The Olympic Games are widely viewed as a chance for countries to showcase their fastest, strongest, most skilled and disciplined athletes, a time when political, economic and cultural differences are set aside and individuals are judged on personal merit alone.

But the reality is often quite different. When athletes from around the world gather in London this summer for the 2012 Games, they won’t be competing on a level playing field.

Even after total population has been taken into account, the relationship between development and medal totals is a significant one. Credit:U.S. Army/CC BY 2.0

Not surprisingly, recent research shows that for a variety of reasons, poorer countries tend to win fewer medals in the Olympics, with a direct correlation between performance and economic well- being, particularly national infrastructure and social services.

For example, people from poor countries seldom do well in swimming since they usually don’t have access to swimming pools, and the same is true for diving.

In the 2008 Olympics, the first five winners of medals for swimming were the United States, Australia, Great Britain, Japan and Germany.

“Most sports accomplishments require a fair amount of social and financial support for training, facilities and travel,” William Orme, a spokesperson for the United Nations Development Programme Human Development Index Unit, told IPS. “This means that better off countries are usually doing better.”

It’s not just a matter of size, either – even after total population has been taken into account, the relationship between development and medal totals is a significant one.

The report, by researchers at the Institute for Democracy and Conflict Resolution (IDCR) at the University of Essex, analysed the ranking of countries on the UNDP’s Human Development Index and the number of medals handed out at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China.

The U.S. won a total of 110 medals in the 2008 Olympic Games, making it the top performer at Beijing. At the same time, the United States ranked fourth in the 2008 Human Development Index, with a high score of 0.907.

At the other end of the spectrum was conflict-torn Democratic Republic of Congo, whose athletes left Beijing without any medals at all, and which scored 0.24 on the HDI.

The data on these and the other countries participating in the Olympics can be found on a series of web-based maps the Institute for Democracy and Conflict Resolution published on its website.

Orme, who calls the correlation “kind of obvious”, notes that most young people participate in some kind of sports, but when they can go to school, they do it in a more organised fashion. And when they are healthier, they perform better.

Some exceptions to the rule

Researchers note that the imbalance doesn’t hold true for all Olympic athletes across all events. For instance, Ethiopia ranked 157th on the HDI in 2008, with an index of 0.33, but was 29th on the 2008 medals table with seven medals.

In the field of athletics – sprinting, for example – several developing countries scored high, with Kenya ranking third, having won 14 medals, six of them gold. Jamaica came in fourth with 11 medals, and Ethiopia won seven medals.

“Ethiopia is an exception, mainly concerning the sport of running,” Thierry Graf, who served as president of the Ethiopian-Suisse development association Sport – The Bridge, told IPS.

He explained that running – which requires virtually no special equipment – is very popular throughout the country, in cities as well as the countryside.

“Running effectively does not need infrastructure and specific material and thus can be performed by anyone regardless of his or her socio-economic status,” he said.

While running and hurdling need little more than a road or track, good shoes and energy drinks can also boost performance, which might explain why the U.S. still won most of the medals in the field of athletics (a total of 23).

Graf believes that governments should put more emphasis on creating policies that give all citizens, regardless of income, an opportunity to pursue sports.

“Backed by my experience with Sport – The Bridge, I think that the development of ‘sports for all’ can achieve several goals, like social value creation, health and popularisation of a specific sport, at the same time,” he said.

For the Olympic Games to be genuinely open and democratic requires public investment not only in sports facilities, but also in health care and education.

“Having public support for sports and recreation is part of human development,” Orme said. “It’s a question of both public resources and priorities.”

Still, this might not counteract the phenomenon of “muscle drain”, in which talented athletes from poor countries are wooed by wealthy sports clubs abroad.

This practice is named after the “brain drain” in which educated high-tech and medical personnel from India, Cuba or other developing countries are hired by firms and hospitals in Europe or the United States.

The muscle-drain phenomena is most widespread in football, a sport in which the high transfer rates that European players can demand from clubs make them resort to the much cheaper alternative of importing players from developing countries.

“Young people look for a better life. Sports is a field where a huge income jump is possible, and thus they are attracted to try it,” Graf said.

Graf said it was problematic that this was a largely unregulated field, with the danger that young people, who in the end are not good enough to receive a contract on a professional level, are left on their own in the host country, become illegal migrants and are at risk of falling into poverty and criminal activities.

“It would be desirable that such international associations commit themselves to a sort of code of conduct regarding the treatment of the youngsters,” he added.

With less than two months before the London Games open on Jul. 27, 185 countries have qualified at least one athlete to compete.

However, a vast gulf remains. Haiti, still recovering from the effects of its devastating 2010 earthquake, has only qualified two athletes. The country has not won an Olympic medal since 1928.

Meanwhile, the United States currently has 183 Olympic qualifiers, and 64 Paralympic qualifiers.

In a statement, Professor Todd Landman, director of the IDCR, noted, “As we celebrate the wonder of the Olympics this year, it is important to reflect on the politics and economics that shape the games, as well as the many challenging obstacles that this year’s dedicated athletes have had to overcome to take part.

“The financial crisis, the fallout of the Arab Spring and the continued rise of the BRIC countries will certainly be at the forefront of our minds this summer. The Olympic Dream is a small window into the complex world of today.”

Hundreds of nurses and protestors from other professions gathered on Friday in Chicago to call on world leaders to adopt a Robin Hood Tax on Wall Street transactions as a way to raise hundreds of billions of dollars every year to help heal the U.S. and world economies.

Protestors gather at Daley Plaza in Chicago during the National Nurses Rally on Friday. Credit: Bob Vonderau/CC by 2.0

The march is part of the Robin Hood Tax global week of action taking place from May 18 to May 22 in the wake of the G8 Summit at Camp David, which began this Friday. Activists around the world are lobbying for this global financial transactions tax, supported by a range of United Nations (U.N.) human rights experts, including Olivier De Schutter, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the right to food, .

In the United States, unions, think tanks and groups that focus on the environment, international health, consumer protection and financial reform lobby for “Wall Street to give back to Main Street”, as a website in support of the Robin Hood Tax says. The idea of a financial transaction tax has existed since the 1930s, when leading economist John Maynard Keynes was a popular driver of the tax.

“After the bank bailout, the government now needs a lot of money to deal with a huge budget deficit and to help meet the USA’s commitments on aid and climate finance,” the website adds.

A financial transactions tax (FTT) would affect the purchase and sale of stocks, bonds, commodities, unit trusts, mutual funds and derivatives such as futures and options. The tax would generate revenues needed to pay for and protect global public goods like education, health and the environment, with a number of variations having been proposed of how high the tax should be.

One of the most prominent ideas is a tax rate of .1 percent on equities and bonds and .01 percent on derivatives.

Estimates suggest that at its lowest rate, the FTT would yield about 48 billion U.S. dollars across the group of countries known as the G20, with higher rates offering up to 250 billion U.S. dollars per year to offset the costs of the enduring economic, financial, fuel, climate and food crises.

Not only NGOs are lobbying for it, but the tax was also discussed by the heads of states at the G20 meeting in Cannes, France, in November 2011, with Germany, France, Spain, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Ethiopia and the African Union all pledging their support.

While German chancellor Angela Merkel in January expressed support for the FTT but wanted members of the 27-nation European Union to agree on the measure before its implementation, Sarkozy said that the French government might impose the tax without waiting for its European or G20 partners to come on board.

“If France waits for others to tax finance, then finance will never be taxed,” Sarkozy said in a speech. However, he did not ultimately implement such a tax during his presidential term, which ended this week.

With the G8 meeting held from May 18 to 19, NGOs hope for the representatives of France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Russia to discuss the issue further.

“At the G20 last November, when Bill Gates threw his weight behind the proposal, many countries announced their support. We want to see this momentum continue,” Simon Chouffot, spokesperson for the Robin Hood Tax Campaign, told IPS.

“We know the FTT is gaining huge momentum in Europe…and that Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande are driving this. Hollande has made the FTT one of his key priorities and we have heard he may raise it with Barack Obama,” Chouffot added. The tax is on the agenda for the EU’s informal summit on growth next week.

U.N. human rights experts also consider a financial transaction tax a pragmatic tool for governments to protect and uphold the human rights of their peoples.

“It is high time that governments re-examine the basic redistributive role of taxation to ensure that wealthier individuals and the financial sector contribute their fair share of the tax burden,” the U.N. Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Magdalena Sepúlveda, said.

“When the financial sector fails to pay its share, the rest of society must pick up the bill,” she said.

“Food prices have twice spiked dangerously over the past five years, and could easily do so again,” warned De Schutter, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the right to food.

“The FTT will likely reduce hot capital flows that fuel speculation, drive price instability and wreak havoc on the right to food worldwide.”

(END)

For several decades, governments around the globe have turned to privatisation as the best option to help relieve the world’s destitute by providing them with health care services, water and electricity. By and large, however, this effort has failed.

Numerous experimental alternatives to privatisation exist, but a report by the Municipal Services Project has an idea that is not outlandish or even terribly experimental.

If public pension and other government funds redirected their investments, it says, they could help provide improved access to water, energy and health services for the world’s poor. Municipal Services Project is an organisation that researches alternatives to privatisation and the commercialisation of public service provision.

“Public funds should serve to reinforce much needed public services,” David McDonald, co-director of the Municipal Services Project, said.

The research initiative is co-directed by Queen’s University in Canada and the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, with other partners including the Universidad Mayor de San Simón in Bolivia, as well as NGOs such as the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South and the Accra-based Africa Water Network.

An approximate sum 75 billion U.S. dollars is needed to bridge the global public services gap, mainly in the developing world, where up to two billion people lack access to basic services such as water and sanitation, electricity and health care, says the report.

So how can countries close this gap? The Municipal Services Project suggests taking advantage of two types of funds: public pension funds, made up of contributions from public employers and employees; and sovereign wealth funds, through which governments collect and invest revenues from natural resources, budget and trade surpluses and other forms of state income.

Together, these two funds manage as much as 10 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide and invest heavily in the private sector, seeking – though not always achieving, in the volatile current economic climate – an average return rate of seven percent, according to the report.

Some funds currently invest in some public service providers, such as privately owned utility companies and infrastructure operators, such as those at toll roads and airports.

If the funds were willing to invest as little as 1 percent of their assets in publicly owned and operated infrastructure, argues the report, it could create an initial capitalisation pool of up to 100 billion U.S. dollars – 25 billion more than the 75-billion-dollar gap.

Investment in public services more beneficial

Research has shown, the report’s authors point out, that while investment in the private sector may be more profitable for shareholders over a period of one to three years, “regulated public utilities tend to be more reliable sources of income growth over the longer term”.

In fact, some public pensions funds are already being invested in ways that provide public services, although they usually do so through private firms, thereby complicating the picture.

The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan invests in three private for- profit Chilean water companies, for example, and has been pressured by activists to divest.

“Privatisation of public services has had disastrous development results,” Madeleine Bélanger Dumontier, spokesperson for the Municipal Services Project told IPS. When private entities are responsible for providing services that traditionally have been publicly provided, the poor tend to end up worse off.

The privatisation of the delivery of public services – water or electricity, for example – have offered “disappointing results”, the report agrees, explaining that these results occur even though “governments and international financial institutions have touted” privatisation as a “solution to…shortcomings”.

Ultimately, the report sees funds such as pension plans and sovereign wealth funds as an alternative source of public funding that could help bolster public services.

It points out that while no single model exists to subsidise the provision of essential services, including health care, to the world’s neediest, current experiments “suggest that the ‘public’ approach is alive and well, thriving with community participation and constituting a real alternative to privatisation”.

NGOs and researchers must collaborate

Donald Cohen, chair of In the Public Interest, a national resource centre on privatisation and responsible contracting, thinks the report is an important addition to the discussions about public-private partnerships. “There is massive need for capital across the world, and there are lots of pension funds which are looking to invest,” he said.

According to Cohen, fund managers might be more easily convinced to put money into public infrastructure rather than a single public service, because more money is involved and therefore more revenue is to be gained.

The question, however, is whether investors exist that are interested in not only financial profits but also in social well being, and so the report also looks into how fund managers might be convinced to invest in public service provision for those 1 to 2 billion people without adequate water, sanitation, energy and health care.

“We are proposing that civil society activists and fund members put pressure on pension and sovereign wealth funds, possibly working with governments, to commit some funds for ‘experimental’ purposes,” Bélanger Dumontier said.

This would require a major collaborative effort among researchers, NGOs, legislators and activists in both the North and the South, as well as the creation of a global coalition that can pressure funds, governments and even the United Nations to commit to a set of development goals and targets that allocate public funds for public services.

Education and information campaigns, which would inform the public as well as fund members about the nature of current investments and strategies of the funds, are one strategy the report suggests.

It also recommends lobbying legislators and politicians to change existing laws or impose new legal requirements on existing funds.

Fund members should, insists the report, use their power to actively contribute to the funds’ policy strategies and put pressure on the funds’ boards to redirect the investments.

(END)

Grasshoppers and other insects might become the next generation of drones, if researchers with the Israeli research centre Technion who are studying the movements of these insects succeed. Ultimately, they hope to be able to remotely control where the insects fly.

Since their introduction more than a half-century ago, drones have dramatically increased in complexity, as the Israeli research would suggest. But they also remain as controversial as they are fascinating, as a new book by Medea Benjamin launched in New York in early May, “Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control,” demonstrates.

The book is the result of in-depth research on drones, their proliferation and their impact on civilians. It also presents an overview of the controversy surrounding, opposition to and activism against this technology. Benjamin is an activist in and leader of the peace movement and the struggle for human rights and social justice.

Today, fifty countries have acquired regular drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles, for either military or civilian use, or for research purposes, says Benjamin. The U.S. Army introduced drones during World War II and the Korean War, but it was not until the Vietnam War that drones were used to gather intelligence.

During the Balkan Wars in the 1990s, the Predator drone –the most common type of unmanned aircraft – was equipped with its own satellite communications system, which was used to gather information on refugee flows and Serbian air defences.

The first ‘killer drones’

During the NATO Kosovo campaign in 1999, however, drones were equipped with missiles, “transforming them from spy planes into killer drones”, Benjamin writes.

Drones currently serve a wide range of purposes, and the title of one chapter in Benjamin’s book aptly reflects the proliferation of drone technology: “Here a drone, there a drone, everywhere a drone”.

The U.S. police use drones to track drug smugglers and to monitor the U.S.-Mexican border, while German police sent out an unmanned vehicle the size of a child’s toy airplane during an anti-nuclear march in 2010.

U.S. “killer drones”, however, have been in use since 2002, primarily in Afghanistan, and since 2004 they have been used in Pakistan. They are also used in Yemen.

In Pakistan, there have been 321 drone strikes since then (as of May 2, 2012), only 52 of which occurred under the administration of former president George W. Bush. An astonishing 269 have been carried under the Obama administration, who took office in 2009.

While the United States has claimed that 175 Al Qaeda suspects are hiding in Pakistan, drone strikes there have killed more than 3,000 people, mostly civilians.

These numbers were presented during the book’s launch by Shazad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer, activist and head of the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, which has conducted research in Pakistan and is trying to obtain compensation from the United States for the families of the unintended victims of drone strikes.

The failures of ‘precision’ weapons

In his talk, Akbar made clear that high-technology precision arms are not always as precise as they’re proclaimed to be. He brought up several examples of whole families that had been blown up by U.S. drones.

The “collateral damage” – military speech for unintended killings – is only one of many objections to drones listed by Benjamin and Akbar.

Another area of concern is the bypassing of legal and judicial instruments, where instead of arresting suspects and bringing them to court, the United States simply kills them.

Akbar told the story of a man called Tarik, an Al Qaeda suspect who was killed by a drone in Pakistan’s capital city of Islamabad. “Tarik was only one mile away from the U.S. embassy. He could have been arrested and even be tortured in Guantanamo, at least that would have saved his life,” Akbar pointed out somewhat sarcastically.

“This is just racist,” Benjamin said, adding that the U.S. government thought it was legitimate to kill non- U.S. citizens in order to save the lives of its own people.

Whether drones are necessary for national security is a hotly contested idea, with opponents arguing that drones actually increase the danger for the United States in several ways, one of which is by turning people against the country.

In her book, Benjamin also deals with the issue of the legality of unmanned aerial vehicles.

According to Benjamin, former president George W. Bush deemed it a legal tool in the nation’s war on terror. Under President Obama, the U.S. drone program, overseen by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), has been stepped up significantly.

“It breaks my heart to see how we have let Barack Obama get away with operating beyond the confines of international law,” Benjamin said during the book launch.

Only recently did John Brennan, the U.S. official in charge of counterterrorism, formally admit that the United States engages in attacks using armed drones.

According to Brennan, who spoke on April 30 at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington, the drone programme is “legal”, “ethical” and “wise”.

He added that the United States was respecting national sovereignty and international law, but he refused to apologise for civilian killings resulting from attacks by this deadly weapon.

(END)

Two years ago, Ashkan Delanvar was arrested by Iranian authorities and held in poor conditions for 14 days before he was sentenced to 10 months in prison.

Criticising authorities online has now become so dangerous that 2011 was considered the deadliest year for online activists in many countries. Credit: Antonella Beccaria/CC BY 2.0

His crime? The student, blogger and computer technician had provided software to overcome the authorities’ internet filters and trained people how to use it.

Delanvar was eventually able to flee the country and is currently seeking asylum in Germany. He was the first person identified by the rights group Amnesty International who was tried and sentenced to prison under the 2009 Law on Cyber Crimes in Iran.

“Bloggers see it as their duty to inform other people, but in Iran (they) are seen as a threat to the government because they provide analysis of daily life and politics, and reflect news that is blocked,” Delanvar told Amnesty.

On May 3, World Press Freedom Day, human rights defenders say that journalists and cyber activists are being increasingly persecuted in countries where press freedom is either not a constitutional right or the law is simply ignored.

2011 deadliest year yet

According to Amnesty International, criticising authorities online has now become so dangerous that 2011 was considered the deadliest year for online activists in many countries.

With social media now firmly established as a tool to organise protests such as during the Arab Spring, netizens – citizens who use social media networks such as twitter or facebook – are facing the same dangers as journalists.

“Since the beginning of 2012, one journalist is killed every five days,” Delphine Halgand, Washington director of Reporters Without Borders, said during a reception to celebrate World Press Freedom day on Thursday.

Another 161 journalists have been jailed, together with 121 netizens, for conducting their rights and duties around the world, she said.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists puts the number even higher: 179 journalists detained in 2011, a 20 percent increase over 2010 and the highest level since 1990.

Governments pulling the plug

State authorities from China to Syria and Cuba to Azerbaijan are blocking search engines, charging exorbitant fees for internet access, torturing activists to obtain their facebook and twitter passwords, and passing laws that control what people can talk about online.

This was clearly evident during the Arab Spring, especially in Egypt, where the government shut down mobile phone services and the internet.

“The opening of the digital space has allowed activists to support each other as they fight for human rights, freedom and justice around the world,” said Widney Brown, senior director for international law at Amnesty International, in a press realease.

“States are attacking online journalists and activists because they are realizing how these courageous individuals can effectively use the internet to challenge them,” he added.

Yet journalists, bloggers and activists are coming up with new ways to bypass internet controls and ensure their voices are heard by millions across the world.

In some countries, activists have switched to using the twitter and facebook accounts of their imprisoned or murdered fellows in order to protect their own identities.

A global trend

This year already has seen autocratic regimes across the former Soviet Union strengthen their grip on power, choking dissent, muzzling criticism and clamping down on protest.

In Belarus, which held widely criticised presidential elections at the end of 2011, several prominent opposition activists and leaders of non-governmental organisations have been put behind bars.

Hungary’s parliament passed strict media-muzzling legislation in 2011 which was condemned by fellow member states of the European Union.

In Latin America, Honduras and Mexico are the most dangerous places for journalists.

Dina Meza, a Honduran journalist and human rights activist, received a series of threats of sexual violence against her in early 2012. On Apr. 6, she was walking in her neighbourhood with her children when she noticed two men taking photos of them.

On Apr. 28, the body of journalist Regina Martinez was found at her home in Veracruz, Mexico. Regina was a reporter with political magazine Proceso and, for over three decades, had reported on issues of insecurity, drug trafficking and corruption. Local authorities vowed to investigate the killing.

“Whilst new media is being more and more used in Mexico, last year also saw that this new era was facing attacks which hadn’t been imagined only a few years ago,” Karin Deutsch Karlekar, project director of freedom of the press of the non-governmental Freedom House, based in New York, told IPS.

Since 2000, at least 65 journalists have been killed in Mexico and at least 10 remain missing, according to human rights organisations.

On Thursday, the eve of Press Freedom Day the bodies of two news photographers were found dismembered in the eastern Mexican state of Veracruz.

“We have seen some decline of freedom of the press in México. We are very worried about that. One of the main issues is the impunity, because the killings are not investigated,” said Deutsch Karlekar.

The Mexican Senate has approved a new law to protect journalists and human rights activists who receive threats, but the situation remains dire.

“Impunity for those who attack or threaten journalists remains disturbingly prevalent,” United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said at a World Press Freedom day reception at U.N. headquarters Thursday.

“The U.N. will now intensify our efforts to help member states strengthen legal frameworks and investigate attack against journalists,” Ban said.

*With additional reporting by Rousbeh Legatis at the United Nations.

Human development and biodiversity will not be the only focus of the Rio+20 Earth Summit in June, for which representatives of hundreds of states and non- governmental organisations (NGOs) will gather to discuss sustainable development.

The delegates will also deal with the wellbeing of farm animals and sustainable farming, thanks to the efforts of the London-based NGO World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA), the governments of the G-77 countries, Switzerland and New Zealand.

Together, they have helped to draft a part of the Rio+20 outcome text, to be negotiated in June, to “call upon all States to prioritise sustainable intensification of food production through increased investment in local food production”, especially in regard to women, smallholders, youth and indigenous farmers.

The draft text further demands an increase in “the use of appropriate technologies for sustainable agriculture”.

The WSPA, which sees itself not only as an animal advocacy group but also as one that supports sustainable agriculture, defines sustainable livestock production as part of a food and agriculture system that is ecologically sound, equitable for farmers and rural communities and other sectors of society, and humane in its use and treatment of livestock.

The livestock sector provides livelihoods to about 1.3 billion people worldwide – more than one-sixth of the global population – according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

A significantly higher proportion – about 70 percent – of the world’s rural poor, however, relies on livestock production for their livelihoods.

Industrial farming, which threatens the livelihoods of these people, especially smallholders, while simultaneously damaging socio-economic systems and the environment, came about during the second half of the twentieth century.

“The ancient contract of responsible stewardship, once honored by farmers for thousands of years, was replaced by intensive factory farming methods that exchanged ethical farming practice for increased economic profitability,” said a 2010 article in the journal “Holistic Nursing Practice”.

Profit came “at the expense of animal welfare and the increase in potential adverse health consequences to the general public”, it added.

“Factory farming is not sustainable,” Dinah Fuentesfina of WSPA Thailand told IPS. “Factory farming also is bad for the climate,” she added.

Raising cattle, in fact, not only generates more greenhouse gases than does driving cars, according to a 2006 FAO report, but it is also a major contributor to land and water degradation.

“Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems,” said Henning Steinfeld, the report’s senior author.

“The Rio+20 conference is about poverty reduction. If you really want to achieve that, there is no way to leave out such an important sector as the agricultural or the livestock sector,” Stephen Chacha of WSPA’s Tanzania branch told IPS.

“Governments really need to put more emphasis on this,” he added.

In order to convince the governments represented at the Earth Summit to take livestock farming into account, the NGO has collected more than 100,000 signatures in more than 165 countries in a petition addressing John W. Ashe and Sook Kim, the chairs of the Earth Summit.

On April 25, the petition was handed over to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development Executive Coordinators Elizabeth Thompson and Brice Lalonde, who agreed to forward the signatures to Ashe and Kim.

The petition is part of the WSPA’s pawprint campaign to put farm animal welfare on the agenda of Rio+20.

Growing movements around the globe point to the importance of animal welfare both for the sake of the climate and environment as well as for the sake of people’s health. Numerous studies and groups have found links between animal welfare and food safety.

“Standards of animal welfare and animal management practices including feeding, house and husbandry can impact…the prevalence of food-borne diseases,” says the website of the European Food Safety Authority.

Although a gradual cultural shift is evident, with consumers growing more conscious of their food choices, the movement has yet to overpower industrial farming, and progress in the fight to create a sustainable and ecologically sound agricultural system can be painfully slow.

On Thursday, food chain giant Burger King announced a major policy shift, pledging to use 100 percent cage-free eggs in its more than 7,200 fast food restaurants throughout the United States – by 2017.

Those restaurants represent more than half of the 12,500 Burger King locations in 81 countries and territories worldwide, although the corporation did not indicate it would also replace caged eggs in other countries.

A Catholic priest from the Philippines, a mother of three from Argentina, and the founder of the NGO Friends of Lake Turkana in Kenya all have one thing in common: they have helped to motivate their respective local communities to protect the natural environment around them and to stand up for their rights.

On Monday, Edwin Gariguez, Sofia Gatica and Ikal Angelei, along with three other grassroots activists, were declared winners of the so- called “Green Nobel”. Ma Jun from China, Evgenia Chirikova from Russia and Caroline Cannon from the U.S. also took the 2012 Goldman Environmental Prize.

Water is a special focus of this year’s prize, with two of the winners being outstanding river activists.

For one of them, Ikal Angelei, the prize comes at an important juncture in her struggle to stop construction of the massive Gibe III Dam in Ethiopia, which would block access to water for indigenous communities around Lake Turkana.

With a projected cost of 1.7 billion dollars, the Gibe III dam upstream of the Omo River, which began construction in 2006, is the single largest infrastructural work being undertaken in Ethiopia and is supposed to provide 1,800 MW of electricity.

The Omo River provides up to 90 percent of the total water flowing into Lake Turkana, whilst the other 10 percent is provided by the Turkwel and the Kerio.

According to Jeffrey A. Gritzner, a geography professor at the University of Montana in the U.S., there will be a drop in the lake level of up to 10 to 12 metres once the dam opens.

“Even a slight drop of as little as five metres would cause cessation of flooding, leading to a reduction in the lake’s water which will result in rising salinity. This will cause a destruction of significant commercial interests around the lake which include fishery and tourism,” said Gritzner, who is part of the Africa Resources Working Group (ARWG).

Ikal Angelei founded the group Friends of Lake Turkana (FoLT) in 2008, and in response to her advocacy, last August, the Kenyan parliament passed a unanimous resolution for the government to demand an independent environmental assessment from Ethiopia.

UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee also responded to her appeals by passing a resolution to halt dam construction until further investigation.

The World Bank and African Development Bank are considering funding the transmission line that would justify completing the dam, and Ikal is now pressuring the banks to stay out of this project.

Chinese journalist and director of the Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs (IPE) Ma Jun was awarded the 2012 Goldman Environmental Prize for creating unprecedented environmental transparency in China and empowering Chinese citizens to demand justice for industrial pollution.

In 1999, Ma Jun published the book “China’s Water Crisis”, which exposed the pollution and the impacts of dams and diversions on the health of rivers across China.

“Ma Jun and Ikal Angelei live and work in very different contexts and take quite different approaches in their work on behalf of healthy waters and healthy communities,” Jason Rainey, executive director of San Francisco based NGO International Rivers, told IPS.

“Yet, they are both creative strategists who effectively articulate the crises effecting the rivers of the world, and have a sharp understanding of how to work ‘upstream’ to influence the decision- makers who are often far removed from the impacts of their decisions.

“Both recognise that ecological and economic ‘sustainability’ cannot be achieved if society fails to take care of our living rivers,” he added.

The Goldman Environmental Prize was established in 1990 by San Francisco civic leader and philanthropist Richard N. Goldman and his wife, Rhoda H. Goldman, who is a descendent of Levi Strauss.

Richard Goldman founded the insurance company Goldman Insurance and Risk Management, and with his wife he established the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund in 1951.

The prize is awarded to six persons each year, one in each of the world’s six inhabited continental regions (Africa, Asia, Europe, Islands and Island Nations, North America, and South and Central America), and has so far been given to more than 150 people from more than 80 countries.

The “Green Nobel” has been given to other river activists before, including Chinese journalist Dai Qing won the Goldman Prize in 1993, primarily for her authorship and organising to bring transparency and critique to the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China.

Chilean environmentalist Juan Pablo won the prize in 1997 due to activism against the ecological damages from a series of dam building projects at the Biobío River.

Water privatisation has been proven not to help the poor, yet a quarter of all World Bank funding goes directly to corporations and the private sector, bypassing both governments and its own standards and transparency requirements in order to do so, says a new report released Monday.

People in many developing countries often lack access to clean water, but the approach to remedy this problem has shifted in recent years to rely more on the private sector. Yet, as this new report and several other watchdog groups have shown, the change has been more harmful than helpful.

Corporate Accountability International, the U.S.-based non-governmental organisation that published the report, has called on the World Bank to stop funding the private water sector and start redirecting its money to public and democratically accountable institutions.

The release of the report, entitled “Shutting the Spigot on Private Water: Case for the World Bank to Divest”, coincides with the start of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund‘s 2012 Spring Meetings.

The World Bank’s private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), has spent 1.4 billion dollars on private water corporations since 1993, according to the report.

As of January 2013, that investment will increase to 1 billion dollars per year. The report also says that the IFC is attracting 14 to 18 dollars of follow-up private investment for every 1 dollar it directly invests.

This money helps explain why the World Bank and the IFC continue to fund private water corporations, even though roughly one third of all private water contracts signed between 2000 and 2010 have failed or are in distress – four times the failure rate of comparable infrastructure projects in the electric and transportation sectors, according to CAI.

“A tremendous failure”

“Rather than focusing on guaranteeing access to clean and affordable water, the World Bank has promoted measures that will cost consumers more money for water,” says a 2010 report from the NGO Food and Water Watch.

The high cost can also be defined in human terms. That same report pointed out how poor water quality and sanitation bring about gastrointestinal diseases and parasites that are “the leading cause of illness and death throughout the developing world”.

CAI also criticises several different conflicts of interest, such as the World Bank’s ownership of water corporations while simultaneously presenting itself as an impartial advisor. Ultimately, “the World Bank has been the engine behind this corporate takeover of water systems and services,” its website states.

The World Bank encourages countries to either privatise their water systems or modify pre-existing public ones with a focus on profit, says CAI. As a result, the World Bank paves the way to further privatisation. It also pushes for infrastructures that offer advantages to “large corporate users over individuals and communities”.

“In the midst of a world water crisis, the World Bank is squandering resources needed to save millions of lives,” said Kelle Louaillier, executive director of CAI. “Its charter is to aid those in the greatest need, but its financial stake in private water corporations is creating perverse incentives which undermine the bank’s own mission.”

According to CAI, funding the privatisation of water hurts the world’s poorest and can also have negative effects on water access and human rights, such as in Manila, Philippines.

Here, the World Bank not only advised the government, but it also helped design the privatisation of water there.

“Years later, many residents still don’t have water, and affordability problems have gone through the roof,” Shayda Naficy, CAI’s water expert, said.

“The IFC is calling it a success, which it has been for its investors. But it’s been a tremendous failure from the perspective of everyday residents and the right to water.”

A World Bank spokesperson told IPS that the report misrepresented the World Bank’s role and did not elaborate. “IFC’s financing and advisory services have provided clean water and sanitation to over 20 million people as of 2011,” the spokesperson said.

World Bank reform?

Given that the bank is expected to vote on a new president this year – current president Robert Zoellick will step down in June – Louaillier suggested, “With a change at the top comes an opportunity for the bank to change course as it has before.”

One year ago, Zoellick declared that the world needs a “new geopolitics for a multi-polar economy, where all are fairly represented in associations for the many, not clubs for the few”.

In his view, the 2009 global financial crisis marked the definitive end of longstanding paradigms of the global economy and development. As a result, categorisations such as first or third world, donor or recipient, leader or led, “no longer fit”. Yet the reforms considered by the bank itself do not represent the same ideas.

Three candidates are on the list of Zoellick’s possible successors, with two of them non-U.S. candidates.

One is Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the other former Colombian finance minister Jose Antonio Ocampo.

Whilst both have been raking in high-profile endorsements, the United States is claiming its right to nominate the new World Bank president, who has always been a U.S. citizen.

The candidate of the United States is the South Korean-born Jim Yong Kim, who is currently president of Dartmouth University and former head of the HIV/AIDS department at the World Health Organisation.