Attempts to genetically modify food staples, such as crops and cattle, to increase their nutritional value and overall performance have prompted world-wide criticism by environmental, nutritionists and agriculture experts, who say that protecting and fomenting biodiversity is a far better solution to hunger and malnutrition.

Two cases have received world-wide attention: one is a project to genetically modify bananas, the other is an international bull genome project.

In June, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced that it has allocated some 10 million dollars to finance an Australian research team at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), working on vitamin A-enriched bananas in Uganda, by genetically modifying the fruit.

On the other hand,  according to its project team, the “1000 bull genomes project” aims “to provide, for the bovine research community, a large database for imputation of genetic variants for genomic prediction and genome wide association studies in all cattle breeds.”“It makes little sense to support genetic engineering at the expense of (traditional, organic) technologies that have proven to substantially increase yields, especially in many developing countries” – ‘Failure to Yield’, a study by the U.S. Union of Concerned Scientists

In both cases, the genetic modification (GM) of bananas and of bovines is an instrument to allegedly increase the nutritional value and improve the overall quality of the food staples, be it the fruit itself, or, in the case of cattle, of meat and milk.

James Dale, professor at QUT, and leader of the GM banana project, claims that “good science can make a massive difference here by enriching staple crops such as Ugandan bananas with pro-vitamin A and providing poor and subsistence-farming populations with nutritionally rewarding food.”

In the ‘1000 bull genomes project’, the scientists involved (from Australia, France, Germany, and other countries) have sequenced – that is, established the order of – the whole genomes of hundreds of cows and bulls. “This sequencing includes data for 129 individuals from the global Holstein-Friesian population, 43 individuals from the Fleckvieh breed and 15 individuals from the Jersey breed,” write the scientists in an article published in Nature Genetics of July 13.

The reactions from environmental activists, nutritionists, and scientists could not be more critical. The banana case has even prompted a specific campaign launched in India – the “No to GMO Bananas Campaign”.

The campaign, launched by Navdanya, a non-governmental organisation founded by the international environmental icon Vandana Shiva, insists that “GMO bananas are … not a solution to” malnutrition and hunger.

The group argues that so-called bio-fortification of bananas – “the genetic manipulation of the fruit, to cut and paste a gene, seeking to make a new or lost micronutrient,” as genetic expert Bob Phelps has put it – is a waste of time and money, and constitutes a risk to biodiversity.

“Bananas are highly nutritional but have only 0.44 mg of iron per 100 grams of edible portion,” a Navdanya spokesperson said. “All the effort to increase iron content of bananas will fall short the (natural) iron content of indigenous biodiversity.”

The rationale supporting bio-fortication suggests that the genetic manipulation can multiply the iron content of bananas by six. This increase would lead to an iron content of 2.6 mg per 100 grams of edible fruit.

“That would be 3,000 percent less than iron content in turmeric, or lotus stem, 2,000 percent less than mango powder,” the spokesperson at Navdanya said. “The safe, biodiverse alternatives to GM bananas are multifold.”

Scientists have indeed demonstrated that the GM agriculture has so far failed to deliver higher yields than organic processes.

In a study carried out in 2009, the U.S. Union of Concerned Scientists demonstrated that the yields of GM soybeans and corn have increased only marginally, if at all. The report, “Failure to Yield“, found out that increases in yields for both crops between 1995 and 2008 were largely due to traditional breeding or improvements in agricultural practices.

“Failure to Yield” also analyses the potential role in increasing food production over the next few decades, and concludes that “it makes little sense to support genetic engineering at the expense of (traditional, organic) technologies that have proven to substantially increase yields, especially in many developing countries.”

Additionally, the authors say, “recent studies have shown that organic and similar farming methods that minimize the use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers can more than double crop yields at little cost to poor farmers in such developing regions as Sub-Saharan Africa.”

Yet another ground for criticism is the fact that Bill Gates has repeated an often refuted legend about the risk of extinction of the banana variety Cavendish, grown all over the world for the North American market.

In his blog, Gates claims that “a blight has spread among plantations in Asia and Australia in recent years, badly damaging production of … Cavendish. This disease, a fungus, hasn’t spread to Latin America yet, but if it does, bananas could get a lot scarcer and more expensive in North America and elsewhere.”

The risk of extinction, however, is practically inexistent, as the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), among other institutions, had already shown in 2003.

“What is happening is the inevitable consequence of growing one genotype on a large scale,” said Eric Kueneman, at the time head of FAO’s Crop and Grassland Service. That is, monoculture is the main cause of the fungus.

“The Cavendish banana is a “dessert type” banana that is cultivated mostly by the large-scale banana companies for international trade,” recalled Kueneman, today an independent consultant on agriculture.

On the other hand, as FAO numbers show, the Cavendish banana is important in world trade, but accounts for only 10 percent of bananas produced and consumed globally. Virtually all commercially important plantations grow this single genotype, and by so doing, make the fruit vulnerable to diseases. As FAO said in 2003, “fortunately, small-scale farmers around the world have maintained a broad genetic pool which can be used for future banana crop improvement.”

Actually, the most frequent reasons for malnutrition and starvation can be found in food access, itself a consequence of poverty, inequity and social injustice. Thus, as Bob Phelps, founder of Gene Ethics, says, “the challenge to feed everyone well is much more than adding one or two key nutrients to an impoverished diet dominated by a staple food or two.”

The same goes for the genome sequencing of bulls and cows, says Ottmar Distl, professor at the Institute for Animal Breeding and Genetics at the University of Hannover. “Some years ago, we thought that it would impossible to obtain more than 1,000 kilograms of milk per year per cow,” Distl said. “Today, it is normal to milk 7,000 kilograms, and even as much as 10,000 kilograms per year.”

But such performance has a price – most such “optimised” cows calve only twice in their lives and die quite young.

And yet, the leading researchers of the “1000 bull genomes project” look at further optimising the cows’ and bulls’ performance by genetic manipulation of the cattle in order to, as they say in their report, meet the world-wide forecasted, rising demand for milk and meat.

Distl disagrees. “Whoever increases the milk output hasn’t yet done anything against worldwide malnutrition and hunger.” In addition, he warned, the constant optimisation of some races can lead to the extinction of other lines, thus affecting the populations depending precisely on those seldom older races.

It goes without saying that such an extinction would hardly serve the interests of the world’s consumers.

More than six years after the global financial crisis broke out, European Union (EU) countries continue to protect banks and investments funds from tougher rules, despite abundant evidence of recurrent criminal or reckless activities in the sector, and new accumulation of enormous financial risks.

The latest in a string of scandals involving banks was the revelation in May that at least seven European banks or banks operating in Europe had colluded to falsely fix the Euro Interbank Offered Rate (Euribor).

The Euribor is a daily reference rate, published by the European Banking Federation, based on the averaged interest rates at which Eurozone banks offer to lend unsecured funds to other banks in the euro wholesale money market.

“The (European) commission has concerns that … three banks may have taken part in a collusive scheme which aimed at distorting the normal course of pricing components for euro interest rate derivatives,” the body said in a statement issued May 22.

The three banks in question are JPMorgan Chase, HSBC and Crédit Agricole. Another four banks (Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland and Société Générale), also accused of misconduct concerning the Euribor, reached a settlement with European regulators.“Another typical example of the lack of will among European governments to improve regulations and reduce risks in financial markets is the long and so far fruitless debate on the introduction of a very low tax on financial transactions, also known as the Tobin tax”

Because of such behaviour, bank managers have since 2009 again earned the nickname of ‘banksters’, a combination of banker and gangster coined in 1937 at the height of the global economic crisis of the time.

Experts and analysts complaint that despite such criminal activities, and the new accumulation of financial risks, European governments have during the past six years repeatedly intervened to stop far-reaching rules to regulate operations in the financial sector.

The list of actions taken by European governments to spare banks and investment funds from new rules is long. In December last year, the French government managed to arrange for French banks to pay a lower-than European average contribution to the E.U.-created national deposit insurance.

“To obtain that, France used the friendly support of Michel Barnier, the French European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services,” says Burkhard Balz, German member of the European Parliament (EP).  Balz is a member of the conservative Christian Democratic Union.

“Over the last six years we have seen a pattern of behaviour concerning efforts to introduce a Europe-wide financial regulation,” Udo Bullmann, a German Social Democratic member of the European Parliament, told IPS.

This pattern goes as follows, Bullmann added: “First, the European Commission makes a timid regulating proposal. The European Parliament takes the proposal over and toughens its content. But then it is the turn of governments, and they water the proposal down, even under the original commission level.”

Independent experts agree. “The European Union is indeed a community of states, but at the end of the day, the member states compete against each other instead of cooperating to put forward a comprehensive set of rules for financial markets,” says Joost Mulder of Finance Watch, an independent association set up in 2011 to act as a public interest counterweight to the powerful financial lobby.

“What the individual states want is to protect their countries’ banks and investment funds,” Mulder added.

Opposition to far-reaching financial regulation comes from practically every state, but in changing roles. Britain usually opposes rules that would affect operations at the London financial market. It also has consistently opposed establishing limits for bonuses for financial managers, one of the main reasons for risky investments and moral hazard. Germany and France prefer to pass modest laws on financial aspects, to avoid approving a tougher European binding regulation.

In September last year, Finance Watch published a report on the planned European banking union and the bank reform in the European Union, and concluded that “despite its intention, (it) will fail to prevent European citizens from bearing the losses of failed banks in the event of a systemic banking crisis unless there are meaningful structural and capital reforms to Europe’s largest banks.”

The banking union, which should start operations in November, is supposed to create a safety net to minimise the risk of further European Union taxpayer-funded bailouts.

The banking unions foresees a new European authority, the so-called Single Resolution Mechanism (SRM), with the power to wind up or restructure failing banks.

According to Finance Watch, “The SRM has the right objectives: namely to enable the orderly resolution of banks in participating member states, and to weaken the interdependencies between financial institutions and their sovereigns.”

But the watchdog group does not see “how these objectives can be met without reducing the regulatory incentives that favour sovereign debt, and without a structural reform of bank activities to make bail-in and bank resolution credible.”

According to International Monetary Fund (IMF) figures, in the aftermath of the global financial meltdown of 2008, industrialised countries bailed out private banks for 1.75 trillion dollars, some 1.3 trillion euros. This amounts to the one-year salary of more than 42 million people earning net average German wages of around 25,000 euro per year.

The global bank rescue weakened the European states involved, in particular Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, and triggered, among others, the present sovereign debt crisis, with its social and human costs.

Another typical example of the lack of will among European governments to improve regulations and reduce risks in financial markets is the long and so far fruitless debate on the introduction of a very low tax on financial transactions, also known as the Tobin tax, after it was suggested by Nobel Laureate economist James Tobin in 1972.

In September 2011, the European Commission proposed the introduction of the tax within the 27 member states of the European Union by 2014. According to the original proposal, the tax would only impact financial transactions between financial institutions charging 0.1 percent against the exchange of shares and bonds and 0.01 percent across derivative contracts.

According to the initial Commission estimates, the tax could raise up to 57 billion euros per year. But, as of June 2014, that is, almost three years after the proposal, only 11 E.U. member countries appear ready to introduce the tax. Furthermore, there is wide disagreement among these 11 countries about which transactions should be taxed, and how high the levy should be.

Sven Giegold, German Green Party member of the Euro-Parliament and expert on international finance, even goes as far as saying that “France, nominally a strong supporter of the Tobin tax, actually did kill it.”

In May, during negotiations at the European Council, the French government opposed raising the Tobin tax on most financial derivatives and on government bonds. Giegold said that “France obviously fears that if taxed, banks wouldn’t buy government bonds.”

After such objections, Giegold complained, “the original tax on financial transactions has been devaluated to a useless levy to be paid only by small savers.”

A new scheme to avoid new rules for financial markets in Europe is to make them part of supra-regional binding projects, such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), currently under negotiation between the European Union and the U.S. government.

According to Finance Watch, “there is no proven case for including financial services in the TTIP.” “We are concerned that the EU’s approach to regulatory cooperation (within the TTIP negotiations related to financial markets) will encourage convergence around the lowest common standards, not the highest,” Thierry Philipponnat, Finance Watch’s secretary, said during a recent hearing at the European Parliament.

For Philipponnat, “it is difficult to see how the inclusion of financial services in the European Union-U.S. free trade agreement negotiations, and especially the parts on regulatory cooperation, will not lead to a ‘race to the bottom’ in financial services regulation.”

For many months, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) debates between the European Commission (EC) and the U.S. government were a matter for insiders.

In July 2013, government officials and representatives of international corporations agreed behind closed doors that such a free trade agreement (FTA) would be a great step forward towards homogenising social, environmental, health, industrial, and labour standards across the Atlantic Ocean.

Until recently, only a handful of civil society organisations, mostly based in Brussels, questioned the wisdom of such an agreement, and revealed the secret dealings of governments, in particular those referring to the so-called ‘investor protection clauses’ and the downgrading of social and environmental standards in Europe, to the detriment of European consumers and parliaments.

But, under pressure from civil society groups, the EC agreed earlier this year to launch a process of public consultation on the TTIP. And, since early May, after demonstrations by numerous consumer, environmental protection and labour groups, the TTIP has become a theme debated across society, and criticism of the way the EC and the U.S. government, in close cooperation with corporate lobbyist groups, have managed the secret negotiations is now general.Criticism of the way the EC and the U.S. government, in close cooperation with corporate lobbyist groups, have managed the secret negotiations is now general

By early May, some 500,000 people in Germany alone had signed a petition against the TTIP, complaining that the agreement would “undermine democracy and the rule of law… endanger our health… and (would be) practically irreversible.”

Even sectors of governments have become outspoken critics of the TTIP. During a conference on the TTIP held in Berlin on May 20, the German Minister of State for Culture and Media, Monika Gruetters, said: “We Europeans have plenty to lose,”  if the FTA with the United States were to forbid state subsidies for theatre, music, public radio, and cinema production.

Gruetters even used a slogan typical of anti-globalisation activists, by saying that “culture is not a commodity.” That’s why, Gruetters explained, European states subsidise cultural production, “to permit arts to be critical, complex, (and) heterogeneous.”

However, she said, for the U.S. government such subsidies are “protectionist measures.” To confirm this view, Gruetters quoted a “recent conversation” she had with the U.S. ambassador to Berlin, John B. Emerson.

“State privileges for cultural production belong to the European self-conception,” Gruetters insisted. “We oppose a new deregulation of culture (as demanded by the TTIP) because we are afraid we would lose our unique cultural landscape.”

German Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy, Sigmar Gabriel, has also adopted the critical position of civil society groups against the investor protection clause that makes up the bulk of the TTIP. According to this clause, transnational corporations would be allowed to challenge national labour, health, environmental and other standards before non-governmental tribunals.

The deliberations of such tribunals are secret and their verdicts are definitive and cannot be appealed against.

Pia Eberhardt, expert for trade and investment at the Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), says that transnational companies around the world “are using such clauses contained in practically all FTAs to claim compensations for perfectly legitimate government policies to protect health, the environment and other public interests – because they claim these policies have the indirect effect of undermining corporate profits.”

The Brussels-based CEO, an anti-lobbying watchdog organisation, is one of the leading civil society groups questioning the TTIP. It has forced the European Commission to reveal secret protocols of the deliberations between European and U.S. government officials, and has also shown that the EC most of the time adopts the positions presented by industrial lobbyists as its own.

A typical example of such corporate actions against states is the ongoing lawsuit that U.S. tobacco company Philip Morris, based in Switzerland, launched in 2010 against Uruguay. Philip Morris is demanding two billion dollars as compensation for alleged economic losses from Uruguay, claiming that the South-American country’s anti-smoking legislation devalues its cigarette trademarks and investments.

In a similar case, the oil and gas company Lone Pine Resources is suing the Canadian government for 250 million dollars for, as the company’s lawsuit puts it, the “arbitrary, capricious and illegal revocation of (Oil Pine Resources’) valuable right to mine for oil and gas under the Saint Lawrence River.”

In 2012, Quebec’s regional government suspended fracking, the controversial method to exploit shale gas fields. According to Lone Pine Resources, the measure violates Chapter Eleven of the North American FTA.

For civil society groups in Canada, such a lawsuit is “outrageous”.

“Based on the principle of precaution, Quebec government’s response to the concerns of its population is appropriate and legitimate,” said Martine Châtelain, president of Eau Secours!, the Quebec-based coalition for a responsible management of water. “No companies should be allowed to sue a State when it implements sovereign measures to protect water and the common goods for the sake of our ecosystems and the health of our peoples.”

For Maritta Strasser, leading activist behind the German petition against the TTIP, the investor protection clauses are “a tool to blackmail legitimate governments and parliaments.”

Strasser’s fears are well founded. As a former Canadian government official has been quoted as saying, “I’ve seen the letters from the New York and DC law firms coming up to the Canadian government on virtually every new environmental regulation and proposition in the last five years. They involved dry-cleaning chemicals, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, patent law. Virtually all of the new initiatives were targeted and most of them never saw the light of day.”

For Eberhardt of CEO, the law suits against governments prove that FTAs “create two different systems of justice. One, full of privileges for corporations, and another one for the rest of the society.”

Many consumer groups are also concerned that the TTIP would facilitate the import of U.S. food stuffs, that otherwise would not satisfy present European health standards, into the European Union, such as genetically modified agricultural products, or hormone- or chemically-treated meat and poultry.

By now, even for German Economic Affairs Minister Sigmar Gabriel, “it is unconceivable that an investor protection clause would annul German or European laws.” Gabriel also opposes non-governmental tribunals ruling over conflicts between governments and corporations.

“Both the United States and Europe are democratic state structures that guarantee the rule of law,” Gabriel said. There is no reason, then, “to allow special jurisdiction tribunals to rule over our laws and over our social, environmental and health standards.”

He also demands that from now on the negotiations between the EU and the U.S. government be “carried out in the most transparent way,” adding that “if the European Commission believes that it can leave the national parliaments out of the negotiations, than the TTIP will be a sound failure.”

This has not, however, dented European Trade Commissioner Karel de Gucht’s interpretation of the negotiations. “The U.S. government demands that the TTIP negations remain confidential and that the agreement contains an investor protection clause,” he told the German ZDF public television channel.

The result is that most of the protocols of the negotiations continued to be classified, as demanded by the U.S. government, and only private corporations and a restricted number of European government officials and members of the European Parliament have access to the documents.

2012 Catalan independence protest. Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Kippelboy

By Julio Godoy
BARCELONA, May 24 2014 (IPS)

The debate on Catalonian efforts to become a sovereign state independent from Spain has become the centre of the otherwise tedious European Parliament elections campaign this month.

In December last year, the Barcelona-based regional Catalonian conservative government, the Generalitat, announced that it would carry out a referendum to decide whether Catalonia will remain part of the Spanish state, or declares independence. The local parliament has scheduled the referendum for November 9, 2014.

“Spain is undoubtedly a democracy … but it doesn’t have the same depth as British democracy” -- Artur Mas, President of Catalonia’s Generalitat
For the conservative central government in Madrid, such a referendum cannot take place because the national constitution does not foresee such popular consultations.

Catalonian independence activists argue that the region, Spain’s leading industrial cluster, pays too many taxes to the central budget, in exchange for low quality public services. Yet another argument in favour of independence is that the central government insists on imposing Castellan culture to the detriment of local traditions, in particular the use of the Catalonian language.

According to official 2014 figures, Catalonia is the fourth richest region in Spain, as measured by the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. However, Catalonia pays the largest contribution to the Spanish central budget, only after Madrid. To make this imbalance worse, the region’s benefit is a relatively low investment from Madrid.

In 2010, for example, Catalonia contributed almost 62 billion Euros in taxes to the central budget, but only received public investments of over 45 billion, amounting to a deficit of 8.5 percent of the Catalonian GDP. This imbalancehas been growing since 2007.

As Elisanda Paluzie, professor of economics at the University of Barcelona, puts it, Catalonia feels like a “a cash cow (which) pay(s) Swedish-level taxes in exchange for sub-par public services.”

Artur Mas, president of the Generalitat, and leading political figure supporting the Nov 9 referendum, has called this fiscal imbalance “discriminatory, unfair, and arbitrary”.

In a document prepared by the Generalitat, and released in October last year, the Barcelona government estimated that the central government in Madrid owes more than nine billion Euros to Catalonia, as a consequence of its non-compliance with investment agreements with the Catalonian region.

Despite years of Catalonian efforts to obtain a new fixing of this ratio and of the central Spanish budget, or to legally give priority to Catalonian culture and traditions, in particular the use of the Catalan language, so far nothing has changed, in particular because the central authorities in Madrid have always rejected such proposals.

In 2010, the Madrid Constitutional Court invalidated 14 articles and established an official interpretation of 27 other declarations contained in the so-called Catalonian Statute, a sort of Catalonian constitution, which had been approved by the Catalonian parliament and by a popular referendum in 2006.

In particular, the Madrid court annulled a statute article calling the Catalonian language “the preferred” language in the region.

Madrid authorities also deny the fiscal imbalance, and dismiss the Catalonian claims as “lies”. Spanish Minister of Finance Cristobal Montoro said in October last year that “Madrid pays Catalonia’s bills”.

Even Socialist opposition leaders in Madrid reject the Catalonian claims. Joaquin Leguina, former president of the Madrid regional government, proposed paying “the nine billion Euro that Catalonia demands, on the condition that the Catalonian people shut their mug for ever.”

In other declarations, local leaders have called the Catalonian independence campaign “nationalist vomits”.

As the European Parliament elections campaign, being held May 22-25, reaches an end, Spanish political parties have seasoned their electoral efforts with insulting allusions to Catalonia. María Dolores Cospedal, secretary general of the conservative Popular Party (PP), which rules the central government in Madrid, accused Artur Mas of “fomenting hatred and national division with his lies and frauds.”

Mas replied: “Catalonian is a peace loving nation which only wants to vote and to listen” to the people’s will

For Catalonian people, such debates “only heat the tensions” already in place among Spain’s regions. Dani, owner of a small enterprise in Gracia, a popular district in Barcelona, complained that “it should be possible to discuss such a matter in a civilised democratic way, without exchanging insults.

Dani, who has relatives in Britain, said that he has been following the debates about the independence referendum in Scotland, scheduled for September 18. “People in England and in Scotland are exchanging the pros and cons on the question of Scottish independence, but they don’t call each other liars or dictators.”

“Nobody in England questions the right of Scottish people to decide,” Dani added. A popular Catalonian slogan in favour of the referendum says “In a democracy, it is normal to vote”, a reaction to Madrid’s rejection of the November referendum.

Artur Mas has also referred to these differences in public. In an interview, Mas said, “there’s a more profound democratic will in Britain than in Spain. I regret that because I would love to say that in Spain there is the same talent for democracy or the same feeling for democracy.”

“Spain is undoubtedly a democracy,” Mas added. “But it doesn’t have the same depth as British democracy.”

The Scottish and Catalonian quests for independence constitute a major challenge for the European Union because, if the separatists win, the body would have to decide whether it accepts the new states as members. In the Catalonian case, European authorities would also have to decide whether the new state may keep the Euro as its national currency.

For Catalonia, with strong trade links with the rest of Europe, a loss of such status would represent a substantial economic setback. Both Scottish and Catalonian independence activists have made it clear that they want the eventual new states to remain as members of the European Union.

So far, the authorities in Brussels have tried to avoid taking sides in the debates. But José Manuel Barroso, president of European Commission, warned Catalonia and Scotland alike that, in case they become independent states, they would have to leave the EU and ask to be re-admitted.

However, there is no legal cadre sustaining such position. As Artur Mas pointed out in the interview, “there are no precedents. In the EU treaties, and more precisely in the Lisbon Treaty, there’s no consideration of cases” such as the Catalonian and Scottish quests for independence.

Indeed, no European law-maker has ever considered the possibility that a region within an EU member state would declare independence from that state but ask to remain part of the body.

Mas noted that European authorities could not take away “the rights of citizenship held for many many years by Scottish citizens or Catalans; citizenship rights that can’t be annulled or swept aside overnight.”

Women carrying bananas in the North Atlantic Autonomous Region of Nicaragua. Credit: Germán Miranda/IPS

By Julio Godoy
ROME, Jul 14 2013 (IPS)

FAO is currently supporting two seemingly contradictory projects in Caribbean countries: while one seeks to promote organic production, the other involves the use of chemical fungicides to fight black sigatoka, the worst enemy of this key food crop.

The project aimed at assisting organic banana growers is being carried out by FAO (the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization) in the Dominican Republic, “because the country is a small producer on a global scale, and is thus well-suited to meeting the highly specialised demands of this market,” said Kaison Chang, an economist, trade specialist, and secretary of the FAO Intergovernmental Group on Bananas and Tropical Fruits.

“As small producers, the Dominicans cannot compete with the big producers, like the Ecuadorians, whose production costs per unit are considerably lower,” Chang told Tierramérica*.

This is why banana farmers in the Dominican Republic need to increase their yields and improve their crop management techniques, in order to maximise their comparative advantages.

As part of the project, FAO distributed some 900,000 protective sheets to around 780 banana farmers in the Dominican Republic.

The sheets are placed around the banana bunches while they are maturing, and can help reduce the number of bananas unsuitable for export by 40 to 50 percent.

The Dominican Republic exports almost all of its organic banana production to Europe, and especially Germany. In 2012, organic banana sales totalled 300,000 tons.

The share of organic bananas within the country’s total banana exports rose from 32 to 58 percent between 1999 and 2007.

Bananas are the world’s most exported fresh fruit, both in volume and value. They are primarily exported from developing countries to industrialised countries, which account for almost 90 percent of imports.

Bananas are an essential source of income and employment for hundreds of thousands of households in Latin America, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and West Africa, according to the World Banana Forum.

However, agrochemical-intensive production on large-scale plantations, distortions along the value chain and declining producer prices have given rise to environmental and social challenges. Meeting these challenges requires the involvement of all stakeholders in the banana sector worldwide, which is what led to the creation of the Forum.

One of these environmental challenges is the disease known as black sigatoka.

In June, FAO organised an intensive training workshop for technicians from Dominica, St. Lucia, Grenada and St. Vincent and the Grenadines aimed at “promoting the effective use of fungicides to control and eradicate” the disease.

Black sigatoka is caused by a fungus (Mycosphaerella fijiensis Morelet) and considered the most devastating of banana diseases. It is harmful to most species and varieties of bananas and plantains. It attacks the plant’s leaves, affecting photosynthesis and thereby reducing yields.

“Black sigatoka causes losses of up to 57 in the weight of the fruit and provokes premature ripening,” said Humberto Gómez, a specialist in technical innovation to boost productivity and competitiveness at the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) in Trinidad and Tobago.

The disease was first recorded in 1963 in Fiji, where a similar fungal disease, yellow sigatoka, was initially detected in 1912. In Central America, it appeared in 1972 in Honduras, and subsequently spread to other countries. According to FAO, banana and plantain exports from St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Guyana have fallen by 90 to 100 percent as a result of black sigatoka.

Gómez described the current situation in the Caribbean as “disastrous”. “It is an emergency,” he told Tierramérica.

To confront the black sigatoka outbreak, the technicians attending the FAO workshop “were trained to assess the disease’s reaction to specific ingredients of fungicides, in order to develop more effective treatment plans,” he added.

He recognised, however, that the use of fungicides is counterproductive, because the fungus is highly adaptable and can build up resistance to the combination of available fungicide chemical products. Moreover, the Caribbean’s high humidity and rainfall provide an ideal breeding ground for the disease.

A successful campaign against black sigatoka requires continuous monitoring of soil moisture, better irrigation and drainage, improving plant nutrition through the use of fertilisers, reducing the density of plantations by spacing trees farther apart, and quick removal of affected leaves, according to technical specialists.

“But for now, conventional banana producers in the Caribbean are satisfied with their models of production, using chemicals,” said Chang, who did not take part in the workshop.

“Organic production is very demanding and makes it impossible to use the majority of chemical products traditionally used to control diseases,” he added. “As a result, the costs of organic banana production are very high, which reduces profits for the plantations.”

Another method, proposed by Gilberto Manzo-Sánchez, a professor and researcher at the University of Colima, Mexico, involves the development of natural products from microorganisms that can be used as a preventive measure by boosting resistance to the disease.

“This way we could reduce the use of fungicides, saving up to 50 percent of their cost while helping to protect the environment,” Manzo-Sánchez told Tierramérica.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Excerpt:

Argentine economist Raúl Benítez highlights continuing inequality in Latin America. Credit: FAO/Giulio Napolitano

By Julio Godoy
ROME, Jun 18 2013 (IPS)

Judging by the accolades and diplomas handed out to 11 Latin American and Caribbean countries by FAO, it would be easy to conclude that the region has taken a giant leap towards eradicating hunger.

This is the benign face of the fight against hunger in Latin America, together with the strong economic growth experienced by many countries in the region.

But a closer look at the food and agriculture scenario reveals another side: lingering inequality, marked by the increasing influence of agribusiness, in which a few giant corporations wield enormous control and power.

Argentine economist Raúl Benítez, head of the FAO office for Latin America and the Caribbean, said that “although our continent has made great strides against hunger, it is still the most unequal region in the world.”

“Of the nearly 900 million hungry people in the world, 50 million are in Latin America or the Caribbean,” Benítez told IPS at the 38th FAO Conference meeting in Rome Jun. 15-22.

Hunger has even reared its head once again in countries like Argentina, whose population was among the best-fed on the planet for a considerable part of the 20th century.

“Today in Argentina there are many children suffering from malnutrition caused by the soy boom,” complained Silvia Ribeiro, Latin America director of the Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC), referring to Argentina’s top export.

“For more than 20 years, with the support of every administration, Argentina has allowed massive expansion of soy cultivation, displacing cattle as well as other crops, and even transforming the local diet,” said Ribeiro, whose organisation monitors the impact of emerging technologies and corporations on biodiversity, agriculture and human rights.

Today, “the poor in Argentina don’t drink cow’s milk but soy milk, and they don’t eat beef but soy substitutes, a monotonous diet that causes malnutrition,” she said.

According to Ribeiro, who is also at the Rome conference, FAO’s praise for Latin America’s achievements against hunger “is based on a biased and misleading analysis.”

“It’s as if FAO only saw GDP, which does reflect greater agricultural production, but closed its eyes to the fact that this production is socially excluding and ecologically unsustainable, and only benefits big multinational corporations that produce for export,” she said.

But Benítez said “FAO can only call attention to these phenomena and propose corrective measures; states are sovereign, and they may or may not adopt policies in line with our proposals.”

Ribeiro also highlighted the increasing use of genetically modified crops. “The most serious case is that of Mexican maize, because the government has approved (experimental plots) of transgenic maize seeds by companies like Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer,” the activist said.

Maize is an essential staple in the diet of the people of Mesoamerica, the region encompassing southern Mexico and Central America. Moreover, Mexico “is the birthplace” of maize, Ribeiro noted. In this country, “maize is more than food, it is an essential pillar of national identity and tradition,” she added.

Countries in similar positions, such as China in the case of soy, and parts of southeast Asia in the case of rice, prohibit the cultivation of transgenic varieties to safeguard their biological heritage, said Ribeiro. “Mexico should follow their lead with maize,” she argued.

Recent research has found that transgenic maize may be harmful to health. “A group of French scientists has shown that transgenic maize causes cancer in rats,” said Ribeiro.

“Another study, for the European Food Safety Authority, discovered that most of the transgenic varieties approved for commercial use in the United States (54 out of 86) contain virus genetic material that was not observed when they were approved, and may have harmful effects in plants, animals and people,” she said.

“At FAO we are aware that land grabbing and large agribusiness concerns can cause social exclusion and be environmentally unsustainable,” said Benítez. “Governments must weigh the short-term benefits against the long-term costs, which may be much higher, and make decisions accordingly.”

A healthy, delicious dish featuring a “misfit” carrot. Credit: Courtesy of Culinary Misfits

By Julio Godoy
BERLIN, May 28 2013 (IPS)

The criticism and concern voiced by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and non-governmental agencies over the huge amounts of food wasted in Europe have begun to inspire action, particularly in the form of private initiatives.

In Berlin, Tanja Krakowski and Lea Brumsack, product design specialists turned cooks, created Culinary Misfits as a way to promote the consumption of vegetables whose physical appearance does not meet the “aesthetic” standards of supermarkets and large food stores.

These “misfit” vegetables include overly large zucchini (courgette), potatoes and other tubers in “odd” shapes, heads of cabbage whose leaves have split due to excess humidity, and carrots with two or more roots.

Although these vegetables are otherwise perfectly healthy and of good quality, they are considered unfit for sale and discarded.

“City dwellers have adopted totally insane criteria for consumption,” said Christian Heynmann, a farmer from the outskirts of Berlin. “A zucchini can be no longer than your hand, a cabbage that has split because of too much moisture is inedible, and carrots with three short roots instead of one long, perfectly conical root have no place in the kitchen,” he commented.

“But if you cut up and eat a zucchini that is 30 centimetres long and compare it with another that is 10 centimetres long from the same crop, or a carrot with three ‘legs’ and another that is long and conical, you will see that they look the same and taste the same,” Heynmann told Tierramérica.

Heynmann collaborates with Krakowski and Brumsack, supplying them with vegetables that he would otherwise have to throw away, since supermarkets and other retailers would not accept them for sale.

“We created Culinary Misfits to use these ‘misfits’ in the kitchen on a daily basis, and to show the public the true face of nature, as well as dispelling this false belief that prevails in the city, that good vegetables have to be symmetrical, small and round,” Krakowski explained to Tierramérica. “We need to learn to eat the whole harvest.”

“We are not professionally trained cooks, but we can show the public that it is possible to prepare delicious meals with seemingly unfit vegetables,” added Brumsack. “Our goal is to recreate a sustainable culinary culture.”

Brumsack, Krakowski and Heynmann are just three faces of an emerging movement in Europe that is fighting back against the senseless waste of food.

Many farmers use “deformed” vegetables to produce juice or sell them to the kitchens of restaurants connected to supermarket chains.

This movement seems to have been spurred by, among other factors, the alarming revelations in “Global Food Losses and Food Waste”, a report published by FAO in May 2011.

“Roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year gets lost or wasted,” the report states. “Industrialised and developing countries dissipate roughly the same quantities of food – respectively 670 and 630 million tons.”

In Germany, 11 million tons of food is thrown away annually, which works out to 135 kilograms per capita, according to figures from the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection from March 2011.

Roughly 81.6 kilograms of food per person is wasted at the household level, while the remainder is thrown away by industry, trade and large-scale consumers.

Fruits and vegetables are the foods that are most commonly wasted.

As a result of the European economic crisis, there are a growing number of people, especially young people, salvaging still-edible food from supermarket and restaurant dumpsters.

This has led governments and supranational organisations to launch awareness-raising campaigns.

European Union (EU) Environment Commissioner Janez Potočnik has warned that unless eating and food shopping habits change, the bloc could waste more than 120 million tons of food in 2020, which is equivalent to 30 percent of regional food production.

But some organisations have been working for years to tackle the problem of food waste. In 2007, the non-profit Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP) of the United Kingdom launched the Love Food Hate Waste campaign, financed by the governments of Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland, in cooperation with companies and non-governmental organisations.

The initiative includes a rigorous inventory of the food and drink thrown away daily by restaurants. As a result, many of these businesses have changed their routines and begun to reduce serving sizes and garnishes.

Some restaurants, particularly those which specialise in all-you-can-eat buffets or attracted customers with promises of extra-generous portions, have begun to charge diners a surcharge for the food that they leave on their plates.

Measures like these, combined with food price inflation, seem to have had a beneficial effect.

According to figures from WRAP, annual UK household food and drink waste fell from 8.3 million tons to 7.2 million tons between 2008 and 2011.

This avoided waste “would fill Wembley Stadium to the brim,” Richard Swannell, the director of design and waste prevention at WRAP, told Tierramérica.

But the squandering of food and the amount of waste produced by the food industry, especially in terms of packaging, continue to be major challenges.

“Food waste is an enormous problem that needs tackling throughout the whole supply chain,” said Swannell. “By working with companies and industry bodies, we can help consumers to take advantage of recent innovations and keep food fresher for longer.”

In other words, eating everything that is harvested – no matter what it looks like – is not enough. It is also crucial to revolutionise food marketing, reduce packaging, and re-educate the public so that they only buy the amount of food they really need.
* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Excerpt:

Whenever hot water from the kitchen tap or the bathroom shower goes down the plughole, a substantial amount of heat energy goes with it. In some German buildings this is being recovered and used to heat buildings in the winter and run air conditioning systems in the summer, representing a real energy-saver.

Equipment converting drainpipe heat to central heating for the Fürth town hall in Germany. Credit: Ricarda Hager – Courtesy Municipality of Fürth

The energy, recovery of which allows reduction of fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, flows in the drains. That is precisely where the city government of Fürth, in the southeastern German state of Bavaria, went to find it.

For the past two years, the city government has been using energy from wastewater in pipes close to the town hall to help heat the building during the winter. Recovering it is inexpensive and only requires simple heat-exchange and heat transmission methods.

“Drain pipes in the vicinity carry at least 150 litres of water per second, at a temperature of between 12 and 16 degrees Celsius, enough to provide heating for the town hall,” Katrin Egyptiadis-Wendler, the engineer in charge of buildings administration in the city of Fürth, told IPS.

“In the winter of 2010, in the framework of the German law promoting renewable energy, we changed the old heating system and installed a new, very efficient gas-fired system, and a heat-exchange and transmission mechanism for the drains,” Egyptiadis-Wendler said.

The essential requirements for recovering energy from wastewater are a constant flow of water through the pipes — at least 15 litres per second — and a minimum temperature of 12 degrees. “The wastewater must not be mixed with rainwater, which is too cold to use,” the engineer stressed.

In Fürth, the city government installed a series of heat-exchangers along a 70-metre length of drain pipes, where they absorb heat from used water. By means of a heat pump, the temperature is raised to 50 degrees and then injected into the heating system for the town hall, built over 170 years ago.

“The only additional energy we need is the electricity for the pump,” said Egyptiadis-Werner. “The system provides 70 percent of the heating for the building. Only when the weather is extremely cold do we need to use the gas-fired system we installed in 2010.”

The energy savings mean that each year, 130 fewer tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2, a major greenhouse gas) are emitted, and 14 fewer tonnes of fine particles. Moreover, 65 percent of the annual 85,000 cubic metres of gas used before the system was installed is now saved.

The total investment in the new town hall heating system, amounting to 550,000 euros (733,000 dollars) will be completely amortised by 2018.

So far only some 30 buildings in Germany, particularly large shopping malls and hotels, are using similar systems to recover energy from drain pipes, or from the heat generated within the facilities.

But according to the German Association for Water, Wastewater and Waste (DWA), they could be installed at many more sites, because the requirements for good results are relatively simple to satisfy: a heat source nearby, to avoid heat losses over distance, a constant volume of warm water, and a reasonable minimum temperature.

“It’s very easy to absorb heat from pipes, whether they are for wastewater or for air circulation. However, one must assess whether the energy gain justifies the investment required,” Johannes Lohaus, the manager of DWA, told IPS.

The method can be reversed in the summer. Heat absorbed by used water in drain pipes, or from the buildings themselves, can be used to feed air conditioning systems and cool the buildings.

A furniture and decoration store in Berlin belonging to the IKEA chain, which covers an area of 43,000 square metres, uses a system identical to that employed by the Fürth town hall in winter, absorbing heat from wastewater pipes. And in summer it applies the reverse process, extracting heat from the building and transforming it into cold water to feed the air conditioning system.

“This way, we don’t need conventional air conditioning and we reduce our CO2 emissions by 700 tonnes a year,” Simone Setterberg, an IKEA spokeswoman, told IPS.

However, there is a negative aspect to heat recycling: cooling the drain pipes endangers the bacteria that provide a natural filter for the elimination of impurities from wastewater.

“Bacterial metabolism is more efficient when the temperature of the wastewater is higher,” Lohaus, of DWA, explained.

“If the wastewater is cooled too much by the process of heat exchange, the bacteria do not survive, and aeration of the wastewater must be carried out in order to achieve the same level of cleansing as the bacteria provided, which implies higher energy consumption,” he said.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the World Bank.

Jaime Valladares in Guatemala City uses four solar heaters to provide hot water to his renters. Credit. Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Julio Godoy, Edgardo Ayala, and Danilo Valladares
BERLIN, Dec 27 2012 (IPS)

A recent agreement between El Salvador and Germany, with the latter supporting two renewable energy projects that would increase installed capacity in the Central American country by 94.2 megawatts by 2013, points to a promising alliance for carbon-free energy.

The first such project is the 14.2-megawatt ‘15 de Septiembre’ solar plant, slated to be one of the biggest of its kind in Latin America. The second initiative is the expansion of the ‘5 de Noviembre’ hydropower plant to increase capacity to 179.4 megawatts.

The two plants would supply 129,000 homes with power, according to an official communiqué from the Río Lempa Executive Commission, a government agency.

According to José Francisco Rodríguez, an expert on climate change in El Salvador’s Environment Ministry, “A policy launched this year by the national energy council has two objectives: reduce dependence on oil and by-products and keep the environmental impacts of energy production to a minimum.”

Since 2005, El Salvador has had in place a law to promote renewable energy sources, offering incentives in the form of tax exemptions for projects generating anything between 10 and 20 megawatts of power.

Geothermal sources currently provide 23 percent of all energy produced in El Salvador. A study published this year by the Japan International Coordination Agency (JICA) estimates that geothermal energy could generate an additional 89 megawatts by 2020.

“In addition, wind power is expected to generate 60 megawatts, and two hydroelectric plants are to be expanded: the abovementioned ‘5 de Noviembre’ will increase production by 80 megawatts, and El Chaparral, currently under construction, by 65 megawatts,” Rodríguez added.

Obstacles to production

Recent collaborations between German and Central American experts on renewable energy made one thing clear: governments in Central America will need to launch comprehensive industrial policies if they are to harness the full capacity of renewables.

Several Central American engineers from the private sector, in Germany for an educational tour sponsored by the German government back in October, told IPS that a lack of coordination between different sectors – such as education, finance, and technology imports – is hindering efforts to expand and optimise the renewables sector.

Germany has valuable lessons to share in this regard. Last year Chancellor Angela Merkel announced plans to phase out nuclear power by 2020, thereby further forcing innovation in the renewable energy sector.

The government hopes to increase energy supplied through offshore wind turbines to 25,000 megawatts by 2030. In terms of solar power, the country has an installed production capacity of more than 25,000 megawatts.

A year ago, Germany added 7,500 megawatts of capacity to the existing solar park, by utilising an eight-billion-dollar government subsidy.

But Germany’s model is not easy to replicate in Central America.

Raffaele Trapasso, administrator of the Rural Development Programme at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and author of a new study, ‘Linking renewable energy to rural development’, told IPS that industrial policies in the developing world need to take a holistic approach to renewables.

However, so far, “National and regional governments such as those in Central America tend to treat renewable energy as a single policy issue… deploying large-scale installations dealing with a small number of developers whose only interest is to get subsidies, grants or tax credits.”

In Guatemala, where energy innovation is based on the 2003 Law of Incentives for the Generation of Renewable Energy, production does not meet commitments on paper, despite regulations that ensure grants and tax and tariff exemptions.

José Granados, an expert in renewable energy sources, told IPS that Guatemala only produces 853 megawatts of solar power, far below installed capacity. Geothermal potential is also strong at 1,000 megawatts but the country only produces 49.2 megawatts annually.

The gap between potential and actual production is similar in the case of biomass, solar and wind power, he said.

Claus Schieber, an engineer who has been promoting the use of solar energy in Guatemala for nearly 30 years, recently in Germany at the Berlin-based Renewables Academy (RENAC), told IPS that renewable energy practitioners are forced to jump bureaucratic hurdles and navigate a dearth of credit, poorly-qualified technicians, and high customs duties when importing technology.

Furthermore, he said, Guatemala’s education system churns out post-graduate renewable energy specialists, but does not do enough to train and educate technicians, electricians and plumbers.

“Many of my highest-qualified colleagues have to carry out even the most simple technical tasks, which robs them of time they could be using more efficiently in conceiving new systems and promoting new projects,” Schieber said.

Coordinated national action could also help Central American governments extend power to rural areas, which are largely cut off from the electric grid.

In Guatemala for instance, the ministry of energy and mines reports that only 82 percent of the population has access to electricity. The 18 percent without power – about 530,000 households – are located in rural areas.

In El Salvador, only 83 percent of rural households have access to power, compared to 97 percent of urban dwellers.

The OECD reports that deployment of renewable energy into rural areas could benefit local communities, by providing affordable electricity and professional capacity building, as well as creating new revenue sources for the local governments, by increasing the tax base of their communities.

* Edgardo Ayala (San Salvador) and Danilo Valladares (Guatemala City) contributed to this article

The Desertec Industrial Initiative plans to install a network of solar thermal, photovoltaic, and wind plants across the Maghreb region. Credit: Green Prophet1/CC-BY-2.0

By Julio Godoy
BERLIN, Dec 12 2012 (IPS)

When the Desertec Industrial Initiative (DII), an alliance of 21 major European corporations, first unveiled plans to install a network of solar thermal, photovoltaic, and wind plants across the North African Maghreb region to generate electricity, the project was greeted as a ‘green utopia’.

Expected to generate 100 gigawatts by 2050, the project demanded an investment of 400 billion euros.

In a study released last summer, Desertec predicted that an integrated power system for Europe, the Middle East and North Africa would allow Europe to meet its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions reduction target of 95 percent in the power sector by importing up to 20 percent of its electricity from the Maghreb, thus saving 33 billion euros per year.

Meanwhile, the project would enable Middle Eastern and North African countries to meet their own energy needs using the abundant solar and wind resources in the region, and achieve 50 percent of CO2 reductions in the power sector despite a massive increase in demand.

The region would benefit from an export industry worth up to 63 billion euros per year.

Now, three years since the project was announced, the Desertec dream is yet to be realised, and euphoria has given way to harsh criticisms ranging from accusations of incompetence to shortfalls in corporate governance.

The project has been nicknamed “desperate tec” by internal staff members discontent with its trajectory.

Huge potential

In a so-called White Book on the project, the DII claimed, “The long-term economic potential of renewable energy in EUMENA (Europe, Middle East and North Africa) is much larger than present demand, and the potential of solar energy dwarfs them all.”

Based on figures by German research institutes and the Club of Rome, the report estimates, “From each square kilometre (km²) of desert land, up to 250 gigawatts of electricity can be harvested each year using the technology of concentrating solar thermal power.”

Indeed, every square kilometre of land in MENA “receives an amount of solar energy that is equivalent to 1.5 million barrels of crude oil. A concentrating solar collector field with the size of Lake Nasser in Egypt (Aswan), of some 6,000 square kilometres, could harvest energy equivalent to the present Middle East oil production”.

Morocco, which will host the pilot project, has been especially keen to see the venture come to fruition, since it will have a huge impact on the local economy, particularly with regard to job creation in the renewables sector.

Back in 2009, ‘green networks’ were created in several cities around the kingdom, including in Casablanca. Comprised of small firms run by young professionals, these networks were designed to create the necessary infrastructure for the project.

“We have created companies, received training, but in reality nothing has happened yet,” Abdellah Benjdi, one of the young company heads, told IPS.

Ordinary citizens suffering from astronomical electricity bills in Morocco are eagerly awaiting the so-called ‘green utopia’.

But by all indications, their patience is not about to be rewarded.

Endless obstacles

Experts first received confirmation of Desertec’s difficulties on Nov. 7 in Berlin, during the official presentation of the first solar thermal, photovoltaic and wind plants to be installed in the southern-central Moroccan province of Ouarzazate, which are scheduled to deliver electricity by 2014.

Although construction plans have technically been sealed, they still depend on Spanish approval – Spain being the primary partner in the project – to allow the electricity generated at the site to be transported to Europe.

The Spanish government, battered by a grave economic recession, has so far been unable to confirm its support for the project, a situation that is unlikely to change given that Spain is a net exporter of electricity to Morocco and would not like to see this trend reversed by successful implementation of the pilot project in Ouarzazate, experts say.

The DII alliance includes the leading German Deutsche Bank and the Spanish transmission agent and grid operator, TSO Red Eléctrica.

“The business case for a Desertec Reference Project, prepared by (us) and the Moroccan Solar Agency Masen, has been extensively discussed for the past two years with Spanish companies, the TSO Red Eléctrica and the European Commission, and declared feasible,” DII CEO Paul van Son said during the presentation in Berlin.

The first project in Morocco led by the German energy giant RWE would comprise an installed capacity of 100 megawatts of photovoltaic and wind power.

A second project, using solar thermal plants and overseen by Saudi Arabia’s ACWA Power International, will have an installed capacity of 160 megawatts.

Both plants are expected to be functional by 2014.

Van Son confirmed, “Investors have been found, initial subsidies are available, and industry wants to get involved.” But Spain refused to send representatives to the presentation in Berlin, and has so far failed to undersign the Morocco project.

Van Son is convinced that “the other partners in this negotiation, from Morocco and the EU, will be able to convince Spain,” since the Spanish government, too, stands to benefit from the project.

Lack of coordination

But Spain’s refusal is just one example of the enormous political, technical and financial coordination hurdles the venture must overcome.

Another indication of these difficulties came in late October, when the German electronics giant Siemens announced its withdrawal from the alliance, despite being a founding member of the DII back in 2009.

This move has been widely interpreted as proof that Desertec is failing.

According to Friedrich Fuehr, founding member of the board of directors at the Desertec Foundation, the DII “has been following the wrong strategy”.

Fuehr told IPS that DII’s main responsibility since 2009 was to conceive a political roadmap that could overcome all international coordination difficulties and solve the pressing questions of how subsidies and taxes would be implemented.

Fuehr, a prestigious German lawyer and business consultant, said that “a coalition of such powerful and capable private companies such as the Deutsche Bank, UniCredit, RWE and SCHOTT Solar should be able to formulate within three years the political framework they need to make Desertec come true”.

“But we are still waiting for this framework,” Fuehr said. “Instead, the DII has concentrated all its action in launching one single model project (in Ouarzazate).”

Fuehr lamented that the energy revolution the world needs in order to confront the realities of global warming “is already happening. But Desertec is not involved in it”.

*Abderrahim El Ouali contributed to this report from Casablanca.

A riot policeman in Greece attacks a protester during an anti-austerity rally in Athens. Credit: PIAZZA del POPOLO/CC-BY-2.0

By Julio Godoy
BERLIN, Nov 16 2012 (IPS)

The austerity programmes being rolled out in virtually every member state of the European Union (EU) – particularly in Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy – have failed to reach their stated objective of consolidating public finances in order to solve sovereign debt crises.

Instead, these programmes – which entail massive public spending cuts in sectors such as education, health and governance – are “leading to collective folly” and even to “a social breakdown” across the continent, according to numerous economic experts.

Far from solving the debt crisis, as promised, the current fiscal consolidation plans will result in higher debt-GDP ratios in the EU in 2013, according to recent research.

Several reports have now confirmed what economists and activists warned months and even years ago: that the economic crisis, triggered by the financial collapse of 2007-2008 and the subsequent state-sponsored bailout of banks and investment funds, has resulted in higher unemployment and poverty rates in every country.

According to figures published by the official European statistics office, Eurostat, youth unemployment in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain is presently above 30 percent.

The situation is particularly difficult in Greece, where youth unemployment has more than doubled since 2008, to reach 55.4 percent in 2012. In Spain, where a 37 percent youth unemployment rate was the norm in 2008, the crisis has rendered over 50 percent of the youth labour force jobless.

Further deterioration of the social climate in Greece, where unions have orchestrated a wave of general strikes against yet another bout of state budget cuts, this time worth 17 billion dollars, augurs ill for the future of the Union under the shadow of austerity.

In its newest Global Prospects Report, released on Nov. 5, the London-based Centre for Economic and Business Research (CEBR) predicts that the Eurozone recession will continue through 2013, with only “marginal growth … likely” in 2014.

According to the CEBR, the outlook is particularly calamitous in Greece, Italy, and Spain, with negative economic growth prospects. The report forecasts contractions of gross domestic product (GDP) in all three countries for 2013, of seven, 1.8, and 2.2 percent respectively.

“The economic situation in some parts of Europe is moving from bad to catastrophic,” Douglas McWilliams, chief executive of CEBR and a co‐author of the report, told IPS. “There is a danger that the economic problems will spill over into social breakdown in many areas of Europe as unemployment soars and governments run out of money.”

Yet another analysis of the economic and social situation in Europe, released Nov. 1 and authored by two leading economists at the London-based National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR), goes even further, arguing that the austerity programmes across the continent are “self-defeating”.

The NIESR’s most benign scenario for 2013 forecasts a worsening of the present depression. According to their calculations, the austerity programmes will have a negative impact on the debt-growth ratios of 8.9 percent in Greece, 7.7 percent in Portugal, 4.2 percent in Spain, and 1.9 percent in Italy.

Jonathan Portes, co-author of the study, told IPS that his analysis of the present fiscal policies in Europe leads to the conclusion that “while in ‘normal times’, fiscal consolidation would lead to a fall in debt-GDP ratios, in current circumstances…fiscal consolidation is indeed likely to be ‘self-defeating’ for the EU collectively.”

Youth hit hard by austerity

In a study released late October, the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound), an autonomous body of the EU, emphasised, “The immediate future of Europe depends upon the 94 million Europeans aged between 15 and 29.”

According to the study, the youth unemployment rate was 33.6 percent (or 19.5 million people) in 2011, “the lowest level ever recorded in the history of the European Union”.

However, there is huge variation between EU member states, with rates varying from below 7 percent in Luxembourg and the Netherlands, to above 17 percent in Bulgaria, Ireland, Italy, and Spain.

“The consequences of a lost generation are not merely economic,” the Eurofound report warns, “but are societal, with the risk of young people opting out of democratic participation in society.”

The drain of an unproductive youth force – in terms of lost output – amounts to some 153 billion euros annually, or 1.2 percent of the EU’s GDP, according to the Eurofound report.

Stefano Scarpetta, deputy director for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), charged that Europe was “failing in its social contract” with the young, and warned that political disenchantment could reach levels similar to those that sparked the North African uprisings that have been dubbed the Arab Spring.

According to a report released last May by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), unemployment among young people in North Africa jumped five percentage points in 2011, to 27.9 percent.

“North Africa and the Middle East stand out in terms of their overall unemployment problem and these are the only two regions where the unemployment rate exceeded 10 percent in 2011 for the population aged 15 and above,” according to the ILO.

That situation is now true in various EU member states, where discontent has emerged in the form of ‘indignados’ in Spain and mass youth mobilisations in Portugal, Greece, and elsewhere in Southern Europe.

Peter Matjasic, president of the European Youth Forum, the representative body of more than 90 national youth councils and international youth NGOs, urged the EU to make the European “vision (of a social democratic society) a reality for a generation.”

Matjasic also demanded that expectations raised by the bestowal of the Nobel Peace Prize upon the EU this year be fulfilled. “The Nobel committee (talked) of the success of the ‘European dream’ and European leaders this week spoke about strengthening it. But without investing in youth now, it is in danger of becoming a lost dream.”

(END)

Most European nuclear facilities do not meet even minimum security standards. Credit: Monica S/CC-BY-ND-2.0

By Julio Godoy
BERLIN, Oct 16 2012 (IPS)

The so-called ‘stress tests’ on nuclear power plants in the European Union (EU) have confirmed environmental and energy activists’ worst fears: most European nuclear facilities do not meet minimum security standards.

The tests on 134 nuclear reactors operating in 14 EU member states were carried out in response to widespread concern among the public that an accident similar to the catastrophic meltdown of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power reactor in March 2011 could occur in Europe. According to the report, “EU citizens must… be confident that Europe’s nuclear industry is safe.”

But the findings of the report, released in Brussels on Oct. 4, suggest that, contrary to feeling safe, EU citizens have good reason to be afraid.

Only four countries “currently operate additional safety systems (e.g. bunkered systems or a ‘hardened core’ of safety systems) independent of the normal safety systems, located in areas well protected against external events.”

The stress tests also found that in “four reactors (located in two different countries), there is less than one hour available to operators to restore the safety functions in case of loss of all electrical power and/or ultimate heat sink.” Additionally, “in ten reactors, on-site seismic instrumentation is not installed yet.”

Only seven countries are in possession of “mobile equipment, especially diesel generators needed in case of total loss of power, external events or severe accident situations.”

Activists have also lamented that the tests were almost entirely theoretical, whose findings and recommendations are not legally binding.

The report itself states, “Peer review teams mainly composed of experts from the Member States visited 24 sites out of the total of 68, taking into account the type of reactor as well as the geographical location. Team visits to selected sites in each country were organised in order to firm up the implementation of the stress tests, without encroaching on the responsibilities of national authorities in the area of nuclear safety inspections.”

Report prompts action

The catastrophe of Fukushima, deemed the worst nuclear accident since the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, demonstrated that nuclear power plants must be protected even against accidents that have been deemed ‘highly improbable’.

In the EU’s own words, “Events at Fukushima revealed well-known and recurring issues: faulty design, insufficient backup systems, human error, inadequate contingency plans, and poor communications.”

The EU stress tests only confirmed what environmental groups and anti-nuclear power activists have feared for years. Now, these groups are using the results of the tests to call for a gradual phasing out of nuclear power across the continent.

Tobias Muenchmeyer, nuclear power expert for the German office of Greenpeace, told IPS, “The stress tests confirm that the warning systems are insufficient, and that the application of guidelines in cases of major accidents is also deficient. In such cases, nuclear power plants must be shut down.”

“The stress tests on nuclear power plants across Europe constitute a fire signal for a pan-European phasing out of nuclear power,” Muenchmeyer added.

At the very least, according to other activists and politicians, the results of the tests should lead to the immediate shutting down of all nuclear power plants situated in border regions, where nuclear accidents will not only impact the local environment and population but foreign regions and citizens as well.

Such measures would affect nuclear power plants in Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, the Netherlands, the Slovak Republic, and Romania.

Johannes Remmel, minister for the environment in the German federal state of North-Rhine-Westphalia, said in a press conference that all deficient nuclear power plants operating in border regions in Europe should be shut down, or, at least, not be allowed to function past their ‘operational life’.

“An accident with leakage of radioactivity would affect populations in several countries,“ Remmel said. He specifically referred to the Belgian nuclear power plants of Tihange and Doel, considered particularly fragile, which are situated between 60 and 120 kilometres away from German territory.

Similar calls were made in Austria referring to the nuclear power plants in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

The stress tests also shed light on just how expensive nuclear power plants can be.

The EU assures that “All participating countries have begun to take operational steps to improve the safety of their plants”, adding that “the costs of additional safety improvements are estimated to be in the range of 30 million to 200 million (euros) per reactor unit. Thus, the total costs for the 132 reactors operating in the EU could be in the order of 10 (to) 25 billion (euros)…over the coming years.”

These figures are based on estimates published by the French nuclear safety authority, which covers more than one-third of the reactors in the EU, and are subject to confirmation in national actions plans.

Experts like Jo Leinen, former minister of the environment in the German federal state of Saarland, and present member of the European parliament, believe this money can be put to better use.

“Either the EU and its member states invest in upgrading the nuclear power plants to make them safer, or they shut them down,” he told IPS. “If the upgrading actually costs 25 billion (euros), such a sum (could) be better invested in renewable energy sources.”

The accident at Fukushima showed that nuclear power plants must be prepared to withstand even the most improbable accidents.

Fukushima also reinforced popular opposition to nuclear power around the world. Meanwhile, numerous nuclear power plants currently under construction, such as the Olkiluoto 3 in Finland and the Flamanville power plant in France, are incurring skyrocketing costs.

Now, the EU stress tests have added yet another nail in the coffin of nuclear power.

The growing global share of renewable energy sources shows that a world free of nuclear power is possible and feasible. The share of nuclear power in global power generation has steadily declined from a historic peak of 17 percent in 1993 to about 11 percent in 2011.

(END)

The European Union is calling for protectionist measures against strong emerging economies. Credit: Jim Killock/CC-BY-SA-2.0

By Julio Godoy
BERLIN, Sep 28 2012 (IPS)

For many years, the European Union (EU) and its individual member states counted among the strongest advocates for free trade, arguing that it would boost economic growth and welfare both at home and abroad.

But since the global financial crisis in 2007 triggered a severe sovereign debt crisis and a general economic downturn across most European countries, EU institutions, individual governments and representatives of some industrial sectors are calling for protectionist measures, especially against competitors from strong emerging countries such as Brazil, India, the People’s Republic of China, and South Korea.

The European turnabout on international trade became evident this summer, when struggling German solar panel manufacturers and the new, Leftist French government of François Hollande urged the EU to launch protectionist measures against Chinese competitors and to suspend a recent free trade agreement (FTA) with South Korea.

French minister for industrial renewal, Arnaud Montebourg, denounced in early August “the unacceptable dumping (by) Korean auto manufacturers such as Hyundai and Kia, which are disloyal competitors to the French auto industry”.

“Europe may open its markets, but it should not give herself up” to disloyal economic competitors, Montebourg argued.

An assessment of current industrial trends suggests that Europe is indeed lagging.

The legendary French automaker Peugeot accumulated losses of 1.2 billion euros between July 2011 and June 2012, and has announced layoffs of more than 8,000 workers in France, and industrial relocations to Eastern European countries.

Meanwhile, Korean automakers have substantially increased their exports to Europe. According to European Commission figures released on Aug. 29, exports to France by Korean automobile maker Hyundai grew by 48 percent during the first half of 2012.

At the same time, European automobile exports to Korea fell by 13 percent in the same period.

However, these figures alone do not make a strong enough case for Europe’s calls for protectionism. According to the South Korean car maker Hyundai, well over half of the 400,000 automobiles it sold in Europe between January and July this year were actually fabricated in EU countries such as the Czech Republic.

Additionally, the FTA led only to a marginal fall of customs duties for small South Korean autos, from 10 percent before the agreement to 8.3 starting July 2011, and to 6.6 percent since July 2012.

Still, since other French industrial players – from manufacturers of ships and high-speed trains to constructors of nuclear power stations – have recently suffered severe contract losses against South Korean competitors, the latter has become the embodiment of a strong, allegedly disloyal competitor.

Additionally, according to the World Economic Forum’s newest global competitiveness report, South Korea’s economic performance in 2011 surpassed that of France.

But South Korea is not the only formidable threat.

Twenty-five European producers, led by German solar panel manufacturers facing bankruptcy due a strong Sino presence in the market, asked the EU to launch an anti-dumping measure against Chinese competitors, arguing that the government in Beijing gives local manufacturers illegal subsidies and allows them to sell their products below actual costs of production.

Such practices, according to the group EU ProSun – which represents the majority of solar industrial production in the region – constitute “unfair distortions” of international trade.

The World Trade Organisation itself allows governments to act against dumping where there is genuine injury to the competing domestic industry.

In 2011, the Chinese solar panel industry sold 60 percent of its global exports in Europe. On Sept. 6, the EU announced it would respond to ProSun’s demand by launching an official investigation into Chinese subsidies and trade practices.

Protectionism on the rise

The EU has also developed a new international trade concept, which, according to economic experts and analysts, clearly includes new protectionist measures likely to hurt emerging developing countries such as India, Brazil and South Africa (IBSA) as well as China, South Korea, and Vietnam.

In an analysis released last July, ‘The next decade of EU trade policy: Confronting global challenges?’, the London-based Overseas Development Institute (ODI warned, “There is a major concern that the EU is moving towards protectionism.”

The ODI paper analyses the proposals on international trade approved by the European Commission last May. This new agenda, expected to come into force in January 2014, foresees a reform of the EU’s generalised system of preferences (GSP), which has ruled European trade policies towards developing countries since 1971.

According to the new rules, several strong developing countries would be excluded from the GSP. Additionally, the new GSP would establish new standards on environment, labour, and social rules to be respected by developing countries trading with the EU.

In its analysis of this new GSP, the ODI report warns that the number of countries eligible for preferential trade with the EU will fall from 175 at present to about 80 in the near future.

Dirk Willem te Velde, head of the ODI’s International Economic Development Group and coordinator of the ODI report, is concerned that “the EU will retreat into protectionism, especially vis-à-vis the so called BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) with a range of trade-related economic policies.”

“Clearly, the GSP reform is likely to impose more trade barriers on a range of products and countries when they are not benefiting from a reciprocal Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the EU,” te Velde added.

“This does not offer the best value for EU consumers or developing country exporters,” he said.

Christopher Stevens, co-author of the study, said the new GSP regime would exclude all so-called Upper Middle Income Countries (UMICs) from the GSP, even for products where these countries are not competitive.

“The justification for the change is that the UMICs are sufficiently well integrated into the world economy (that they) do not need the GSP; and it will ease pressure on less competitive developing countries and hence focus the GSP preferences on the countries most in need,” Stevens added.

But neither claim stands up well to examination, Stevens argued. “UMICs are not a very close proxy for ‘the most competitive developing countries’,” he wrote in the report, concluding with some very telling examples of the coming discriminations: “Under the new regime, China will remain in the GSP but Cuba will be excluded; Indonesia and Thailand will remain in, but Gabon and Namibia will be out.”

(END)

Over a month has passed since the United Nations summit on sustainable development concluded in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, but the world still appears to be unaware of one of the most important statements made during the conference that drew some 50,000 delegates from all over the world.

Louise Kantrow, permanent representative of the International Chamber of Commerce, received thunderous applause when she told her audience on Jun. 19 that “businesses are taking the lead” in global negotiations on climate change and sustainable development.

For many observers, Kantrow’s blunt words highlighted just how strong of a grip private multinational companies have upon supposedly democratic processes.

In a statement aptly titled ‘Reclaim the U.N. from corporate capture’, the environmental organisation Friends of the Earth (FoE) complained that, “There are … real concerns about the increasing influence of major corporations and business lobby groups within the U.N.”

The report went on to detail the extraordinary level of businesses’ influence over the positions of national governments in multilateral negotiations.

“Business representatives dominate certain U.N. discussion spaces and some U.N. bodies; business groups are given a privileged advisory role; U.N. officials move back and forth (from) the private sector; and – last but not least – U.N. agencies are increasingly financially dependent on the private sector.”

One blatant example of this “corporate capture” of the U.N. is the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell, which, thanks to senior executive representatives in several corporate lobbying groups, was omnipresent during the Rio+20 negotiations.

Shell sent delegates to the discussions and round tables of the above-mentioned International Chamber of Commerce, the International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association, the U.N. Global Compact, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and the International Emissions Trading Association.

Yet, according to Paul de Clerck, campaign coordinator at FoE, “More than one year has passed since the U.N. presented its report on Shell’s pollution of Ogoniland (Nigeria). But we are still waiting for a comprehensive plan from Shell to clean up its mess.”

The first step recommended by the U.N. was the establishment of a one billion-dollar emergency fund to clean up the region.

“So far, Shell has committed to nothing, despite its participation in all kind of environmental and sustainable development debates,” Clerck told IPS.

“It is not acceptable that companies like Shell should be in the driving seat of processes for sustainable development,” Nnimmo Bassey, of FoE International, told IPS. “That is a recipe for disaster for our planet and peoples. Corporate polluters should not (be drafting) laws, they should face the laws.”

But the U.N. is not the only international institution threatened by the influence of multinational businesses.

Tightly woven groups of professional go-betweens and loyal supporters of multinationals who have passed through the revolving doors that link governments and private corporations are now facing growing scrutiny from civil society activists.

In Europe, the head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, is facing a formal inquiry by the European Union (EU) ombudsman because of his membership in a well-known international banking lobby group.

On Jul. 24, the ombudsman’s office announced that it was launching the investigation following allegations that Draghi’s membership in the so-called Group of 30 “is incompatible with the independence, reputation and integrity of the ECB”.

The EU has been the subject of multiple complaints, because, according to civil society groups, many of its agencies allow a revolving door to admit and dispatch senior executives who bring corporate agendas to democratic fora.

One of the leading critics of this policy, the Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), a multinational and public policy watchdog group, claims that many “senior European decision-makers leave office and go straight into lobby jobs, or (alternately) lobbyists join the EU institutions.”

In such cases, Olivier Hoedeman of CEO told IPS, “The risk of significant conflicts of interest is great, undermining democratic, public-interest decision making.”

According to Hoedeman, CEO “is working with the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation to challenge the revolving door and to demand that it is effectively regulated”.

CEO was the first group to complain about Draghi’s membership in the Group of 30, whose members include heavy-hitters in the international banking sector like William C. Dudley, former managing director at Goldman Sachs and former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

European activists and analysts have been growing more anxious about the influence of private investment banks on public financial policies, especially as the European sovereign debt continues to spiral out of control.

As CEO put it, “Given the euro crisis, the huge bailout operations of big banks, and the on-going debate on how to regulate banks in the light of the financial crisis, it should be obvious that safeguards are needed to ensure that the President of the European Central Bank remains independent.”

CEO argues that Draghi’s participation “in a closed, club-like structure with representatives from big international private banks could damage the integrity and reputation of the ECB.”

Indeed, Goldman Sachs’ links to numerous present officials at ministries of finance and other state agencies in Europe are extraordinary and worrisome. In a recent debate in Berlin, sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, director of the prestigious Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, denounced what he called “the diarchy in financial capitalism.”

Streeck said that European democratic states are presently suffering under the dictatorship of the deregulated financial markets, controlled by corporations like Goldman Sachs, while at the same time, most of their institutions are led by former executives of those very same corporations.

A salient example of Streeck’s thesis is the current, non-elected Italian head of government Mario Monti, who was the international adviser to Goldman Sachs from 2005 until 2011. In Goldman Sachs’ own words, Monti’s mission was to provide advice “on European business and major public policy initiatives worldwide.”

Given that Goldman Sachs and similar investment banks are pivotal in managing the sovereign debt of numerous European countries, it seems almost absurd that they are simultaneously preparing speculation schemes against the solvency of those very same states.

Following the announcement that the EU ombudsman had launched an official investigation into Draghi’s professional past, CEO has urged him to step down as president of the ECB.

In a letter addressed to Draghi, the group wrote, “Any president of the ECB has to make it absolutely clear that he or she is not under the influence of the financial lobby at any time. In particular at this dramatic point in the history of the EU, with the euro crisis and an ailing banking sector – recipient of trillions of euros in aid – it is completely unacceptable if doubt can be cast on the independence of the Bank’s president from the financial lobby.”

(END)

The catastrophe following the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power reactor in March 2011 has turned the old debate on nuclear power into a war of words between international agencies and independent experts with diametrically opposed views.

In their newest Uranium report, released Jul. 26, the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) all but ignored the lessons learned from Fukushima, predicting that by the year 2035, world nuclear electricity generating capacity will grow by 99 percent.

This forecast also effectively dismisses the financial constraints caused by the ongoing global economic crisis, which has brought countries in the eurozone to the brink of collapse.

Both agencies, mostly financed by industrialised countries, say that during the next two decades nuclear power will grow between 44 and 99 percent, and that uranium reserves, despite higher costs of extraction, are more “than adequate to meet (the) high-case requirements through 2035 and well into the foreseeable future.”

But for independent experts, these optimistic forecasts are typical of the sustained delusions of both agencies.

Mycle Schneider, co-author of the new ‘World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2012’ (WNISR), recalled that both agencies have a long history of exaggerated forecasts that never came true. “In 1973-1974, the IAEA forecast an installed nuclear capacity of 3,600-5,000 gigawatt (GW) in the world by 2000, ten times what it is today,” Schneider told IPS.

Schneider, a Paris-based consultant on energy and nuclear policy, has been a consultant to practically every Western European government, the European Union, the European Parliament, and numerous leading environmental organisations.

A member of the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM), based at Princeton University, he is considered an international expert on nuclear policy.

“Even after the accident of Chernobyl, in 1985, the NEA forecast an installed nuclear capacity of 497-646 GW for the year 2000, still between 40 and 80 percent above reality,” Schneider added.

In sharp contrast to the NEA and IAEA, the WNISR, released Jul. 1, sees a collapsing nuclear power industry in most parts of the world, and gives it only marginal significance in the present and future global energy mix.

Particularly in the context of financial instability and ever-higher costs of construction, not to mention tight security requirements for nuclear reactors and a growing market for renewable energy resources, the report does not place nuclear power anywhere close to the top of the energy agenda.

“Nuclear electricity generation reached a maximum in 2006 with 2,660 terawatts per hour (TWh) and dropped to 2,518 TWh in 2011 (down 4.3 percent compared to 2010), while the nuclear share in the world’s power generation declined steadily from a historic peak of 17 percent in 1993 to about 11 percent in 2011,” the report says.

In addition, the report notes that, “Installed worldwide nuclear capacity decreased in the years 1998, 2006, 2009 and again in 2011, while the annual installed wind power capacity increased by 41 GW in 2011 alone.”

In contrast, global investment in renewable energy totaled 260 billion dollars in 2011, five percent above the previous year and almost five times the 2004 amount, the report indicates.

“The total cumulative investment in renewables has risen to over one trillion dollars since 2004 according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance,” Schneider told IPS. “Compare this to our estimate of nuclear power investment decisions of approximately 120 billion dollars over the same time period,” he added.

Schneider said that such contradictory developments show that “renewables and natural gas energy sources increasingly are more affordable and much faster to install” than nuclear power.

While the WNISR considers the Fukushima catastrophe to be a turning point in the development of nuclear power, the Uranium report by the NEA and the IAEA see it only as “bump in the road.”

As NEA’s Director General, Luis Echávarri, put it, “The Fukushima Daiichi accident … has had the effect of delaying the development of nuclear power programmes worldwide as the lessons from the accident are analysed and implemented.”

“Although most countries have reaffirmed their commitment to continue using nuclear power, a few have opted to phase out or not to reintroduce its use,” Echávarri added.

The NEA and IAEA repeat again earlier references to supposed plans for new nuclear power plant construction, “with the strongest expansion expected in China, India, the Republic of Korea and the Russian Federation,” and take nuclear power growth in other countries for granted.

However, the NEA and IAEA refuse to comprehensively quantify such growth. “(Its) speed and magnitude in generating capacity elsewhere is still to be determined,” the NEA and IAEA claim.

Such optimism can only be explained by a purposeful denial of actual energy developments since the accident at Fukushima, says Antony Froggatt, senior research fellow on energy, environment and resources at the London-based independent think-tank, Chatham House.

“The most significant post-Fukushima policy change outside of Japan has been in Germany,” Froggatt told IPS. “Within four months of the accident Germany adopted legislation that reintroduced and accelerated a previous phase-out plan for nuclear power.”

Germany’s phase-out of nuclear energy should be complete by Dec. 2022. Japan is also considering phasing out nuclear power within the next two decades.

“Other countries in Europe, including Belgium, Italy and Switzerland, have moved away from nuclear as well,” Froggatt added. In the developing world, countries such as Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, and Thailand “have also dropped plans to develop nuclear power.”

However, Froggatt pointed out that other governments, in the Czech Republic, France, Hungary and Britain, as well as India and Pakistan, have declared their intentions to continue developing nuclear power.

A good example of the uncertainty of the global energy sector is the People’s Republic of China.

“China is building 26 reactors, 40 percent of the global total,” Froggatt said. “Yet, it has suspended new construction to undertake further assessments and testing.”

Such uncertainty is already a strong argument against the NEA and IAEA’s optimistic forecasts. For nuclear electricity generation to actually increase by 99 percent during the next 23 years, hundreds of new nuclear power plants would have to be built in that period.

Present reality and immediate perspectives could not be farther from that kind of growth.  As Schneider’s report points out, since 2011, only nine reactors actually started up – against 21 that were shut down.

Additionally, Schneider said, “Of the 59 units presently under construction in the world, at least 18 are experiencing multi-year delays, while the remaining 41 projects were started within the past five years or have not yet reached projected start-up dates, making it difficult to assess whether they are running on schedule.”

(END)

For several decades, microcredit presented itself as a magical and benign financial tool for the poorest people in the world, who were otherwise completely excluded from conventional commercial banking services, to secure easy access to loans in order to set up their own businesses and live a dignified life.

Such was the hype surrounding the concept of microfinance that in 2006 its leading practitioners, the Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen bank, received the Nobel Peace prize for, as the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm put it, “their efforts through microcredit to create economic and social development from below.”

Such prestige quickly lured activists, investors, and tycoons like Bill Gates, George Soros, Bono, William and Hillary Clinton and even the Queen of Spain, to fund and endorse microfinance projects around the world.

Now, new evidence suggests that even microcredit was not protected from the greed that characterises modern international finance.

Two recent studies show that microfinance was simply another profit making scheme for global private finance corporations, such as the Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, and Standard Chartered, who started pouring money into microcredit initiatives.

In his book, ‘Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic’, released Jul. 9, former investment banker Hugh Sinclair claims that such banks and funds use microcredit, through local operators, to charge usurious interest rates – of up to 200 percent – on even the smallest loans.

Sinclair said in an interview that microfinance has been “hijacked by profiteers”. According to Sinclair’s interpretation of the microfinance business, “neither (is) the entire sector evil, nor (is) the basic model fatally flawed.” Still, he argued that most of the financial sector involved in the business does not care about microcredit’s actual impact on poverty reduction.

By his own account, Sinclair worked with several microfinance institutions and funds in countries such as Mexico, Mongolia, Nigeria, and Mozambique.

“I couldn’t help but notice that even with a booming 70 billion-dollar industry on their side, the poor didn’t seem any better off in practice,” he told IPS. “Exorbitant interest rates led borrowers into never-ending debt spirals, and aggressive collection practices resulted in cases of forced prostitution, child labour, suicide, and nationwide revolts against the microfinance community.”

European Investment Bank under fire

Similar criticism constitutes the backbone of yet another study, focused on the European Investment Bank (EIB)’s approach to microfinance in developing countries.

The study, by Italian economist Valerio Carboni, was published last June by Counter Balance, a European coalition of development and environmental non-governmental organisations, formed in 2007 specifically to challenge the EIB.

“Microcredit originally was meant to help the poor to escape the poverty cycle,” Carboni recalls in his report. Microcredit “was designed to short circuit the poverty trap that condemned poor people excluded from the banking system to rely on usury loans or accept slavish working conditions.”

Hence, Carboni concludes microfinance addressed primarily the needs of micro entrepreneurs and vulnerable people.

Western governments, through their financial agencies, have for the last three decades been pouring funds into local microfinance initiatives in emerging markets, and helped to turn the original niche sector into a multi-billion-dollar business.

It was in this context that the EIB started its own microfinance activities. Carboni pointed out that though the EIB’s microfinance portfolio still represents a very small fraction of its total budget, it has been growingly steadily through the years.

“Since the EIB’s first operations in Morocco, back in 2003, the average deal size has been increasing constantly and is now expected to hit 10-50 million dollars,” Carboni told IPS. According to the EIB’s own figures, the bank has, since 2003, committed some 881 million euros to microfinance activities, in nearly 50 countries.

“Nowadays microfinance encompasses a wide range of financial services, from micro-insurance to mobile banking, and seems to have lost its original vocation: instead of helping the poorest the question has been turned upside down and it is now how to make money out of them,” Carboni added.

Due to these changes, microfinance is no longer contributing to self-reliant development processes based on domestic resource mobilisation and local institution building, but has instead become “in some cases a significant blockage for the development of the poorest by dragging them into speculative market dynamics and generating a renewed dependency on international financing and actors”.

Carboni’s primary critiques of microfinance in general, and of the EIB’s activities in the sector in particular, are that there is a general lack of strategy and vision. “The EIB just follows the markets,” Carboni said.

He also lamented the fact that in countries with limited capital markets, “the EIB is simply involved in investment projects, rather than in reaching out to the poor.” Furthermore, he said, “the accountability chains are long and obscure, and the management of portfolio is insufficient.”

Sinclair called attention to the lack of regulation on microfinance. “The ultimate investors are not in practice protected by any meaningful regulation, have a limited idea of what their funds are being used for and rely entirely on the funds to reassure them,” Sinclair writes in his book.

While none of the private financial corporations questioned by Sinclair’s book have reacted, the EIB issued a statement in which it “recognise(d) the challenges posed by the lack of standardised social performance measurements used by both microfinance investors and donors”.

But the EIB added that, as an active member of the Social Performance Task Force (SPTF), it has contributed to the establishment of the Universal Standards for Social Performance Management.

The SPTF, a coalition of over 1,000 academics, agencies, donors, investors, and others active in international microfinance founded in 2005, formulated a common social performance framework and an action plan to improve the industry’s social performance.

The SPTF defines social performance as the effective translation of a microfinance organisation’s mission into practice in line with commonly accepted social values.

The EIB also recalled that it has endorsed the Client Protection Principles in microfinance, which are incorporated in all microfinance contracts to encourage improved social responsibility and have helped improve best-practices across the microfinance industry.

(END)

European media, political leaders, and the citizenry are bashing bankers again, overtly calling them at best accomplices of numerous illegal activities, at worst downright criminals.

The best example of this new wave of anger against bankers is the use of the portmanteau word “bankster” (a combination of banker and gangster), which has become commonplace in media, even in non English-speaking countries.

The term, first coined in the 1930s during the Great Depression and which resurfaced in British media in 2009, appeared on the front page of the French daily Libération on Jul. 18.

Political leaders critical of banks have so far refrained from using the word but everyone else has been having a field day with it.

In a short white paper on banks’ policies released Jul. 21, the head of Germany’s leading opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD), Sigmar Gabriel, accused bankers of “blackmailing governments and states with the (threat) of domino bankruptcy”, of “complicity with criminal activities”, such as tax evasion and money laundering, and of “screwing their own clients”.

Even those commentators who dismissed Gabriel’s banker bashing as political populism agreed that the managers of international private financial corporations have recently done large disservices to their business and their clients.

The list of genuine grievances is long: the HSBC bank is facing accusations in the U.S. of having laundered money for Latin American cocaine cartels and Muslim organisations allegedly involved in terrorist activities.

In a statement released Jul. 17, the HSBC acknowledged, “In the past, (the bank has) sometimes failed to meet the standards that regulators and customers expect. (We) acknowledge these mistakes, answer for our actions and give our absolute commitment to fixing what went wrong.”

The so-called LIBOR (London interbank offered rate) scandal revealed that numerous leading international banks, including Barclays, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, UBS, the Deutsche Bank and, again, the HSBC, conspired to jointly falsify information on the interest rates the banks demand from each other, to lure central banks into reducing their own leading lending rates.

The scandal led to a record 450 million-dollar fine against Barclays, imposed by U.S. and British regulators, and to the forced retirement of Barclays’ CEO, Bob Diamond.

Banks have also been embroiled in massive tax evasion schemes. The independent Tax Justice Network, which investigates international tax evasion and the role of banks in tax havens, estimates that some 11.5 trillion dollars in assets are held illegally in banks’ and funds’ vaults, leading to a global annual loss of tax revenue of about 250 billion dollars.

Similarly, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) underlines that “Tax avoidance and tax evasion threaten government revenues,” and recalls U.S. Senate estimates that 100 billion dollars are lost each year due to tax evasion by U.S.-based firms and individuals.

“In many other countries, the sums run into billions of euros,” the OECD says. “This means fewer resources for infrastructure and services such as education and health, lowering standards of living in both developed and developing economies.”

Such assets are held not only in offshore financial centres, such as the British territories of the Isle of Man, Guernsey, and Gibraltar, the Cayman Islands, and the like, but also in banks and funds operating in the city of London, in New York, and in countries like Switzerland, Singapore, and Monaco.

All these crimes have been occurring at a time when states in industrialised countries are facing a dramatic sovereign debt crisis, bringing many to the brink of bankruptcy.

The sovereign debt crisis originated or at least was aggravated after the financial crisis broke out in 2007, precisely because banks had brought themselves to the point of collapse and had to be “bailed out” by states in order to avoid a global financial meltdown.

But the bailout only set in motion a cyclical financial crisis, with Spanish, Greek, and Cypriote banks now demanding rescue from national governments, who are sacrificing their own populations by cutting expenses on crucial public services like education, health, and infrastructure.

And all this is being done so that international financial markets can continue to operate practically unregulated, while the banksters pay themselves princely salaries and massive bonuses.

On Jul. 18, Libération revealed that the four leading French banks alone paid 1.1 billion euros in bonuses to their risk managers in 2011.

The list of banks’ crimes and their employees’ enourmous salaries have led political leaders to urge new regulation and controls on financial markets. The new French minister of finances, Pierre Moscovici, has launched a bank reform, aiming at separating commercial banking from investment banking, and capping salaries.

The SPD’s Gabriel also argued for caps on salaries and bonuses, and for personal liability of bank CEOs and managers in the event of losses caused by highly risky speculative transactions.

Similar measures have been proposed in Britain by the Independent Commission on Banking (ICB), created in 2010 to reform the local banking sector and to promote financial stability and competition.

However, the ICB proposals were not fully considered by the British government’s new plan, announced earlier this month, to restructure the local financial market and which, in any case, will not be implemented until 2019.

This led the ICB chair, distinguished economics professor John Vickers, to complain that the government measures have watered down key parts of his reform package. “International events keep underlining the need for fundamental reform to make banks safer and to shield taxpayers from future risk of loss,” Vickers said in a statement.

Actually, most of the measures discussed in France, Germany, and Britain are included in the so-called Basel III agreement, a banking regulation reform programme triggered by the evidence revealed in the aftermath of the international financial crisis of 2007.

The new regulation, still under debate at the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, is supposed to be applied step by step starting in 2013, and be fully implemented in 2019.

For independent economists, such delay in establishing new regulation of an obviously rotten industry is proof of the lack of political will among governments to get to the root of the crisis.

“Five years into the worst financial crisis in history, all attempts to regulate banks and funds remain dead letter,” French economist Paul Jorion told IPS. “Despite abundant evidence that (banks and investment funds) cheat all over, again and again, no new rule has been introduced.”

Instead, he added, “the European Union and governments continue to deregulate, pushing their own citizenry into abject misery.”

(END)

Girls’ and women’s access to contraceptives is both a right and a transformational health and development priority. Credit: Patrick Burnett/IPS

By Julio Godoy
PARIS, Jul 18 2012 (IPS)

Improving family planning to avoid unwanted pregnancies in developing countries, as well as assuring girls’ access to education, and women’s participation in the economy, are essential components of a sound development policy, according to Western experts and African activists.

During a summit on family planning in London last week numerous economic development experts, government delegates from industrialised and developing countries, and private donors agreed to raise some 4.3 billion dollars by 2020 to allow 120 million women and girls in the world’s poorest countries, particularly in the continent of Africa, to access contraceptives and other family planning materials.

The summit underscored the importance of girls’ and women’s access to contraceptives as both a right and a transformational health and development priority.

Simultaneously, gender activists attending the second African Women’s Economic Summit, which concluded on Jul. 14 in Lagos, Nigeria, urged policy makers, corporate organisations and political leaders to step up measures to promote women’s empowerment and remove barriers impeding their economic development.

“I don’t want my daughters … in the coming years discussing these same issues (of women’s education and economic empowerment),” Cecilia Akintomide, vice president of the African Development Bank (AfDB), co-organiser of the African summit, told the audience in Lagos. “I want to see a change in my lifetime.”

During the meeting in Lagos, Nigeria’s finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, emphasised that women’s economic empowerment is no longer simply an option “because investing in women, who constitute half of the continent’s population, is the only way to sustain the growth” recently recorded across the African continent.

“Women are the third largest emerging market in the globe.  Women are the third largest source of growth. One of the fastest ways to sustain current growth is to invest in women,” Okonjo-Iweala said.

Participants at the London summit echoed these views, with an emphasis on the health risks associated with unwanted pregnancies.

“Enabling an additional 120 million women in the world’s poorest countries to access and use contraception, something women in the developed world take for granted, will save millions of lives and enable girls and women to determine their own futures,” said Andrew Mitchell, British secretary of state for international development.

Mitchell called the commitments of the summit a “breakthrough for the world’s poorest girls and women, which will transform lives now and for generations to come.”

By 2020, the collective efforts announced in London will allegedly result in 200,000 fewer women dying during pregnancy and childbirth, more than 110 million fewer unintended pregnancies, over 50 million fewer abortions, and nearly three million fewer babies dying in their first year of life.

Avoiding unwanted pregnancies also allows girls and women pursue their own education and improve their professional opportunities.

Numerous studies show that the investment of a single dollar in family planning leads to savings of up to six dollars in health, housing, water, and other public services.

Contraceptive use also leads to more education and greater opportunities for girls, helping to end the cycles of poverty that millions of women and their families are trapped in. Up to a quarter of girls in sub-Saharan Africa drop out of school due to unintended pregnancies.

Based on such evidence, the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) call for gender equality, universal education, and improving maternal and child health, setting specific objectives to be met by 2015.

According to the U.N. 2012 MDG report, released Jul. 2, meeting these goals by 2015, while challenging, is possible, “but only if governments do not waiver from their commitments made over a decade ago.”

In the foreword of the report, U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, warned that the current economic crises battering much of the developed world “must not be allowed to decelerate or reverse the progress that has been made.”

“Let us build on the successes we have achieved so far, and let us not relent until all the MDGs have been attained,” he urged.

The U.N. report points out that the world has achieved parity in primary education between girls and boys. Driven by national and international efforts, many more of the world’s children are enrolled in school at the primary level, especially since 2000.

Girls have benefited the most. There were 97 girls enrolled per 100 boys in 2010 – up from 91 girls per 100 boys in 1999.

Such improvements, as well as improving maternal health and reducing unwanted pregnancies, coincide with women’s demands across the world.

Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, told participants at the London summit that women she meets on her travels tell her that “access to contraceptives can often be the difference between life and death”.

“Today is about listening to their voices, about meeting their aspirations, and giving them the power to create a better life for themselves and their families,” Gates added.

In Lagos, in a video message addressed to the Second African Women’s Economic Summit, AfDB President, Donald Kaberuka said that women have always played a pivotal role in the socio-economic development of Africa.

As farmers, entrepreneurs, traders and innovators, they are key economic actors in the continent, he added. “I believe, strongly believe, investing in women…is essential to revitalising our economies,” Kaberuka pointed out.

(END)

The changing international political order and a dramatic budgetary situation at home are forcing France to consider giving up the extremely expensive nuclear arsenal the country has maintained since the late 1950s.

To make this pressing necessity appear as a virtue, some French political leaders and analysts are attempting to posit the move as a step towards international efforts to update the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and reduce global nuclear arsenals.

But the simple truth is that the French government, facing a major budgetary crisis, can no longer afford to maintain a costly armoury that, as former minister of defence, Paul Quilès, put it, “isn’t supposed to be fired in the first place”.

Former prime minister Michel Rocard, a member of the ruling Socialist Party (SP), inadvertently opened the debate in mid-June during a television interview with the Paris-based broadcaster BFM in which he stated that by giving up its nuclear cache, “France would save 16 billion euros per year, and renounce a completely useless weapon.”

Later, Rocard called his statements “a joke”, and argued that discussing nuclear disarmament was “such a serious issue, that if you want to question it, you have to do it cautiously, and give yourself time to discuss it and to listen to serious arguments.”

But jokes aside, Rocard’s statement provoked an avalanche of debate without a definitive conclusion.

For the time being, Socialist President Francois Hollande has denied that his government has any intention of renouncing the nuclear weapon in the foreseeable future.

Hollande’s position is based on the old argument that nuclear power grants France an exceptional, albeit delusory, political status, placing it on a par with the other four permanent members of the United Nations security council: Britain, China, Russia, and the U.S.A.

Without the nuclear weapon, France would be reduced to its actual geopolitical role: of a middle-range power, battered by economic mediocrity and a volatile domestic climate.

“The end of the Cold War and the grand strategic mutations taking place right now (necessitate) a redefinition of the role of the nuclear arsenal in (France’s) global power considerations, and in our policy of national security,” Pascal Boniface, director of the Paris-based Institute for International and Strategic Studies, told IPS.

But Boniface warned, “If France were to renounce the nuclear weapon it would certainly degrade its credibility as an international power and provoke its own demotion on strategic affairs.”

Boniface recalled, “When Charles de Gaulle (in the late 1950s) decided to equip France with a nuclear arsenal, his objective was to maintain our country as a global power, along with the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union.”

In other words, for De Gaulle’s France, the nuclear weapon was more a geopolitical emblem than a military necessity. In a cryptic way, De Gaulle admitted as much, in an official statement issued in December 1961, at the height of the Cold War.

“In ten years’ time, we might need to kill 80 million Russian citizens,” De Gaulle said. “I believe that (the Soviet Union) wouldn’t attack somebody able to kill 80 million Russians, even if the (Soviets) themselves were able to kill 800 million French (citizens).”

France’s economic woes

Fifty years later, with memories of the Cold War fading into the realm of a bad nightmare, the possibility of having to kill 80 million Russians is as unthinkable as ever. France’s new national nightmare is the sovereign debt crisis, and a deteriorating economic performance in the international arena.

Hollande’s government, in office since mid-June, is this year facing an unexpected budgetary shortfall of up to 10 billion euros, on top of the previously anticipated deficit of 4.4 percent of the gross national product (GNP).

In a report released on Jul. 2, the country’s general accounting office warned that France would have to raise taxes and reduce expenses to meet the high deficit of 4.4 percent originally foreseen by Hollande’s predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy.

According to European Commission figures, in 2013 France will have to increase revenues or reduce expenses by 24 billion euros to limit the deficit to three percent.

To add insult to injury, leading French enterprises, such as carmaker Peugeot, have announced massive layoffs and major industrial facility relocations abroad.

Hollande is thus left with a staggering political challenge: to simultaneously salvage state finances and support French industry to endure the present economic downturn and prepare a more competitive future.

According to various analysts and politicians, the temptation to reduce useless spending – especially on a purely symbolic nuclear arsenal – and instead invest in more rational endeavours, has never been greater.

Quilés, former chair of the parliamentary defence commission, told IPS that the “nuclear weapon is an expensive absurdity.” He dismissed arguments that the nuclear weapon constituted a “life insurance” for France. “It is more a death insurance,” he said.

He believes the costs of the French nuclear arsenal will most certainly increase in the immediate future, given the necessity to update weapons and procure expensive supplementary equipment, such as military submarines.

Retired general Bernard Norlain, head of the military cabinet at the prime minister’s office between 1986 and 1992, also called for nuclear disarmament.

“The arguments in favour of nuclear (arms) were pertinent at the time of the Cold War, but the global strategic situation has changed radically since 1990,” he told IPS. “We cannot continue arguing the same way as in the 1980s.”

Norlain, who has rallied behind the international project Global Zero, that calls for a world without nuclear weapons, noted regretfully that Hollande appears to be bowing to pressure to maintain a useless asset.

“Hollande’s declarations on the matter are extremely conformist,” Norlain pointed out.

But other military experts, who asked not be identified, said that no head of state would choose to go down in history as the one who unilaterally erased France’s status as a nuclear power.

(END)

By Julio Godoy
PARIS, Jul 18 2012 (IPS)

In July 2007, many Parisians laughed at their mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, when he announced the creation of a public bicycle sharing system aimed at reducing traffic in the French capital.

The system was called Vélib’, a combination of “vélo”, which means bicycle in colloquial French, and “liberté”, or freedom. During its first few months of operation, the skeptics appeared to be right.

While most Parisians snubbed the heavy public bicycles (weighing 23 kg), others destroyed or stole them. During the first year, 8,000 Vélib’ bicycles disappeared and another 16,000 were vandalized, according to official figures.

A number of other factors worked against the urban cycling initiative: the subscription requirement, the high cost of the service, the physical exertion required, which in the summer leads to certain side effects undesirable to a population famous for its polished personal appearance, and the chaotic Paris traffic, feared for its high risks.

But despite it all, when Vélib’ marked its fifth anniversary on Jul. 14, it was also able to celebrate its undeniable success: in five years, 138 million people have used the 23,000 rental bicycles, and the system currently has 225,000 subscribers out of a total urban population of 2.3 million.

In addition, during this time, only six people have died in traffic accidents involving rental bicycles.

The system has also gained followers: 31 communities on the outskirts of Paris have joined Vélib’, which serves as a model for another 34 French cities.

The Parisian authorities stress that Vélib’ has also served as an example for the development of similar initiatives in numerous cities around the world, from Melbourne, Australia to the U.S. city of San Francisco.

In 2011, Velib’ achieved profitability and is fully expected to yield profits again in 2012.

For Delanoë – a sober and extremely reserved politician who publicly declared his homosexuality in 1998 – the triumph of Vélib’ is also confirmation that his transportation policy, initially controversial, is the right one: a quiet revolution for a city besieged by traffic jams and air pollution.

“Five years ago, I could not have imagined that Vélib’ would have such good results,” Delanoë told Tierramérica *. “My goal was to try out a different policy, to help Parisians recover their independence and freedom in transportation, and at the same time, to reduce air pollution.”

This policy is summed up by the slogan “Paris respire” (literally, “Paris breathes”), omnipresent in signs used to promote bicycle use in the city.

Vélib’ “has disproved many urban transport taboos,” urban planning expert Isabelle Lesens told Tierramérica. “Bicycles reduce parking problems, and in a relatively small city like Paris, providing the weather is good, they are an efficient means of transportation.”

But despite its success, the innovative bike-sharing system still has certain drawbacks.

“The costs of Vélib’ are very high. The administration and maintenance of each bicycle costs 3,000 euro a year. There certainly could have been a way to achieve the same results for less money,” commented Lesens.

JCDecaux, the company that manages Vélib’ in cooperation with the city government, acknowledges these problems. “The system is very costly in terms of implementation,” Charles Decaux, chairman of the company’s board of directors, told Tierramérica. “But since 2011 it has achieved budgetary balance, after losing money during the first three years.”

In any event, the success of Vélib’ has inspired Parisians to rediscover their passion for cycling, reflected in the world’s foremost cycling race, the Tour de France.

Moreover, according to official figures, Parisians make roughly 200,000 trips a day on privately owned bicycles. In total, the number of bicycles in Paris has increased 41 percent since 2007. During the same period, motor vehicle traffic has decreased by 25 percent.

Bicycles are one component of the urban transportation policy that Delanoë put into practice when he was first elected mayor in March 2001. One of his first measures was the creation of traffic lanes for exclusive use by buses in almost the entire city, in order to speed up their circulation and reduce the space available for use by private automobiles.

The municipal government is also participating, in cooperation with communities on the city’s outskirts, in the construction of a non-polluting tram line that will form a connecting ring around Paris by 2020. In addition, some 370 km of bike lanes have been created in the city.

On the weekends, motor vehicle traffic is prohibited on the most emblematic streets of Paris.

On Dec. 5, the municipal government introduced an electric car sharing system based on the Vélib’ model. Christened, naturally, Autolib’, the initiative has not yet achieved the same degree of popularity as the bike-sharing scheme. But Delanoë is confident that it will have a positive impact on transportation in the city.

“When Autolib’ becomes part of the daily way of life of Parisians, like Vélib’ already is, the urban transportation policy will change definitively,” said the mayor, who was reelected in 2008, with 57.7 percent of the votes, to govern the French capital until 2014.

“All of these measures – Vélib’, Autolib’, the bus lanes, the tramway – are aimed at revolutionizing urban transportation and reducing private motor vehicle traffic, to curb carbon dioxide emissions and purify the air,” he added. “The fact is that automobiles no longer have a place in the big cities of our times.”

*The writer is an IPS correspondent. This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

While there is no doubt that global warming is primarily a consequence of human activities, it is also true that there are natural phenomena contributing to climate change as well.

These natural causes include terrestrial events such as volcanic activity, orogenesis, variations in ocean and air currents, and continental drift, which all play a part in raising average global temperatures.

A homeowner stands in the doorway of his house, flooded by a rise in sea level, on the coast of Surgidero de Batabano, Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

There are also extraterrestrial factors, such as variations in the solar constant, which is the total radiation energy received from the sun per unit of time per unit of area.

These causes, particularly solar constant variations, are stressed by those who deny that climate change is an anthropogenic or “man-made” problem and insist that if global warming exists, it is due to natural causes, which means that any environmental policies aimed at mitigating it are doomed to failure.

But some of these phenomena, including solar constant variability, are cyclical, and their effects on the average temperature of the earth’s atmosphere are marginal and cannot explain the changes that take place over long periods, according to Stefan Brönnimann, a professor of climatology at the University of Bern.

“Thanks to satellite observations, we know that the variability of the solar constant during the 11-year sunspot cycle is too small to account for the dimensions of terrestrial climate change,” Brönnimann told Tierramérica *.

The climatologist commented that another natural phenomenon, the circulation of the oceans, also contributes to the movement of heat in the earth’s climate system. “Unfortunately, scientific observation of this circulation is relatively recent, which means it is not possible to formulate reliable predictions of its future effects,” he said.

Correcting this shortage of data on the natural causes of climate change is one of the recommendations of an evaluation report commissioned by the Research Council of Norway, which appointed a committee of international experts to evaluate the climate research conducted to date by scientists in this northern European country.

The evaluation report, released in June in Oslo, observes that less effort has been devoted to studying and explaining the natural causes of climate change because these have been regarded as having a relatively minor impact on the earth’s climate system as compared to anthropogenic causes.

These anthropogenic causes include greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, industry, deforestation and agriculture.

But the report, “Norwegian Climate Research: An Evaluation”, stresses that a good understanding of the climate system cannot be reached without a dedicated effort to understand the contribution of natural processes to climate change.

Geological history very clearly documents a strong climate forcing associated with solar variability, although the exact mechanism has not been identified, the report notes.

These circumstances should have led to an international effort to study these natural processes, the report continues, “but surprisingly, the worldwide scientific effort to increase our understanding of the natural variations is very limited, and this is most probably related to the limited funding available for basic, not agenda-driven research.”

While the report’s authors do not specify the “agenda” to which they are referring, the wording chosen could be interpreted as an attempt to discredit scientific research on the human causes of climate change, as well as a denunciation of a supposed international refusal to study the natural causes of the phenomenon.

The European scientific sources consulted by Tierramérica did not wish to comment on the report, although they were clearly suprised by its tone and the reference to an alleged research “agenda”.

Norwegian climate researchers are well known and collaborate with their European peers on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The evaluation report recognized that Norwegian climate research has been in harmony with the mainstream of international climate science, but recommends “an increased effort” in research on the natural causes of climate change, in particular “the activity variations of the sun, the mechanism of cloud formation, and the multi-decadal variations in ocean current systems.”

Such criticisms appear to ignore the scientific evidence that the amount of solar energy received by the earth since 1750 has remained almost constant. Yet during this same period, and particularly since 1850, coinciding with the Industrial Revolution and the growing use of fossil fuels, there has been a continuous increase in global average temperatures and the concentration of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere.

Moreover, if global warming were caused by a higher solar constant, the average temperatures in all the layers of the atmosphere would be higher. However, while temperatures in the exosphere and ionosphere are lower today than in the last 150 years, the warming of the troposphere has been extensively documented.

This difference in temperature in the different layers of the atmosphere is a result of the greenhouse effect: gases like carbon dioxide trap the heat of the sun’s rays in the layer closest to the earth’s surface.

This is why, according to Brönnimann, “climate models based on the solar constant cannot reproduce the real increase in the earth’s temperature observed over the last 50 years if they do not take into account the greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans.”

* The writer is an IPS correspondent. This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Despite the grave financial and sovereign debt crisis sweeping the region, the European Union has once again failed to reach unanimous approval of a proposition made by its executive body, the European Commission (EC), to tax financial transactions in order to reduce speculation and increase state revenues.

British and Swedish rejection of the EC proposal once again condemned the so-called Tobin tax, named after its first advocate, the late U.S. economist James Tobin, to remain a theoretical project with little hope of being enacted.

But under pressure from the French and Austrian governments, and the leading German opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD), ten EU countries agreed to consider the application of the Tobin tax starting in 2014.

The preliminary agreement was reached during a European financial summit late last month, and includes Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and Cyprus, all of whom pledged to levy a small tax – between 0.01 and 0.2 percent – on all financial transactions, starting in 2014.

The government of Finland also indicated that it might approve the Tobin tax.

Years after a global financial crisis of epic proportions, and following over a decade of debate around the issue, the EU’s inability to pass a common tax on speculation shows the enourmous influence the international finance sector continues to enjoy.

James Tobin, who was honoured in 1981 with the Nobel memorial prize for economic sciences, first published his proposal for a small levy on speculative financial transactions in 1972.

In 1997, in the aftermath of the Mexican and Asian financial crises, the French Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and Citizens’ Action (ATTAC), rescued the Tobin tax from oblivion and put it at the top of the agenda to regulate financial markets.

Since then, the tax has been a central theme in academic and political debates, particularly in Europe, so far without any substantial success.

Cautious approval by ten European governments does not mean that the tax will actually be introduced, given that the EU process of approval is extremely cumbersome and time-consuming.

“The Tobin tax in Europe is not for tomorrow,” Margrethe Vestegar, Danish minister of finances, and head of the European council of finance ministers, said at the end of the summit late June.

If at all, the tax will not be put into practice until 2014.

Germany conflicted

Ahead of the June summit, the German SPD put forth an ultimatum: unless the German government agreed to tax financial transactions, the SPD would not approve the proposed fiscal pact – conceived by the conservative government of Angela Merkel to enforce “common” austerity measures across Europe – in parliament.

Under this pressure, the German government finally relaxed its opposition to the Tobin tax, but warned that it would take at least two years to put it into practice.

“The tax won’t be approved in this legislative period,” which ends in late 2013, German minister of finances, Wolfgang Schaeuble, said in a press conference. However, he added that the German government has already budgeted for two billion euros in expected revenue from the Tobin tax for the fiscal year 2014.

Without the SPD support in the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament, the German government would have failed to legalise its blueprint for strict budgetary discipline that it wants to see implemented across Europe in the coming years, in a supposed effort to reduce state deficits and thus solve the sovereign debt crisis.

Failure to pass the corresponding law for the fiscal pact would have meant a tremendous setback for the ‘austerity regime’ conceived in Berlin, which the German government describes as fundamental to restore financial stability across the continent.

“We know that the approval of the Tobin tax in Europe won’t be easy,” according to Andrea Nahles, general secretary of the SPD. “But if the governments of Germany and France, the two strongest economies in the continent, cooperate on this question, they would surely convince those governments still opposing the tax.”

Several new studies suggest that the Tobin tax would not only boost economic growth in Europe, but also substantially increase state revenues.

According to a study by the German Institute for Economic Research, released earlier this month, the tax could generate some 11.2 billion euros in revenues in Germany alone. The study takes into consideration the fact that many banks and investment funds would relocate some of the taxed transactions out of the German financial market.

Another study undertaken by the renowned economists Stephany Griffith-Jones, a professor at Columbia University, and Avinash Persaud, senior fellow with the Caribbean Policy Research Institute, estimated that introducing the Tobin tax in Europe would boost gross domestic product (GDP) in the region by at least 0.25 percent annually.

“Our analysis suggests that the overall positive impact on GDP level could be even higher, as we identify a number of channels through which the tax could encourage a higher level of GDP,” the two economists noted in their paper.

Griffith-Jones told IPS that the tax “would also contribute to reducing the risk of a future crisis. When this is taken into account, you obtain a substantial positive effect on economic growth”.

Additionally, she rejected the repeated argument that such a tax would not be feasible because of evasion or due to its limited application in Europe. “In the past, the same was said about income tax, which is indeed avoided but which still raises a lot of money,” Griffith-Jones stressed.

In the study, the two economists recalled that “one of the oldest and largest financial transaction taxes successfully functions on its own without global imitation” – the so-called stamp duty reserve tax applied in Britain.

Griffith-Jones told IPS, “Since 1986, and before in other guises, the British government has unilaterally, without waiting on others, levied a tax of 0.50 percent on transactions in British equities.”

This tax raises some five billion U.S. dollars per year.

According to the EC’s estimates, released last March, total savings resulting from the introduction of the Tobin tax would amount to 81 billion euros for the period 2014-2020.

European Commissioner for financial programming and budget, Janusz Lewandoski, stressed, “The financial sector does not pay valued added tax (VAT), but has received massive support from taxpayer’s money.”

Therefore, he added, “Taxing the transactions of all financial institutions at rates as low as 0.01 percent is only fair. Furthermore, the estimated revenue that the tax would generate by 2020 can only be welcomed by cash-strapped governments across the EU.”

(END)

Terrible images are filtering in from the German Bavarian city of Wuerzburg, where one woman and six men have sewn their mouths shut, threading fishing wire through their lips to symbolise a point of no return in their hunger strike.

The dissenters are Iranian refugees who, since last March, have occupied the central square of Wuerzburg, some 400 kilometres southeast of Berlin, in protest of Germany’s national asylum policy in general, and their cases’ treatment by local authorities in particular.

The protest has escalated since early June, when a growing number of Iranian asylum seekers decided to go on hunger strike and stitch up their mouths. The group in Wuerzburg is just one cell in a larger national movement against German policies that force refugees applying for asylum into poverty and isolation.

The Iranian demonstrators have spent years demanding German recognise them as political refugees, all the while enduring extremely tough local laws. All petitioners are restricted to communal living quarters, forced to rely on packaged food rather than cooking their own meals and denied the right to work.

With the support of human rights groups and lawyers, other protests against national asylum laws have now reached the German constitutional court, which must decide on Jun. 20 whether the controversial Asylum Seekers Social Services Act (AsylbLG, after its German name) violates the German constitution.

Currently, some 80,000 immigrants, including refugees of war, asylum seekers, and other illegal immigrants, are negatively impacted by the Act’s stringent rules.

In the Iranian case, the radicalisation of the protest has led to a deterioration of the refugees’ health and to criticism by some of their key supporters.

The group’s spokesperson, Armin Jahanizadeh, told IPS, “We all are quite afraid for our health. We are drinking only water, through a straw. One of us suffers from kidney (problems), and another one has just come out of the hospital. But we cannot stop our protest, not until the German state recognises all of us as political refugees.”

The refugee said that going back to Iran was not an alternative. “Many among us suffered prison at home,” he said. “If we would back to our country, the regime (will) send us back to jail.”

Jahanizadeh said that from the beginning of the protest until last week local physicians had overseen the demonstrators’ health. “But since Jun. 11, they have stopped coming (to the central square).”

In an open letter addressed to the local mayor, Rainer Schohe, a doctor who had assisted the refugees since Mar. 19, declared he was “giving this responsibility (for the refugees’ health and lives) back to the city”.

“The political decisions taken by the refugees, of escalating their hunger strike by sewing up their lips, forces us to re-evaluate our commitment,” Schohe added. “’Even though we respect the demonstrators’ fight for recognition as political asylum seekers and their despair, we can no longer cope with the extreme conditions reigning at the square,” the physician said.

Schohe explicitly noted that the refugees have only an open tent for shelter and suffer from a serious lack of sleep.

The new situation has led local political personalities, who have supported the refugees’ struggle for recognition, to urge them to stop the hunger strike and allow physicians to remove their stitches.

Simone Tolle, member of the Bavarian parliament, said that by sewing up their lips, the Iranian demonstrators “have exceeded the limits of protest, because it makes any further dialogue to improve their situation impossible.”

“Open your mouths again,” Tolle urged the Iranian refugees. “Raise your voices against the Iranian regime, and against the inhuman German asylum policy.”

Tolle recalled that since the beginning of the protest, German courts have ruled in favour of several refugees. “I am sure the other (judicial) procedures will be closed by the end of the year,” she added.

However, Tolle regretted that the local authorities continue to ignore the protests, and maintain an “asylum policy based on discrimination, humiliation and paternalism vis-à-vis the refugees.”

Protestors are demanding the closure of all common lodges, which, as the Iranian refugees put it in their blog, “segregate refugees from society and cause psychical diseases and even suicides”.

Additionally, refugees are demanding an end to mass deportations, and the right to work while waiting for their cases to be processed.

The AsylbLG, passed in 1993, and amended several times since, posits that asylum seekers and other illegal immigrants only have the right to food stamps or packages, but not money or work. Additionally, the AsylbLG sets the monetary limit on government assistance well below the social welfare minimum, as allocated to unemployed German citizens.

Even this ‘minimum’ rate is highly criticised, for it utilises extremely low standards to assign a monetary value to basic human needs, such as clothing, heating, and access to educational services.

Numerous human rights groups, including Amnesty International, Pro Asylum, and law counsellors of the Catholic Church, argue that such provisions are discriminatory, and violate the German constitution’s basic covenant that human dignity is inalienable.

As law professor Georg Classen, author of a constitutional analysis of the AsylbLG, and member of the German refugee council, put it, “The act is unconstitutional and must be abolished.”

(END)

At a protest to support solar energy at Brandenburger Gate in Berlin. Credit: Daan Bauwens/IPS

By Julio Godoy
BERLIN, Jun 10 2012 (IPS)

When the German government decided last year to phase out nuclear energy by 2022, following the catastrophe at the Fukushima power plant in Japan, it was clear that the process would require extraordinary effort, not only in further developing alternative energy sources, especially renewables, but also in upgrading the country-wide electricity grid.

Germany’s nuclear power plants generated a steady 20 percent of the total electricity consumed in the country last year. But renewable energy sources such as wind and sun are mainly generated in the north of the country, are prone to fluctuations, and need to be transported and managed by a new smart grid.

Consequently, the German government was set to install some 1,800 kilometres of new, high voltage power lines across the country by 2012, to improve the storage capacity of the present grid.

Despite the urgency, only 214 kilometres of new power lines have been installed as of Jun. 7.

Germany is one of the largest industrialised countries in the world to have officially renounced nuclear power. Other smaller European states, such as Italy, Belgium and Austria, have also pledged to phase out nuclear power or refrain from building new nuclear plants.

However, in order to truly move towards dependence on renewables, official figures estimate that Germany would need at least 3,800 kilometres of new power lines by 2022. This new grid is necessary to transport the wind energy generated in off-shore farms installed in the North Atlantic Ocean to the highly industrialised southern regions of the country, especially Bavaria and Baden Wuerttemberg.

In addition, at least 4,400 kilometres of the existing grid must be upgraded in that same period. In all, the new grid should cost some 32 billion euros, roughly 40 billion U.S. dollars.

Given the extraordinary boom renewable energy sources have experienced in the country over the past decade, the present inefficient grid constitutes the bottleneck of Germany’s energy revolution.

Huge potential

On a sunny, spring day in May, the country’s installed solar energy panels alone generated almost 75 percent of the daily electricity demand. On May 28, and the weekend before, the photovoltaic panels installed across Germany generated some 22,000 megawatts per hour, while consumption reached 28,000 MWs.

“In the face of this enormous amount of electricity generated, the present grid, which does not have sufficient storage capacity and cannot efficiently transport electricity, constitutes our main problem,” Helmut Jaeger, managing director of SOLVIS, a leading solar energy equipment manufacturer, said during a conference in Berlin on Jun. 6.

This deficiency of the grid also forces operators of wind turbines to shut them off for long periods of time, if the instant demand is not high enough to immediately consume the electricity generated by the wind farms.

To make matters worse, Germany has recently been on the brink of suffering power blackouts, after having shut down its oldest seven nuclear power plants. This past winter, during some periods of high consumption of electricity and low generation of wind and solar energy, Germany had to import electricity from neighbouring countries, especially from France.

Jaeger said that this risk continues, and could worsen if the coming winters turn out to be colder and longer than the one of 2011-2012.

German electricity operators have already developed small-scales schemes to deal with over-generation of electricity on sunny, windy days, and deficits during high consumption winter periods.

One of these schemes is the so called ‘energy butler’, an electronic device able to coordinate electricity demand and supply, according to instant prices, of small neighbourhoods already using photovoltaic and wind turbine installations, or of local combined heat and power stations.

“The most efficient way to use renewable energy is to consume it locally and immediately,” said Thomas Wolski, manager of a model local smart grid in the city of Mannheim, some 500 kilometres southeast of Berlin.

In the model of Mannheim, neighbouring houses using solar panels are linked to each other, in clusters of energy-efficient urban units. “The energy butler analyses the present supply of electricity and its price, compares it to the potential demand in the urban unit, and decides whether to start operating washing machines or temporarily shut off refrigerators and heating systems, in order to optimise consumption according to prices and supply,” Wolski told IPS.

In other schemes, industrial refrigerators are used as storage devices in periods of high supply of renewable energy, when electricity prices are low. This is the case for fisheries in the city of Cuxhaven, just 20 kilometres inshore of the North Atlantic Ocean.

In a small-scale smart grid, which encompasses 650 households, one communal swimming pool, several refrigerated warehouses, and combined heat and power stations, the local energy provider EWE has developed a cluster of generation and storage facilities.

“When the wind turbine parks installed off-shore generate high amounts of electricity, we cool down the refrigerated warehouses to extreme temperatures, and use them as accumulators,” Tanja Schmedes, managing director of EWE’s project, told IPS.

“Actually, we need temperatures of only minus 21 Celsius in the warehouses,” Schmedes said. “When wind energy is low, we release the stored energy from the refrigerators to the community.”

Such models are not enough to manage the enormous amounts of electricity the grid has to coordinate for Germany’s heavy industrial sector. Additionally, the present power lines are unable to efficiently transport electricity over hundreds of kilometres, said Stefan Kohler, director of the German Energy Agency (DENA), the semi-governmental office coordinating the exploitation of renewable energy sources and smart grids.

“We need a mixed grid, with 380-kilovolt electric lines able to transport alternate electricity over relatively short distances, and the so-called high-voltage, direct current lines, able to transport high amounts of electricity over long distances,” Kohler told IPS.

Kohler said that by 2020 at the latest, Germany must utilise at least three high-voltage direct current power lines “from Schleswig Holstein at the Baltic and North Atlantic Sea down to Bavaria”. Each one of these lines would be 900 kilometres long.

(END)

Family planning in the LDCs is crucial to lowering birth rates, reducing poverty and protecting vulnerable populations against climate change. Credit: SERP/IPS

By Julio Godoy
PARIS, May 30 2012 (IPS)

The reproductive rights agenda, from improving women’s access to education to systematic family planning to reducing birth rates and combating poverty, has become a cornerstone of most industrialised nations’ development policies toward the least developed countries (LDCs), comprised primarily of sub-Saharan African states.

This sharpening of focus comes just in time for the Rio+ 20 summit on sustainable development, slated to run from Jun. 20-22 in Brazil, where the question of climate change will be discussed alongside the development agenda.

It is no surprise that LDCs with the lowest gross national income per capita, weakest human resources and highest economic vulnerability are also the most affected by climate change.

This double challenge, of mitigating climate change and combating crushing poverty, makes improving reproductive rights and promoting gender equality goals that can no longer be delayed, according to several recent reports and agreements.

During a meeting of the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women – U.N. Women – with the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF), which took place in Paris this week, delegates agreed to put the empowerment of women and reproductive rights at the centre of their joint action.

The agreement, signed by Michelle Bachelet, executive director of U.N. Women, and Abdou Diouf, secretary general of the OIF, aims at tackling gender inequality in the 75 OIF member states, most of which are also LDCs.

Gender inequality, typified by violence and discrimination against women, also leads to higher birth rates and poverty, according to experts.

The agreement between U.N. Women and the OIF is but one of several other covenants launched in recent weeks, in the hopes of improving women’s access to education and promoting reproductive rights and family planning.

Last April, U.N. Women set up another agreement with the European Union to strengthen cooperation between the two organisations in their work on gender equality.

Simultaneously, the Royal Society of London (RS) released its new People and the Planet report, which focuses on reproductive rights and social justice as cornerstones of global economic sustainability.

The report called attention to LDCs’ urgent need to “improve women’s access to education and family planning if they are to achieve sustainable development”.

The report recalled that even though global population growth is slowing, rates in LDCs — particularly in sub-Saharan African countries — are expected to remain high for the rest of the century, hampering efforts to reduce poverty.

On the other hand, the report deplored disproportionately high consumption levels in industrialised countries, the root cause of global warming and climate change.

British biologist John Sulston, co-author of the report, said that “population growth and high consumption must be considered together” while searching for solutions to climate change.

Sulston, who headed a working group at the RS while preparing the newest People and the Planet report, said that family planning is indispensable in countries with the highest fertility rate, mostly LDCs.

He also pointed out that populations in industrialised countries, which consume resources at a rate that the planet cannot afford, must realise that their way of life is not sustainable.

The report is extremely timely, coming just ahead of the Rio + 20 summit, which is poised to deal with sustainable development and the planet’s future.

The report stressed the world must meet the challenge of lifting “the 1.3 billion people living on less than 1.25 dollars per day” out of absolute poverty.

To fulfil this objective, international inequality must be eliminated, a process that “will require focused efforts in key policy areas including economic development, education, family planning and health.”

The report also emphasised that “the most developed and the emerging economies must stabilise and then reduce material consumption levels through … improvements in resource-use efficiency, including reducing waste; investment in sustainable resources, technologies and infrastructures; and systematically decoupling economic activity from environmental impact.”

Sulston told IPS, “An enormous injustice affects the human world, as expressed by extremely high consumption in some areas, a consumption of food for instance, that is unhealthy for the very people consuming (the foodstuffs), while other people (in LDCs) consume too little, and suffer malnutrition, diseases and even death due to poverty.”

Sulston lamented, “Humanity is the victim of a system of global economics based on an (inadequate) measurement of gross domestic product (GDP), which drives consumption, and pushes people to compete against each other.”

“The one thing that governments all over the world say is: we must grow, we must grow, more than the others,” Sulston said.

To actually measure human development, “We must add the cost of the Earth, the price of its resources, into our economic models, in order to have a more stable socio-economic structure, not only for the present, but also for the wellbeing of humans in the future,” he said.

Sulston added that climate change is making clear that humanity “is running out of space.” Evidence of climate change and of social injustice fuels the crucial need “to put all these issues – population growth, human consumption and environment – on top of the agenda of the forthcoming Rio + 20 summit.”

Eliya Msiyaphazi Zulu, executive director of the African Institute for Development Policy and president of the Union for African Population Studies, recalled that there is a well-established link between low education levels and high birthrates.

Education delays the onset of childbirth, but also empowers women, “because once you’re more educated, you can have more autonomy, more say in decision making processes in your marriage,” Zulu said.

The report notes that educated women are also more likely to seek out healthcare for their children and get jobs, thereby contributing to their economies. Consequently, instead of waiting for development to slow population growth, Zulu said, countries should focus on reducing fertility rates to promote development.

(END)

The latest session of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), taking place May 15-25 in the former German capital Bonn, is the perfect opportunity to reaffirm the enormous and growing body of scientific expertise on policies to tackle global warming.

During the current session, attended by hundreds of scientists, environmental activists, and government delegates from all over the world, the UNFCCC – the agency tasked with fulfilling the obligations of the Kyoto Protocol – is hosting numerous workshops for at least five groups dedicated to debates and decision-making on climate change.

The UNFCCC is also obliged to hold international debates on a follow up treaty that is expected to take effect in 2013. Until now, despite mounting pressure and numerous attempts to reach an agreement on a post-Kyoto protocol, there is no global consensus on how to continue reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE), the primary culprit of global warming.

During the negotiations that led to the formulation of the Kyoto protocol in 1997, the world’s leading industrialised countries (including the United States, which later refused to endorse the agreement) collectively agreed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 5.2 percent on average for the period 2008-2012, relative to their annual emissions in the base year 1990.

Bureaucratic delays

Sadly, workshops hosted by the UNFCCC often suffer a loss of efficiency as a result of bureaucratic hurdles.

The titles of the many sessions alone are often too complicated to follow. In Bonn, the following groups are meeting daily: the subsidiary body for implementation; the subsidiary body for scientific and technological advice; the ad hoc working group on long-term cooperative action under the convention; and the ad hoc working group on further commitments for ‘annex 1 parties’ – U.N. parlance for ‘industrialised countries’, or signatories of the Kyoto protocol.

Still, the red tape surrounding official procedures cannot conceal the collective wisdom of these committees, which represent years of research on how to deal with climate change.

A workshop on equitable access to sustainable development, held here on May 16, allowed a brief glimpse into this wisdom.

During the workshop, a handful of scientists explained the empirical evidence of climate change and the moral consequences that follow, stresseing that sustainable development and climate change mitigation burdens should, in the future, be equitably distributed among the world’s nations.

One of the speakers, Martin Khor, executive director of the Geneva-based South Centre, stressed that in the quest for an international climate agreement to forestall the climate change crisis, “three aspects have to be the basis simultaneously: the environmental imperative, the developmental imperative, and the equity imperative.”

Khor insisted that setting the global goal for emissions reduction “has to take account of the environmental imperative, and also deal with the emission reduction of Annex I and non Annex I parties,” the latter being the developing countries not obligated by the Kyoto protocol to reduce their GHGE.

Khor pointed out that the UNFCCC recognises “the equity principle; that developed countries take the lead in emission reduction, and that developing countries have development imperatives, and their ability to undertake climate actions depends on the extent of support they receive from the developed countries. ”

In other words, “Annex I countries will (have to) meet the agreed full incremental costs of implementing developing countries’ climate policy measures,” Khor pointed out.

Khor recalled that since the beginning of the period of industrialisation – in Western Europe, North America, Australia and Japan – until 2009, about 1,280 gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon dioxide (CO2) were emitted, triggering the present processes of global warming and climate change.

Scientists have now determined that, in order to achieve a 67 percent probability of limiting global temperature rise to under two degrees celsius, CO2 emissions between 2010 and 2050 must be kept below 750 Gt. If this probability is to be increased to 75 percent, the carbon budget for the period up until 2050 falls to 600 Gt. Khor said estimates for the “fair share” of emissions for developed and developing countries is based on the size of the population relative to emissions from 1850 to 2008.

“Cumulative global emissions have totalled about 1,214 Gt (from) 1850-2008,” he said. Annex I countries accounted for 878 Gt or 72 percent of the total.

Given that industrialised countries’ share of the global population during this time was about 25 percent, these countries “overused” 568 Gt worth of emissions.

“The industrialised countries are still accumulating (CO2) debt because their actual emissions as a group in 2009 still exceed their fair share,” Khor said.

Sivan Kartha, senior scientist at the Washington-based Stockholm Environment Institute, also laid out three key components of equitable access to sustainable development. “First, the global emissions peak (and subsequent rate of decline) must be consistent with keeping climate change below the agreed maximum level.”

Second, “Each country must have a sufficient share of the limited remaining greenhouse gas budget, as this determines how soon its national emissions must peak and how quickly they must decline.”

And finally, “Each country must also have adequate financial and technological means to keep within the available greenhouse gas budget, without compromising poverty eradication and development needs.”

To illustrate the double inequity of GHGE origin and development levels, Kartha recalled that while industrialised countries already dispose of annual per capita incomes of between 30,000 and 42,000 U.S. dollars, only a handful of the strong emerging economies might reach the 15,000-dollar annual level in 2050.

(END)

The decision by the European Parliament (EP) to renounce its participation in the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development next month on the grounds that hotel costs are exorbitant has provoked sharp criticism from civil society organisations.

In a statement released May 7, and which almost went unnoticed, the chairman of the EP environment committee Matthias Groote said that the parliament declined to send a delegation to the Rio + 20 summit due to the “huge increase in the estimated hotel cost(s)”, which he called “simply not justifiable.”

But non-governmental organisations dismissed such arguments as “alibi” and the decision as the EP’s conscious failure to play its role as a fundamental check and balance institution within the European Union (EU), especially vis-a-vis its executive body, the European Commission (EC).

Belen Balanya, expert on international environmental policy at the Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), told IPS that the EP decision to cancel “all participation in Rio is simply regrettable. I do not know how much effort they have put in looking for viable options to go or if it is more a decision that has other, obscure reasons.”

The Brussels-based CEO is a research and campaign group working to expose and challenge the privileged access and influence enjoyed by corporations and their lobby groups in EU policy making.

At the Rio+20 Conference, the 20 year follow up to the Earth Summit of 1992, world leaders, along with thousands of participants from governments, the private sector, NGOs and other groups, will come together to define a global policy agenda to reduce poverty, advance social equity and ensure environmental sustainability.

Balanya said that the Rio + 20 summit is “the end of a process which is going on for months, and the responsibility of the EP should have been to check and ensure throughout the process that the European Commission played an adequate role in the negotiations to promoted a change for more sustainable societies.”

Balanya recalled that the EC has been mainly pushing “a bigger role for corporations in the Rio+20 Summit and related U.N. processes and the financialisation of nature, such as biodiversity.”

This European policy “will further promote the privatisation of nature, benefitting only a small minority and will not attempt a change in the current model of consumption and production, therefore not helping to solve the environmental crisis.”

“Such European policies will certainly not benefit the poor,” Balanya added.

NGO representatives in Germany called the EP decision “odd.” A Berlin-based German development expert, who asked not to be identified, told IPS, “The civil society organisations are sending delegates to Rio, without incurring in horrendous hotel costs.”

Jo Leinen, member of Social Democratic group at the EP, and who was supposed to be part of the European delegation to Rio, called the parliamentary decision “regrettable”

In an interview with IPS, Leinen said that the absence of the EP at Rio + 20 “is a big deficit. We should be there, but there is a cartel of hotels in Rio that is abusing of the conference to demand irresponsible prices.”

Leinen admitted that the European environmental policies are at best stagnating. “Europe is still the vanguard in global environmental and sustainability policies, but the present financial and economic crisis is changing the priorities.”

“The EU must be better, in reducing resources consumption, in improving solidarity with the developing world,” Leinen said. “But European governments now have other urgent problems to solve.”

In the run up to Rio + 20, the European Union has actively promoted the concept of a green economy, but without actually defining what the term means.

European environmental groups and governments from developing countries, especially those represented at the Group of 77, have rejected the concept as merely a ploy by industrialised countries to pursue their own interests, particularly the expansion of foreign markets for technology, without taking into account the needs of the countries of the South.

In a recent analysis on the perspectives of Rio + 20, VENRO, the umbrella federation of some 120 development non-governmental organisations in Germany, called this “green economy” a fuzzy idea, of which “there is no a general accepted definition.”

In the paper, VENRO points out that technology transfers and improved economic efficiency, defended by the European Union and U.N. institutions as part of this new green economy “do not necessarily lead to a reduced consumption of resources,” an indispensable element of a truly sustainable economy.

Therefore, VENRO concludes, such a “green economy” does not constitute a new economic paradigm that would simultaneously guarantee sustainability and poverty reduction.

In the paper, VENRO pointed out that the first draft of a final declaration for Rio + 20, the so called “zero draft”, has been rejected by civil society groups and developing countries alike, “since it does not question the fundamental tenets of a neoliberal economy, namely free trade and economic growth.”

Balanya, of CEO, also urged the EU “to stop promoting this flawed concept of green economy, which involves the expansion of the logic of carbon markets to other areas such as water or biodiversity.”

Balanya said that in general the European environmental policies, as “failing badly.”

She explicitly referred to the EU’s climate and environmental flagship policy, the Emissions Trading System (ETS). In theory, the ETS “provides a cheap and efficient means to limit greenhouse gas emissions within an ever-tightening cap. But in practice it has rewarded big polluters with windfall profits,” Balanya pointed out.

Additionally, “It is undermining efforts to reduce emissions and guarantee sustainability with other policies.”

Indeed, there is growing evidence that carbon markets are not a solution to tackling the climate crisis or moving towards a low-carbon, sustainable economy. In most cases, the ETS fails to make countries take responsibility for their own emissions, instead allowing them to offset emissions by buying permits from countries from the South.

“Besides, the European ETS is facing a crash in carbon prices to extraordinary levels,” Balanya added. Low carbon prices render empty the EU logic behind the ETS, that prices will create scarcity of permits to pollute and will encourage corporations to reduce emissions, thus cancelling out other efforts to improve resource sustainability.

Balanya said that in general, “the EU has incorporated the discourse on sustainability in many of their policies and treaties, but it does not go beyond rhetoric.” In reality, she added, the trade and investment policies promoted by the EU, as well as its environmental and energy policies, “are fuelling and locking in a very unsustainable model of production and consumption.” (END)

François Hollande at a massive rally just prior to his election victory on May 6, 2012. Credit: Ps-soisy/CC-BY-ND-2.0

By Julio Godoy
BERLIN, May 7 2012 (IPS)

The voting out of conservative governments in France and Greece this weekend heralds the end of harsh European austerity programmes and ushers in an era of new economic, investment, and social policies aimed at restoring growth and employment across the continent.

In France, the Socialist presidential candidate François Hollande, a champion of government-led economic growth and employment strategies, accomplished a comfortable victory over the incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy – the man often seen as the poster child of the austerity programmes in practice all over Europe.

In Greece, citizens penalised the two strongest, traditional parties, New Democracy and the Pan- Hellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), for their recent technocratic coalition government that has imposed a severe austerity plan on the country, which deepened the five-year-long recession and ignited a steep increase of unemployment and poverty

Instead, Greek citizens cast their ballots with the Coalition of the Radical Left, which obtained 17 percent of the votes, the Communist party (8.4 percent), and yet another Leftist party (six percent). A neo-Fascist group also obtained a minor, but substantial share of the votes.

Winds of change?

Particularly Hollande’s triumph in France is seen as the turning point in the current economic paradigm in the continent. During his speech immediately after the election, Hollande said that his triumph was seen across Europe “as a relief, a hope, the confirmation that austerity is not a call of fate” for the continent.

He added that his mission would be “to give Europe a dimension of growth, of employment, of prosperity” for all.

Hollande, who for the next five years will be ruling over the second largest economy in Europe, also announced that during the next weeks, and at the next European summit scheduled for Jun. 24, he will argue before the European Union and the government in Germany that cuts in public spending, far from contributing to a solution of the sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone, have aggravated the problem of public finances in practically every European country.

For the past two years Germany and the EU, together with Sarkozy, have been pivotal in conceiving the austerity programmes imposed upon the governments in Greece, Italy, Portugal, Ireland and Spain.

Charactertised by drastic cuts in public spending, pensions, social welfare programmes and salaries, these policies have so far only sharpened the economic crisis, prolonging recessions, worsening poverty and even increasing mortality rates among the elderly.

Economic performance, as measured by gross domestic product (GDP), has shrunk in Greece by 17.3 percent since 2007; in Ireland by more than seven percent; in Italy by 6.7 percent; in Portugal by almost six percent and in Spain by four percent.

During his victory speech, Hollande insisted that his government will focus on “social justice and restoring hope for the youth.”

France suffers from a 25 percent youth unemployment rate; in Spain, youth unemployment affects almost 50 percent of the population, a predicament that affects other Mediterranean countries of the eurozone.

This data, coupled with weeks of anti-austerity rhetoric in the lead-up to French and Greek elections, have softened the hitherto stern austerity rhetoric in Germany, the EU, and even at the European Central Bank (ECB).

German chancellor Angela Merkel said last week that she now envisions “a growth amendment” for the austerity programmes that her government has consistently forced upon Europe for two years.

Simultaneously, EU commissioner for economic and financial affairs Olli Rehn called on European governments to approve a new European public investment programme to “boost growth across the region.”

In a public speech on May 5 in Brussels, Rehn actually went as far as to say that the austerity fiscal rules in practice in the EU are not a “straightjacket” and that they allow “considerable scope for judgment” by national governments to implement growth policies.

Rehn also admitted that many EU and eurozone member states are suffering from a “severe recession and rising unemployment.” He added that under certain conditions, additional public investment in surplus countries, such as Germany, “could be beneficial to reduce macroeconomic imbalances” within the EU.

Even the head of the ECB, Mario Draghi, urged on May 4 that growth be put “back at the centre of the (European) agenda.” Such a call is extraordinary, given that the ECB mandate focuses solely on an extremely low inflation target, and has routinely ignored unemployment and growth deficits in the eurozone.

Long road ahead

Leftist European parties across the board see all this as a welcome change. According to Sigmar Gabriel, leader of the German Social Democratic Party, Hollande’s triumph in France means, “Europe will take a new economic orientation, towards growth and employment. That’s excellent news.”

In a press conference on May 7, Gabriel condemned “Angela Merkel’s cuts plans, which have pushed Europe deeper into the crisis. What Europe now urgently needs is a coordinated policy, a collective plan against youth unemployment,” he said.

Gabriel added that the electoral results in Greece showed that that the austerity programmes needed to be accompanied by “social measures to cushion their impact on society.” Furthermore, he said, “Greece needs much more time to solve” its sovereign debt and economic crisis.

In Spain, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, the leader of the Socialist Workers‘ Party (PSOE), called Hollande’s triumph “a great hope, the beginning of a new era.” Pèrez’s deputy, Elena Valenciano, said that Hollande embodies “a new European Union, one of solidarity and equal rights for all.”

Under Hollande, France will be a “wall of protection against the neoliberal policies that have brought us to the present crisis,” Valenciano added.

The mass acquisition or lease of arable land in developing countries, especially in Africa, by foreign investors – a practice aggravated by the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2007 – has reached record highs, according to several new studies.

A study by the Spain-based group Genetic Resources Action International (GRAIN), released late February, estimates that some 35 million hectares of land have been sold or leased in 416 recent, large-scale land grabbing deals in 66 countries, mostly in Africa.

Another analysis of land grabs, carried out by the International Land Coalition (ILC), released last January, found that between 2000 and 2010 some 203 million hectares were leased or sold in developing countries, mainly in Africa, but also in Latin America, Asia, and even Eastern Europe, to foreign investors.

“This land area is equivalent to over eight times the size of the United Kingdom,” the ILC said in its report ‘Land Rights and the Rush for Land – Findings of the Global Commercial Pressures on Land Research Project.’

Most land is used to produce inputs for so called biofuels, ILC pointed out.

In his new book on the subject, award-winning Italian journalist Stefano Liberti says that this massive global land grab is the direct consequence of the privatisation and liberalisation policies imposed for years upon developing countries by international financial institutions such as the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and investment in agricultural policies promoted by United Nations agencies such as the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO).

The book, published originally in Italian under the title ‘Land Grabbing: How the market for land is creating a new colonialism’, was released in German on Apr 18, with English and Spanish editions under way.

Liberti told IPS that most governments in developing countries affected by land grabbing are also accomplices in the process.

“In many African countries in particular, land belongs to the state,” Liberti said. “Governments are dealing secretly with investors, to lease or sell enormous areas of the best arable land. Local farmers who don’t own the land they work are informed of these deals at the very last moment, when they are told to leave,” Liberti said.

During the preparation of his book, Liberti travelled across Africa, and attended numerous seminars and sessions of international institutions, such as the FAO and the WB, and participated in workshops organised by small farmers’ organisations around the world.

Liberti said that the most spectacular cases of land grabbing he came across were in Ethiopia. “This country has been suffering from famine for decades, due to armed conflicts and droughts. And yet, it has been leasing or selling its best land to foreign investors for almost nothing at all to produce food or inputs for biofuels to be consumed abroad,” Liberti said.

In his book, Liberti illustrates the case of an Indian company, which leases 300,000 hectares of Ethiopia’s best arable land for one dollar per year per hectare, to produce wheat, palm oil, and sugar for mostly Indian consumption.

“Ethiopians have almost nothing from this deal,” Liberti said. “The company pays extreme low salaries to its Ethiopian workers, almost nothing for the land, enjoys tax breaks for the import of technology, and on top of that uses the country’s water for free.”

Indeed, the Ethiopian Investment Agency, the state office administering foreign direct investment (FDI), praises the country’s labour costs as “relatively low compared to the African average.” According to Liberti, foreign agricultural industries in Ethiopia pay their workers less than a dollar a day.

The Ethiopian case is typical of the land grabbing phenomenon across the developing world.

In a recent case in Algeria, the Abu Dhabi-based Al Qudra Holding obtained concessions for 31,000 hectares of agricultural land, on which it intends to produce potatoes, olives and dairy products, all for export.

The company is also planning similar land leasing investments in Morocco, Pakistan, Syria, Vietnam, Sudan and India to increase its land holdings to 400,000 hectares.

Liberti said that holdings such as Al Qudra, and investment funds, including pension funds, are the main actors in the global land grab. “The international financial sector discovered some five years ago that it can earn substantial amounts of money by speculating with food stuffs,” he said.

Holdings and sovereign wealth funds, which manage the currency reserves of many Arab and other strong, emerging economies also invest massively in land grabbing, to guarantee food supply in their home markets.

According to estimations by GRAIN, “Pension funds currently juggle 23 trillion dollars in assets, of which some 100 billion are believed to be invested in commodities.”

Of this money in commodities, five to 15 billion are reportedly going into farmland acquisitions. “By 2015, these commodity and farmland investments are expected to double,” GRAIN estimated last year.

Liberti said that international institutions such as the WB and the FAO are accomplices in the land grab.

“The FAO used to say that agriculture needed massive private investment to improve efficiency. The WB and the (IMF), for their part, promoted privatisation and liberalisation of food markets, and gave impulse to land grabbing.”

“The WB has even lent money and provided insurance to investment funds taking part in land grabbing,” Liberti added.

Yet another driver of the land grab is an explosion in the use of so-called biofuels. As the ILC report points out that of all the many deals resulting in land theft, “Seventy-eight percent are for agricultural production, of which three-quarters are for biofuels.”

Mineral extraction, industry, tourism, and forest conversions are also significant contributors, adding up to the remaining 22 percent.

ILC Director Madiodio Niasse told IPS that governments in developing countries must “understand that there are alternative investment models that do not necessarily involve them giving away their land.”

Niasse, a Senegalese national, has been the director of ILC since 2005. He told IPS that it is essential for African governments to conceive “their own rural development strategies to serve their national priorities and the interests of their people.”

“During my research trips in Africa, I came across posters against the land grab deals,” Liberti told IPS. “One said: ‘Future generations will damn your graves, because you did not leave them any land.’”

To avoid this future, Liberti stressed, “An efficient agricultural model, an alternative to the agro- industrial (framework) in practice now, must be developed for Africa, Latin America, and Asia.”

Foreign investment in agriculture was invited based on the misguided assumption that it would help local communities; now, “the opposite is actually happening.”

“The alternative is to support local farmers by teaching them modern methods of sustainable agriculture, and providing infrastructure for irrigation, storage, transportation, and technical inputs,” Liberti concluded.

Swiss banks are facing prosecution in several European countries, accused of complicity in tax evasion and money laundering schemes, especially with French, German, and wealthy Greek citizens.

In France, the publication last March of a book revealing massive tax evasion by French citizens with the help of a renowned Swiss bank forced local judicial authorities to launch an inquiry into the practices of the financial institution.

On Apr. 16, a spokesperson of the French Public Prosecutor’s office confirmed to IPS that it had launched an investigation against the Paris agency of the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), under the charges of money laundering and tax evasion, among others.

The book by journalist Antoine Peillon, entitled ‘Ces 600 milliards qui manquent à la France – Enquête au cœur de l’évasion fiscale’ (‘Those 600 billion which France is missing – Inquiry into the heart of tax evasion’), reveals the methods the bank has allegedly used for years to encourage wealthy French citizens, from business people and high-ranking politicians to sports celebrities and artists, to evade taxes.

According to Peillon, who supports his claims with classified research conducted by the French secret services, interviews with former bank employees, and the bank’s own internal documents, UBS deploys a large clandestine team operating in France, with the sole task of wooing rich French citizens to use their services in attempts at tax evasion.

“Until last January, UBS had 120 clandestine operators in France,” Peillon told IPS. “Each of them used the so-called handbook of private banking, a veritable manual of tax evasion. Each of these operators keeps a hidden accounting system, colloquially called ‘carnet du lait’, French for ‘milk book’.”

“All these activities are well known among the different French police units,” he added.

Peillon estimates that French citizens and private enterprises held secret bank accounts at the UBS worth some 600 billion euros. “Since the year 2000, France has lost some 85 million euros in taxes per year as a result of these accounts.”

The conflict with France is but one of several legal disputes that have brought Swiss banks into confrontation with foreign justice systems.

Last March, Swiss justice authorities issued an international arrest warrant for three high ranking German fiscal officials, under the accusation of “complicity in economic espionage” and “violation of bank secrecy.”

On Mar. 20, German prosecution authorities received the official notification, in which Swiss justices demanded the arrest of the three German officials.

According to the German government, however, the three fiscal officials did not commit any crime – quite the opposite: they were pivotal in prosecuting thousands of German citizens guilty of tax evasion.

To prove their case, the three officials acquired, in 2010, an electronic data storage device containing information of thousands of secret bank accounts held by German citizens in Switzerland, to evade taxes.

With that data, the German finance ministry was able to prosecute and sanction more than 6,000 tax evaders, obtaining an additional tax income worth some 300 million euros.

Reacting to the Swiss arrest warrant, German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said that the three German officials had done “an excellent job.”

German opposition leader Sigmar Gabriel, president of the Social Democratic Party, even urged the government in Berlin to launch an international arrest warrant against Swiss private bank officials, for complicity with money laundering and tax evasion.

If “private banks (are) accomplices of tax evasion and money laundering they should be prosecuted by German justice, even if the banks have their headquarters abroad, and the crimes mentioned are also committed abroad,” Gabriel said.

Other European governments have recently complained that Swiss banks have been collaborating with wealthy citizens to evade taxes.

According to a list released by the Greek government last January, more than 4,000 Greek citizens evade taxes worth 14,877 billion euros, representing seven percent of the national economic activity, or 60 percent of the total public deficit of 2011.

The list, which Greek financial minister Evangelos Venizelos dubbed the “list of shame“, included Greek business leaders, artists, and athletes. It is conventional wisdom that Greek tax evaders are using tax havens in Switzerland, but also in Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, and Monaco.

Similar data is available in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and elsewhere in Europe.

Forced by the sovereign debt crisis to improve their own tax efficiency, European governments and the European Union have created new debates on tax evasion.

In late March, a workshop entitled “Tax and financial havens – a threat to the EU’s internal market”, took place in the Belgian capital Brussels.

The event was organised by the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC), an official advisory body to the EU. In his opening speech, the president of the EESC section on internal markets, Bryan Cassidy, plainly singled out Switzerland, Luxembourg and Britain as notorious onshore fiscal havens within Europe.

Cassidy also stressed that “money laundering and tax havens are closely connected.”

The legal conflicts with Switzerland on tax evasion also highlight the futility of the decades-long international fight against tax evasion, mostly within the framework of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and its associated Financial Action Task Force (FATF).

Peillon told IPS that despite the financial crisis of 2007, “tax havens in Europe are doing as (well) as ever, even if the so-called black and grey lists of the OECD and the FATF pretend otherwise.”

According to the OECD and the FATF, as of Feb. 2012, only two countries worldwide do not fulfil the “strategic measures against money laundering and finance for terrorism standards” (AML/CFT) established by both groups: Iran and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Additionally, the FATF-OECD list 15 other “jurisdictions with strategic AML/CFT deficiencies that have not made sufficient progress in addressing the deficiencies or have not committed to an action plan developed with the FATF to address the deficiencies.”

These 15 jurisdictions are countries and territories in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, but do not include a single one of the most notorious tax havens in the Caribbean, such as the Cayman Islands, or in OECD states in North America, such the U.S. state of Delaware, or Europe.

European civil society organisations continue to demand that international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund apply the same standards of transparency and accountability to their internal affairs that they demand for governments across the world.

These demands are being made just ahead of the spring meetings the IFIs will hold later this month in Washington D.C., and refer in particular to the nomination of a new president for the World Bank.

“The election of the new president of the Bank is typical of the lack of transparency and democracy that reigns in the international financial institutions,” Peter Chowla, an economist working for the Bretton Woods project (BWP), told IPS.

The BWP, a London-based international coalition of economists and anti-globalisation activists, focuses its work on the IFIs, to challenge their power, open policy space, and promote alternative approaches.

Traditionally, the U.S. government and the European Union share the leading positions at the IFIs. While the U.S. government occupies the coveted presidency of the World Bank with a candidate of its own, the EU places one European technocrat at the helm of the IMF – no fair election process precedes either of these appointments.

Last year, the French government obtained the backing of European governments to name former French finance minister, Christine Lagarde, managing director of the IMF, despite vociferous opposition from developing countries.

This year, U.S. president Barack Obama has nominated Korean-born physician Jim Yong Kim to become the Bank’s next president.

Although there are two alternative candidates for the position, the present Nigerian minister of finance Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and her former Colombian counterpart José Antonio Ocampo, it is taken as given that Kim’s candidacy will obtain the support of European countries, and that he will be elected during the bank’s board hearings scheduled to take place in Washington from Apr. 9-11.

It is expected that the confirmation of Kim as new president will be announced on Apr. 11.

Chowla recalled that such “opaque processes” of nomination were conceived more than 60 years ago, when the IFIs were founded, and no longer fit into “the present global economic and political structures.”

But disagreements between European civil society organisations and the IFIs go beyond nomination procedures, and include the institutions’ policy recommendations for governments about management of climate change financial facilities.

Jeroen Kwakkenbos, policy and advocacy officer at the European Network on Debt and Development, told IPS that the World Bank had “neither a mandate nor the qualifications” to participate in the management of the future Green Climate Fund, which is supposed to administrate future financial resources for adaptation and mitigation of climate change, or of REDD (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries).

“We urge the IFIs to remain outside the management of these facilities,” Kwakkenbos told IPS. “Such entities should be managed under democratic principles – that is, one country, one vote, following representation of stake holders in the boards of the organisations.”

Chowla stressed that the main problem with the IFIs is that these institutions continue to apply the neoliberal doctrine that characterised them throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

“These characteristics are deregulation, privatisation, and bilateral free trade agreements between industrialised and emerging countries,” Chowla pointed out. “Four years after the global financial crisis broke out, there are no tangible signs of new regulation of financial flows.”

Chowla specifically mentioned the financial flows to emerging countries, which have triggered important dislocations of exchange rates, leading to what some economists have dubbed “the currency war”.

“(A)symmetry in the recovery of developing countries and the recessions in Europe after the crisis have led to major and unstable short term capital flows to developing countries,” Chowla stated.

These flows have proved to be significantly destabilising, causing sharp appreciation of currencies of emergent developing countries such as Brazil.

Chowla said that the IMF analysis of this destabilising monetary phenomenon on emerging countries is flawed, because it is either based on econometric exercises relying on highly uncertain variables, or on the Fund’s own policy recommendations, which the authorities have not yet even agreed with.

Furthermore, the Bank and the Fund have helped to impose austerity programmes upon European countries already suffering deep economic downturns, regardless of the dramatic social consequences of cuts in public spending and social welfare, Chowla said.

Chowla also mentioned the support the World Bank continues to offer for privatisation programmes across the world.

“In Romania,” he said, “the Bank is the main force behind the planned highly controversial privatisation of the local health system, opposed by unions and civil society groups.”

Other groups, such as the Europe Corporate Observatory, raise similar complaints against the Bank and the IMF, for supporting free trade agreements (FTAs) with developing countries, which obviously damage local public health initiatives and food provision.

The most salient case is the European FTA with India, slated to come into force this year, which would force the Indian pharmaceutical industry to cease producing inexpensive generic medications to treat contagious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, which most of the developing world is dependent on as a cheap alternative to patented drugs.

The recent dramatic rise of youth unemployment across Europe – particularly in the Mediterranean member countries of the Eurozone most affected by the sovereign debt crisis and so-called ‘remedial’ austerity programmes – indicates that the continent is sacrificing its future on the altar of short-term budget consolidation.

According to official figures, the unemployment rate affecting people under 25 years of age has reached 50 percent in Spain, 48 percent in Greece, 35 percent in Portugal, and 31 percent in Italy. Youth unemployment is also high in Ireland (30 percent), France (23 per cent), and Britain (22 percent).

On average, 25 percent of European’s youth labour force is unemployed and yet another 25 percent only has a precarious, low paid job, even though most of unemployed young people possess high educational qualifications, including university diplomas.

In all these countries affected by high sovereign debt and economic recession, conservative governments have imposed drastic cuts in public spending, reduced social welfare programmes and pensions and increased taxes, especially those paid by consumers, among other austerity measures.

These programmes have deepened economic slumps and fiscal difficulties across Europe.

As the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) announced on Mar. 29 in its more recent economic assessment for the G7, the seven most industrialised countries of the world, “Our forecast for the first half of 2012 points to robust growth in the United States and Canada, but much weaker activity in Europe, where the outlook remains fragile.”

“We may have stepped back from the edge of the cliff,” the OECD’s chief economist Pier Carlo Padoan cautioned, “but there’s still no room for complacency.”

Padoan also warned that the eurozone’s three largest economies – Germany, France and Italy – may have shrunk by an average of 0.4 percent during the first quarter of the year.

The German economy already suffered a slowdown of 0.2 percent during the last quarter of 2011. Given the OECD forecast, such figures suggest that even Germany, the last standing economic powerhouse in an otherwise lethargic continent, might have fallen into recession – experiencing a negative growth rate for two consecutive quarters.

To confirm the crisis, the European Commission’s office for youth announced that youth unemployment across the continent went up to 5.5 million in January 2012, a 37.7 percent growth rate since the spring of 2008, at the beginning of the global financial crisis.

Other sources put this youth unemployment growth at a staggering 48 percent since 2008.

The office said that “Overall, young people account for one-fifth (21.3 percent) of the total increase in unemployment since 2008” in the EU.

Small wonder then that social scientists and politicians across the continent are talking about “a lost generation”.

In an editorial comment for the daily Saarlaendische Zeitung, German economist Fred Schmid described the European youth as the “zero generation – zero employment, zero income, zero perspectives.”

Ian Wright, a Labour Party member of parliament in Britain, also warned “that we … face a lost generation … if we don’t act now. If people don’t get a job, long-term unemployment leads to higher rates of depression, more divorces, and more cases of alcoholism. If there is one single thing which contributes to a declining and depressingly low quality of life, it is not having a job.”

Lack of prospects in Spain, Greece, Portugal and other European countries has forced youth to emigrate. The Spanish ministry of labour estimates that some 300,000 young university graduates left the country last year.

“Such a dramatic exodus of university graduates is a first in modern Spain,” minister Fátima Bañez told local press.

Indeed, during the past 15 to 20 years, Spain was a magnet for workers from developing countries, particularly from Latin America and Africa, but also from Asia. In two years, however, since the outbreak of the sovereign debt crisis and the collapse of the local real estate market, Spanish youth have either been demonstrating against local politics and austerity economics, or fleeing the country.

Thanks to this migration, Spanish has become the fourth most-spoken language in the German capital Berlin, after German, English, and Turkish.

The youth unemployment crisis is so severe, and affecting such a broad portion of the world, that the International Labour Organisation (ILO) has scheduled a youth employment forum next May.

The ILO estimates that young people are three times more likely to be unemployed than adults. “Over 75 million youth worldwide are looking for work,” the organization says.

The ILO has also warned of a “scarred” generation of young workers facing a dangerous mix of high unemployment, increased inactivity and precarious work in developed countries, as well as persistently high working poverty in the developing world.

The ILO’s general director Juan Somavia warned that this “labour market recession may last for a whole decade – it would be then a lost decade, with catastrophic social and political consequences.”

The crisis is affecting famiy lives in other unexpected ways. In Italy, for instance, youth end up living longer at their parents’ homes. Low incomes prevent youth from renting their own apartments, or financing their own households.

So far, there are no signs of change. All governments in Europe are insisting on pushing ahead with austerity programmes to stop international financial speculation against their credit-worthiness, and allegedly to consolidate their public budgets. At the same time, they continue to ignore the worrying social symptoms emerging all over the continent.

Only these symptoms, which erupt in the form of widespread protest, from the occupy movement in Germany to the Spanish indignados, suggest that the European youth, victims of a crisis they did not create and of counterproductive ‘solutions’, is not ready to give up its own future.

Francois Hollande, a frontrunner in the upcoming French presidential election, claims his "real political adversary is the world of finance." Credit: Jean-Marc Ayrault/CC-BY-2.0

By Julio Godoy
BERLIN, Mar 20 2012 (IPS)

Practically all European Social Democratic and Socialist parties are supporting the French presidential candidate François Hollande in the upcoming elections, in the hope that his likely triumph against incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy will create enough continental momentum to put an end to the present Conservative-inspired social and economic austerity policies.

According to the most recent polls, Hollande is likely to win the French presidential elections scheduled for April and May, with some polls released on Mar. 19 indicating that he could overcome Sarkozy with some 55 percent of the votes in the second round slated for May 5.

On Mar. 17, leaders of practically every European Social Democratic and Socialist party – all of which attach fundamental importance to the French presidential elections to define the middle term European economic and social future – gathered in Paris to participate in a rally to support Hollande.

Such united backing for the frontrunner who claims that his “true adversary is finance” comes at a time when the question of social justice in Europe has become more pressing than ever. Youth unemployment has reached record summits in debt-ridden Spain and Greece, and in Portugal the death rate of elderly is reaching historic heights.

As Stefan Ulrich, correspondent of the German daily newspaper Die Sueddeutsche Zeitung in France, commented on the weekend Leftist summit in Paris, “Europe has forgotten its own children. That’s why the Left believes its hour has come.”

Additionally, all three Mediterranean countries and Italy are trapped in a severe economic recession, aggravated by the austerity programmes imposed by the European Union and the international financial institutions.

This fiscal and growth conundrum makes the possibility that these countries can improve their budget situations and economic capacities while simultaneously reducing their debts highly unlikely.

The macroeconomic landscape also reflects the rising income inequality across the continent. The present salaries of top business executives remain astronomically high when compared to the income of an average employee in the EU, while taxes paid by large private companies are at an all time low, especially for banks and investment funds.

In Germany, for instance, the local press just revealed that Martin Winterkorn, CEO of automaker Volkswagen, received a salary of 17.4 million euros last year.

Against this backdrop, Hollande’s programme of higher taxes for the wealthy, tighter regulation for private financial institutions, and more public spending on youth employment and education strategies looks increasingly like a Social Democratic ‘new deal’ for Europe.

“The French presidential election is the point of inflexion in European politics,” said the former Italian leftist Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema during the weekend rally to support Hollande.

“First we (Leftist parties) will take France, then we will take Europe,” Johannes Swoboda, Austrian leader of the Social Democratic group at the European Parliament, predicted at the rally.

“We (European Leftist parties) will collectively change Europe,” insisted Sigmar Gabriel, president of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), at the same occasion.

European Leftist support for Hollande is a reaction to the European Conservative electoral support for Sarkozy, and aims at changing the austerity programmes, in particular the so called fiscal pact, imposed upon Mediterranean governments allegedly to “master” their sovereign debt crises.

This Conservative electoral backing for Sarkozy was best expressed by German chancellor Angela Merkel, who in a recent television interview in Paris said, “I support (Sarkozy) in whatever he does.”

Both Merkel and Sarkozy, in cooperation with the International Monetary Fund and the European Union, were pivotal in conceiving and implementing the severe austerity programmes unleashed on Greece, Spain and Portugal during the past two years. The two leaders were also instrumental in drafting and implementing the so-called European fiscal pact.

Hollande is the one European Socialist leader who has expressed open and vehement opposition to such programmes. During his electoral campaign, Hollande pledged to renegotiate the European fiscal pact, which foresees a public debt limit for the whole of Europe, but no increase in public revenues, in the form of tax reforms.

In a programmatic speech last January, Hollande went as far as to say that his “real political adversary is the world of finance … which over the past 20 years has taken control of our economy, our society, and our lives.”

In that speech, Hollande denounced conventional neoliberal attempts to revive the economy, which has been in shambles since the outbreak of the global financial crisis in 2007.

He stressed that the only tangible result of various global and European summits, other than aggravating the abject living conditions of the poor, was that “private banks, first bailed out by the state, are now biting the hand that once nourished them.”

Besides new rules for banks and investment funds, Hollande has also promised a wealth tax of 75 percent, to pay for new public spending in youth employment and education, and a reversal of the rise of the pension age, a Sarkozy-sponsored reform.

The Social Democratic opposition parties in Italy and Germany would indeed benefit from Hollande’s electoral victory. In both countries, general elections are scheduled for 2013. However, both parties must face strong incumbent candidates.

In Germany, conservative Chancellor Merkel still enjoys a great deal of popularity after six years in office, despite numerous setbacks in her political and economic programmes or backlash from her choices in political personnel.

At the same time, the German SPD has not yet fully recovered from the dramatic loss of favour it suffered during its past reign (1998-2005), during which it adopted radical cuts in welfare and pension programmes, and a vast deregulation of the labour market, measures that provoked a widening of income disparities, leading to what social scientists call “the oligarchisation of German society.”

D’Alema, who is likely to lead the Leftist opposition coalition in Italy in the 2013 elections, must also confront the incumbent Prime Minister Mario Monti, who, despite the austerity programmes imposed since last fall, enjoys a good deal of popular support.

A triumph for Hollande in France next May, coupled with victory for the SPD in Germany (most likely in coalition with the Green party) and success for the Leftist coalition in Italy next year, would mean that the most important countries in the European monetary union would cease to be ruled by Conservatives.

The three countries could then join forces with other Leftist governments in Belgium, Denmark, Austria, Slovenia, and Slovakia to form a kind of balanced, united front against the conservative governments in the rest of Europe, in particular in Britain, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.

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By Julio Godoy and - -
BERLIN, Mar 14 2012 (IPS)

The trend of privatisation and commercialisation of water services, which set in in the 1980s and continued throughout the 1990s, has come to a halt due to the process’ own failures, and has given rise to a return of those services into efficient public management, according to a new book.

Released on Mar. 11, “Remunicipalisation: Putting water back in public hands” was authored by several activists at the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute (TNI) and the watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) in cooperation with several non- governmental organisations.

However, in an interview with IPS, the authors of the book warned that the European Union’s management of the present sovereign debt crisis in several member states is putting pressure upon certain governments to again privatise their water services.

“The world economic crisis that broke out in 2007 has somehow changed the picture of remunicipalisation, because of the financial sector bail-out, which has triggered the sovereign debt crisis in Europe,” Martin Pigeon, expert for public services at CEO, told IPS.

“Now EU institutions, which seem unable, or unwilling, to understand the specificities of the water sector, are pushing very strongly the governments in Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Italy to re-privatise their municipal water systems,” Pigeon added.

This policy is a clone of the outdated and delegitimised structural adjustment policies of the 1980s and 1990s, he said.

For this and other reasons, Pigeon said that the remunicipalisation trend still needs “committed and vigilant citizens” participating in the process to master the multiple challenges the public water management sector is facing now.

The book reviews the experiences of four cities and one country around the world, which, during the past decade, have managed to recuperate water services from commercialisation and privatisation.

In the book, one of the authors, David A. McDonald, says that, while the reasons for remunicipalisation are quite diverse, they “stem in no small part from the failures of water privatisation.”

McDonald remarks that “even the World Bank (one of the main supporters of privatisation in the first place) has called for a ‘rethink’ of privatisation policies, having recognised the regulatory problems associated with multinational water providers, and having seen the effects of a profit-driven service delivery model on workers, low-income households and the environment.”

McDonald said that as a result of the realisation of the failures of privatisation, “there has been less direct privatisation of water services since the 1980s and 1990s.”

But the commercialisation of water continues, he warned, “largely through the use of public-private partnerships (PPPs). In effect, the World Bank and many United Nations agencies still advocate for private sector participation in water services and continue to invest in think tanks, conferences and publications that promote and finance private involvement in water services around the world.”

Pigeon said the idea of the book was to study a handful of recent remunicipalisation cases to determine to what extent the process really improved the services in terms of accountability, transparency, performance, social focus, and integration of broader ecological dimensions.

Since remunicipalisation was happening globally, the activists at TNI and CEO wanted to study at least one case per continent, to get a grasp of the diversity of contexts and see whether any common pattern was emerging.

“In the end, we chose to do five cases: Paris (France, back to public management in 2010), Buenos Aires (Argentina, 2006), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania, 2004), Hamilton (Canada, 2004), and a 2006 national sector reform in Malaysia whose implementation is still on-going,” Pigeon explained.

Pigeon said that each case illustrated different aspects of the reasons and effects of remunicipalisation. “Paris shows how a well-prepared remunicipalisation can deliver spectacular achievements, as well as (highlight) the specific technical points that must be paid attention to in the process,” Pigeon pointed out. On the other hand, “Dar es Salaam illustrates the painful realities of international ‘development’ institutions being in control of a crucial local policy, and to what extent the prevailing technical paradigm of centralised networks is not necessarily adaptable everywhere.”

Furthermore, “Malaysia is a fascinating example (of) an attempt at building from scratch a sort of perfect technocratic model, insulated from politics and run by the magic of arms-length relationships, an attempt that we think is not only illusory but dangerous for the country,” Pigeon added.

The case of Buenos Aires illustrates just how long lasting the legacies of corporate control can be, as well as the extent of legal protection given to international companies by the system of bilateral or multilateral investment treaties.

The privatisation of water services in the Argentinian capital shows that the PPPs promoted by international financial institutions such as the World Bank, and a handful of private water management multinationals, as the ideal dual management for water services, actually constitute a dangerous legal trap for governments and societies.

Argentina, which terminated its contract with the French company Suez in 2006, is potentially facing a fine that could amount to hundreds of million dollars from the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes, Pigeon recalled. This fine would be a penalty imposed upon the Argentinian government, precisely for having terminated the concession contract before its legal expiration with Suez for Buenos Aires’ water systems, even though the company’s performance had been very poor.

Pigeon said that such problems can also be found in the wealthiest countries.

“In Brussels, Belgium, it took a major scandal – when yet another French company, Veolia, closed a sewage plant for a week, sending raw sewage directly into the river – and two years of investigations by a college of independent experts to realise that the contract contained problematic but well-hidden loopholes and that the company had built a plant smaller than what was expected,” he said.

Pigeon added that, despite the promising perspectives of remunicipalisation of water services, the commercialisation of water continues.

“A striking finding during the research was the continued ideological domination of the private sector, leading the public managers of many of these remunicipalised systems to see themselves as business managers and endorse the private sector’s definition of performance, based on full cost recovery and microeconomic efficiency,” he said.

For these reasons, Pigeon urged civil society groups to continue participating in the debates on water services.

“It took committed, vigilant citizens to create controversy around water privatisation, make it a political problem and eventually pave the way for change to occur,” Pigeon said. “Now there are fundamental challenges to be taken up in the water sector and, if public ownership is a necessary prerequisite to progressive water management, it cannot be the end of the story.”

Among these challenges, Pigeon underlined issues “like bridging the divide between rural and urban water issues, water policy and land planning, adapt technology to various contexts, break the dead end of ever-increasing pollutants concentration in centralised sewage systems, climate change adaptation and mitigation.”

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By Julio Godoy and - -
BERLIN, Mar 14 2012 (IPS)

The recent death of five prematurely born children in the northern German city Bremen as a result of infections acquired in the hospital has strengthened fears among environmental and health experts that massive use of antibiotics in industrial livestock farming is creating extremely resistant bacteria.

The children who died last December and earlier this year in Bremen, some 300 kilometres west of Berlin, were victims of infections with highly resistant bacteria, including the extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL). Similar infections have been detected in other hospitals in Germany, though these were not fatal.

The cases have raised renewed questions about lack of hygiene in German livestock farming, especially in industrial poultry farms, where thousands of animals are held in relatively small spaces.

The bacteria are believed to have been inadvertently brought into clinics by patients who had been in contact with contaminated poultry.

“Three days after the birth, the doctors announced to us that our baby had contracted an infection and was very ill, and could die,” Maik Stefens, father of a prematurely born infant at the clinic in Bremen told IPS.

“The doctors said bacteria in poultry was the most likely cause of the infection,” Stefens said. “Abuse of antibiotics in livestock farming was the actual origin of the problem.”

Stefens’s baby Niclas survived, but five infants died of similar infections.

In December, the death of three prematurely born infants forced local health authorities to launch an intensive investigation into hygiene conditions at the clinic, and to then order its complete renovation. Additionally, personnel received a crash course in hygiene.

The clinic was opened again in February, to be closed for good early March after two new-born babies died of infections with highly resistant bacteria.

Clinical studies confirm that the genetic structure of the ESBL bacteria found in poultry sold in markets across Europe is identical to that of bacteria in the infections detected in humans.

Poultry bred in industrial livestock farms across Germany is widely treated with antibiotics, regardless of the animals’ health.

According to the Robert Koch institute (RKI), the German central federal health institution responsible for disease control and prevention, 90 percent of all chickens sold in the country contain ESBL germs.

ESBL are lethal enterobacteria resistant to most antibiotics. They were first detected in 1983 – in Germany, due precisely to industrial livestock farming.

A study by the government of the federal state North Rhine Westphalia confirmed that 96 percent of all chickens bred in the state have been treated with antibiotics. The treatment kills most germs, but contributes to the emergence of others resistant to antibiotics.

“My most pressing fear is that by abusing antibiotics, we are actually breeding highly dangerous bacteria,” Wolfgang Witte, director of molecular diagnostics at the RKI told IPS.

Poultry farmers confirm that all animals at a farm are treated with antibiotics when one single animal shows symptoms of infection. “Otherwise, I would run the risk of losing the whole farm,” a farmer, who asked not to be identified, told IPS. “This is a risk I cannot afford, I would go bankrupt.”

The antibiotics are administered through drinking water to the population of the whole farm.

Such use of antibiotics has led to a high concentration of chemicals and of germs flowing into rivers with recycled sewage and wastewater. Bacteria and antibiotics have also been found in fields close to industrial livestock farms.

Reinhild Benning of the German environmental organisation BUND told IPS that many samples raised around a farm in an experiment last month contained ESBL germs. “The whole village near the farm is afraid of the infections,” said Friedrich Ehlers who lives in the neighbourhood of the farm. “We smell the stench of the farm and breathe the emissions every day.”

The problem goes beyond the presence of antibiotics and germs in the atmosphere. When contaminated meat is cooked at home, the germs do get killed. But it is likely that germs can pass to other foods like vegetables, which if eaten raw or only lightly cooked, can lead to infections.

Additionally, residues of poultry and other livestock industrial farms are recycled as fertilisers for agriculture. Such recycling spreads both germs and antibiotics, and brings them into the human chain food, even for people who avoid industrial livestock and prefer organic foodstuffs.

“This is such a scandal that we now cannot trust our own food,” Beate Stefens, mother of the infected child in Bremen, told IPS.

This is not the first food scandal in Germany. Last summer, 53 people died and more than 4,000 became ill as a result of infections caused by vegetables contaminated with Escherichia colia.

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