest the trees’ leaves and pods for fodder for their livestock.

When scientists began looking more closely at this phenomenon, they discovered a virtual underground ecosystem in these areas, with root systems and perennials from various species of valuable indigenous trees, which farmers can now cultivate.

These trees grow naturally each year, and with the grazing of livestock managed to give the trees time to grow, the landscape is being transformed, with the implications of this growth possibly extending beyond food security.

Regenerating security

Africa’s “drylands”, the vast swath of the Sahara Desert stretching across North Africa from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, have risen in the past year to the top of the global agenda. The insurgency in Mali and the ensuing French military intervention have received the most attention recently, following kidnappings in Algeria and wars in Mauritania and Niger.

“If you look at the dimensions of where terrorism and political insecurity are most acute, throughout the entire globe, it is a map of the drylands of Africa and West Asia,” Dennis Garrity, U.N. Drylands Ambassador and director-general of the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi, said at a recent event here in Washington.

“The situation emphasises how fragile the underlying development pathways are under conditions of extremely low literacy, health and other human development indicators in the drylands.”

While the Sahel suffers from both an accelerated degradation of land and low rates of female literacy, these two indicators aren’t generally conflated. Yet according to Garrity, a connection can be found in factors such as high population growth rates.

According to the World Agroforestry Centre, the population in the Sahel doubles every 20 years, a rate that is reflected in the rapidly declining size of farm plots on which rural communities depend for food. Meanwhile, availability of new farmland is rapidly dropping, and studies regularly report a steady decline in soil fertility.

Above all looms the long-term prospect of the region’s vulnerability to climate change, making these agroforestry initiatives all the more urgent. Garrity and other experts warn climate change will play out in terms of more extreme droughts – higher temperatures and low and uncertain rainfall – that will significantly affect crop yields.

“It is not a military or security problem,” said Garrity. “There is a pressing confluence of food insecurity, economic insecurity and a big lag in human development indicators that emphasises that this is a multidimensional problem.”

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers tours flooded areas in Burlington, North Dakota in June 2011. Credit: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers photo by Patrick Moes

By Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, Feb 7 2013 (IPS)

Environmentalists here are warning that the United States is not on track to meet a target of a 17-percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020, despite President Barack Obama’s stated commitment.

Yet, according to a new report by the World Resources Institute (WRI), a Washington-based environment think tank, the country can still meet that goal by using existing federal laws and state action, and investing in renewable energy sources.

“Even without Congressional involvement or new technologies, the U.S. can meet its modest goals of a 17-percent reduction,”Nicholas Bianco, a senior associate at WRI and lead author on the report, told IPS. “We don’t need to wait for new technologies, it can be done now.”

The impact of climate change in the United States is becoming increasingly apparent, in the form of extreme weather events such as record-breaking heat waves, droughts, heavy rainfall, coastal flooding and forest fires. Weather-related damage in the U.S. reportedly totalled 60 billion dollars in 2011, and these amounts are expected to rise in the coming years.

The report offers several key recommendations for both the federal and state policy initiatives aimed at emissions reduction. At the federal level, it particularly encourages the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to pursue emissions reduction at power plants.

At the state level, it focuses on potential greenhouse emissions reductions from policy initiatives in transportation. Yet it also encourages states to venture into areas typically considered the realm of the federal government, focusing on power plants and industry, as well as emissions from refrigerators and air conditioners.

A significant motivation in such approaches is to circumvent the U.S. Congress, which many agree could prove to be one of the biggest obstacles to reaching agreements on reducing climate change.

“Partly due to a small but vocal number of climate-change deniers, and partly because a significant portion of the Congress is beholden to the fossil fuels industry, U.S. companies don’t appreciate the long-term benefits of an economy that is more fuel efficient and based more on renewable energy,” Michele de Nevers, a senior programme associate at the Center for Global Development (CGD), a Washington think tank, told IPS.

In lieu of legislation

Power plants are the leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, followed by the transportation sector, which is responsible for about 30 percent of emissions.

Because state and local regulations play a significant role setting policy for both of these sectors, Bianco and his co-authors are pushing states to achieve reductions in the transportation sector through policies that encourage the use of lower-carbon fuels and lowering vehicle miles travelled. In particular, they are encouraging local governments to prioritise the creation of policies that will improve the efficiency of motor vehicles, and significantly raise standards on all types of vehicles.

If states are able to improve energy efficiency, Bianco suggested, the outcomes will be positive for both governments and the public, as investments in renewable energy will save billions of dollars in long-term costs, including to the environment.

“People save money and it’s relatively cheap,” he said. “It may require a little investment, but this will be quickly paid off.”

The report also recommends the need for increased regulation of the power sector at the state level, as the United States shifts from coal-fired generation toward natural gas-fired and renewable generation. This trend has been driven by dramatic increases in natural gas extraction.

However, scientific research is now showing evidence of significant methane emissions from the use of hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”), the now widely used approach in the U.S. whereby millions of gallons of water and chemicals are pumped underground to break up rocks and release trapped gasses. This could mean that natural gas could have a greater impact on global warming overall than even coal, due to emissions that escape into the atmosphere during the extraction process.

On Wednesday, the EPA released data that, for the first time, suggests that fracking is the second-highest source of U.S. emissions, behind power plants.

“In fact, there is a very safe and cheap technology to capture them and prevent these emissions from escaping,” de Nevers said.

“The (WRI) report encourages states to strengthen their regulations on fracking, and doing so would go a long way toward addressing the issues that local states are most concerned about, like toxic chemicals getting into the water supply.”

Yet evaluating how much methane is leaking from an increasing number of natural-gas operations, and then limiting such emissions, will be a challenge, Bianco and others are warning.

According to Susan Tierney, a WRI board member, the United States’ goal of a 17-percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions was actually lower than was originally recommended by environmentalists. This level was agreed upon, she says, because 17 percent was considered achievable, albeit modest.

“Even so,” she says, “the U.S. still has not made progress toward achieving the target, and emissions will continue to rise if it continues along its present rate.”

According to CGD’s de Nevers, the best thing that could happen to U.S. policymaking now would be to get agreement on putting a tax on carbon emissions.

“Only economics will motivate a lot of the actions that are referred to in this report,” she warns. “But the only way to get this‘price tag’ on emissions is through Congressional legislation, and that is just not happening.”

But, she continues, “In the meantime, states and local policies can fill this gap.”

Rising temperatures mean the vast Arctic Ocean, which used to be frozen over for much of the year, is now an open shipping line for more than half the year. Credit: public domain

By Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, Feb 6 2013 (IPS)

Environmentalists are warning that a meeting of environment ministers that took place Monday in Sweden has agreed on a weak and inadequate response plan in case of an oil spill in the Arctic Ocean.

According to Greenpeace, an environment watchdog, a leaked copy of the document suggests that the eight member states that make up a group dubbed the Arctic Council have failed to agree on the technical details necessary for dealing with a large-scale disaster, even while it opens the way for increased drilling and oil exploration in the Arctic.

“We are unimpressed by what we’ve seen from this totally inadequate document,” Ben Ayliffe, a Greenpeace campaigner based in Washington, told IPS. “It does nothing to prepare governments for dealing with disasters or for protecting the Arctic from disasters.”

According to the United Nations’ global climate office, Arctic sea ice reached its lowest level on record in 2012. That process, which overwhelming scientific data attributes to human-induced climate change, has created a virtual gold rush to the Arctic.

Rising temperatures mean the vast Arctic Ocean, which used to be frozen over for much of the year, is now an open shipping lane for more than half the year, on average. This has resulted in a scramble to lay claim to Arctic territory, which is estimated by the U.S. Geological Survey to contain 22 percent of the world’s undiscovered energy resources.

However, environmentalists are concerned that no mechanisms are in place to prevent or respond to an environmental disaster.

According to Richard Steiner, a biologist and expert on oil spills based in Alaska, this past summer, a record 46 merchant ships transited through what is known as the Northern Sea Route, a 10-fold increase from just two years ago. “There has been an extraordinary increase in shipping across the Arctic Ocean, mainly with very hazardous petroleum products on board,” Steiner told IPS.

He also warns that an increase in offshore oil and gas drilling potential in the Arctic demands robust laws. Yet, he says, the Arctic Council agreement has no technical performance standards, enforcement mechanisms or operational guidelines.

“They are charging forward with this Arctic offshore oil drilling development and shipping without the proper safeguards in place, and it’s really tragic,” Steiner said. “I’m afraid they are going to wait for a big spill disaster before putting the right systems in place.”

He added that this is what happened with the Exxon Valdez case, when an oil tanker ran aground in Alaska in 1989.

“I’m afraid this is what’s going to happen in the Arctic, too,” he continues. “Despite the lessons learned … very little has changed as far as prevention policy is concerned.”

No proven capacity

The Arctic Council, established in 1996, is made up of states with territory in the Arctic, and comprises Canada, Denmark (including Greenland), Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States. The new oil spill treaty will be formally voted upon by members in May, and would become the second binding agreement reached by the Arctic Council since a search-and-rescue agreement was signed in 2011.

Yet Ayliffe says the document doesn’t adequately deal with the complex issues involved with a potential spill.

“It’s a nightmare scenario,” Ayliffe says. “The technical difficulties of responding to a disaster a mile beneath the ice make the kind of operation that BP had to do in the Gulf impossible in the Arctic.”

Despite earlier assurances by the Arctic Council that any agreement would include specific environmental protections, including oil spill recovery and prevention strategies, Ayliffe says the agreement “fails to outline any essential response equipment, methods for capping wells, or cleaning up oil-affected habitat and wildlife, relying instead on vague statements of steps Arctic nations should take within available resources.”

The document contains ambiguous language regarding oil spills, only asking countries to take “appropriate steps” to deal with a spill, without specifying clear demands or requirements. It also lacks guidelines relating to the liability of oil companies in case of a disaster or guidelines on how to adequately deal with a spill.

“No oil company has ever proven it can respond to an oil spill in ice, and the agreement offers nothing in regard to how a company would stop or clean up a Deepwater Horizon-style disaster,” Ayliffe said, referring to the massive 2010 spill in the Gulf of Mexico, when nearly five million barrels of oil spewed from a blown oil well in the sea floor for nearly three months.

“We are hoping that, because of the outrage that has been caused by this document, before the May vote there will be time to fill some of the holes.”