Political protests in Thailand have led to gender attacks on the Prime Minister. Credit: Kalinga Seneviratne/IPS.

By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Jan 28 2014 (IPS)

Supaa Prordeengam, a 48-year-old businesswoman, came to take part in the anti-government rallies that have been continuing in the Thai capital for nearly three months now. But disturbed by the sexist speeches emanating from the protest platforms, she said, “We need to be critical, not invade women’s rights.”

The favourite target of the vitriol spewed by the opposition-led agitation is Yingluck Shinawatra, the country’s first woman prime minister. The 46-year-old leader of the governing Pheu Thai Party has been called all sorts of abusive names by the opposition that has occupied five busy intersections here.“Sexism has been prevalent in Thailand for a long time, but it has lately become a part of political tactics."

It is such words that prompted reflection by Supaa, who is from Samut Sakhon, a province that borders the Thai capital. She was here to join tens of thousands of protestors on the streets and on Blue Sky, the television station that amplifies the views of the opposition Democrat Party.

“They are very emotional, the speeches,” she told IPS. “But it is not right to talk about sexual stuff.”

Many like her have been witness to how the original rallying cry – against government corruption, abuse of parliamentary majority and disrespect of the country’s revered monarch – has morphed into demagogy.

Those making the speeches are from Thailand’s educated class that is being tapped by Suthep Thaugsubana, former Democrat Party deputy chief and leader of the street agitators. The political veteran of over 30 years is eyeing them for his pool of “good people” to serve in his non-elected “People’s Councils” that, he believes, should govern the country for at least a year.

The open comments at the Bangkok rallies, and the rapturous applause they receive, have prompted some soul-searching in the Southeast Asian kingdom about the spectre of ugly sexism in the male-dominated political landscape.

It has taken a while, but Thailand’s mainstream women’s rights groups have finally broken their silence.

“When a network of women’s rights groups issued a statement denouncing a medical doctor for his ugly sexist attacks on caretaker Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, I admit I felt quite relieved,” wrote Sanitsuda Ekachai, a columnist on social justice issues with the English language Bangkok Post. Going by her weekly commentaries, she is certainly no fan of the Yingluck administration.

“For a long time I’ve been wondering why women’s rights groups have remained silent about the slew of degrading, sexist tirades made against Ms. Yingluck by various detractors.”

Among the few groups that have raised the red flag are the Coalition of Democracy and Sexual Diversity Rights. It has berated the “use of sexist, misogynist and denigrating language” as a political weapon. “The continuation of this rhetoric of violence, discrimination and hate cannot be permitted,” it said in a statement.

Yingluck’s rise as the country’s first woman leader has served as a reality check for Thailand’s feminist and women’s rights advocates. The latter gave her a cold shoulder when she led the Phue Thai Party to a thumping win at the July 2011 general elections to become, at 44, the youngest prime minister in 60 years.

Her position, they argued, was not the result of her own doing but the machinations of her elder brother, Thaksin Shinawatra, the twice-elected former prime minister who was deposed in a military coup in September 2006. Statements by Thaksin, who lives in self-imposed exile to avoid a two-year jail term for corruption, did not help.

When he plucked Yingluck out of her career as a businesswoman and nominated her to head the Phue Thai weeks before the poll, he publicly declared that the younger Shinawatra was his “clone”.

The typical display of Thaksin’s arrogance was grabbed by the largely Bangkok-based women’s groups known for being closer to the Democrats, who have not won a parliamentary majority in 20 years.

“How can we be proud? The whole world knows it’s about Thaksin,” commented a leading figure at the Gender and Development Research Institute in a newspaper report, under the headline, “Thailand’s first female PM no victory for feminism”.

“It is worth noting that while many leading Thai feminists are lukewarm at best or dismissive at worst at Yingluck’s sudden rise to power, men seem more willing to withhold judgement at this early stage,” Kaewmala, a prolific Thai blogger who comments on social issues, wrote at the time. “As most observers are tentative of the kind of leadership Ms. Yingluck will offer, her current support comes more often from men.”

By August last year, when Yingluck marked her second anniversary as premier, she was receiving kudos for a non-confrontational and consultative style of leadership that had managed to usher a sense of normalcy on Bangkok’s streets. Comparisons were made between her elected administration and the two-and-a-half-year administration that preceded her – a coalition government led by the Democrats that came to power through a backroom deal hatched by the powerful military.

The Democrat administration was tainted by the bloody showdown on Bangkok’s streets in May 2010 during a clash between pro-Thaksin protesters and the military. It left 91 people dead, at least 80 of them civilians, and more than 2,000 injured.

Yingluck’s beleaguered administration has avoided a hawkish response, enabling the would-be revolutionaries rallying to topple her government to lay siege on many government buildings. Confrontations with the riot police, clashes between the agitators and pro-Thaksin sympathisers, sporadic shootings and grenades lobbed at rally sites have resulted in nine deaths, with over 550 injured since November.

But what is really different since the 2010 showdown on Bangkok’s streets is the “sexist war” – perhaps reflecting the growing frustration of the agitators and a new low in Thailand’s political turmoil that has steadily divided the country since the 2006 coup.

Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a Thai academic at the Southeast Asian Centre at Kyoto University in Japan told IPS, “Sexism has been prevalent in Thailand for a long time, but it has lately become a part of political tactics. It has intensified since Yingluck become prime minister. I have never seen anything like this, on this scale.”

Border guards in Bangladesh refuse entry to Rohingya refugees from Myanmar in November 2012. Credit: Anurup Titu/IPS

By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Oct 3 2013 (IPS)

An exiled leader of the Rohingyas, a persecuted Muslim minority in Myanmar, is raising the alarm from his London office about the fate of his community. He fears “ethnocide to remove all references to the Rohingyas” if the first census in 30 years goes ahead in the Southeast Asian nation.

Nurul Islam, president of the Arakan Rohingya National Organisation (ARNO), tells IPS in an interview that he is targeting the United Nations and European governments in the campaign. “We want to put pressure on the Myanmar government to count the Rohingyas in the census, revealing the actual figures of their population.”

Similar concerns about this stateless ethnic group living along Myanmar’s western border have been expressed by Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The 12-day census to be held by the end of March next year is expected to cost 58.5 million dollars, immigration and population minister Khin Yi confirmed during a mid-September media briefing in Naypidaw, the administrative capital. The Myanmar government has agreed to commit 15 million dollars, while U.N. assistance is expected to cover five million dollars.

Western governments are expected to fill in the rest, including 16 million dollars from Britain and 2.8 million dollars from Australia. There have been further pledges by Norway and Switzerland.

The concerns dogging the 2014 census arise from a slew of discriminatory policies targeting the Rohingyas for decades. Some, such as forced labour, are human rights violations faced by other minorities.

Others have been unique to the Rohingyas – many are denied proper healthcare and schooling, are prevented from moving out of their villages, and are even stopped from marrying because they are not given approval by local authorities. Local leaders say tens of thousands of Rohingya babies have not been registered.

They are not officially identified as one of the country’s 135 recognised ethnic groups. The last headcount in 1983 put the national population at 35.4 million, while the registered population during the previous census in 1973 was 28.9 million. These two censuses, held when the country was under the grip of an oppressive military regime, did not recognise the Rohingyas as part of the population.

Official statements and the local media often refer to the estimated 800,000 Rohingyas as “Bengalis.” By implication the community are considered “outsiders” from neighbouring Bangladesh.

“The term ‘Bengali’ has the connotation of being a foreigner,” says Chris Lewa, head of the Arakan Project, an independent research organisation chronicling the plight of the Rohingyas. “Institutionalising the term ‘Bengali’ is therefore far-reaching beyond simply a rejection of the term ‘Rohingya’ and it is a denial of their rights as Myanmar nationals.”

“The census will not affect the Rohingyas’ citizenship status,” Janet Jackson, head of the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) Myanmar office, told IPS in an interview. “The controversy around this issue must not be allowed to hamper a complete count of the population, and the conduct of the census should not aggravate tensions around the issue.”

UNFPA has received assurances from the government to conduct the census “in line with international census standards, [where] every person will be counted, regardless of citizenship or ethnicity.” Jackson expects the population profile for a country that has an estimated 60 million people to embrace “inclusiveness”.

Such words jar with the reality on the ground since sectarian violence erupted last year between the ethnic Buddhist Arakanese in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar and the Rohingyas.

Attacks on the Rohingyas in June this year and October last year, which killed nearly 200 people and left 140,000 displaced, earned the Rohingyas some sympathy. HRW described them as victims of “ethnic cleansing” in a report released in April this year.

That grim assessment has worsened. The Toronto-based Sentinel Project for Genocide Prevention describes Myanmar as “a textbook case” for a country on the brink of genocide. “The machinery of genocide – the complex systematic process designed to eliminate the Rohingyas – is already operating in Burma [as Myanmar was formerly known] and has carried ethnic cleansing and isolation to its current point.

“Mounting evidence supports allegations that genocide in Burma is currently going on, and may merely be a matter of scale,” revealed the report ‘High Risk of Genocide in Burma’ released by the group in early September. Among the “key indicators of genocidal intent” is the “forced registration of Rohingyas under a ‘foreign’ ethnic identity, thus attempting to provide documentary denial of the existence of the group.”

It was another Monday afternoon in the remote Thai village of Baan Dong when an incoming text message lit up the black, dust-covered Nokia phone belonging to Eiem Sompeng.

Jasmine rice farmer Eiem Sompeng shows a weather forecast text message he received on his mobile phone. Credit: Marwaan Macan-Markar/IPS

The brief, 18-word message alerted the 68-year-old farmer to unexpected showers across parts of Yasorthorn, one of the poorest provinces in Thailand’s northeastern rice bowl, including his own village of 190 families.

Accustomed by now to these weekly alerts, part of a scheme initiated by the Community Weather Forecast Centre (CWFC) to help farmers cope with climate change, Eiem says the messages “have helped us farmers prepare our fields”, echoing the sentiments of roughly 10,000 other farmers benefiting from this new flow of information.

“The forecasts are also useful for (planning) planting, water storage and harvesting times,” Eiem told IPS.

With the annual monsoon rains expected in June, farmers in this community that grows Thailand’s famous jasmine rice are becoming increasingly dependent on their mobile phones for regular and precise weather updates, which they use when preparing the fields for another harvest of the long, fragrant white grain.

Until now, a joint effort by Thailand’s meteorological department and a private mobile phone operator had served to supply weather forecasts to vulnerable farmers. These daily updates had provided broad estimates, such as rainfall percentages for an entire province.

But farmers like Eiem found little use for such information, since it was “too general, when we need specific details.”

“In some provinces like Yasothorn there were no forecasts at all and the farmers had to rely on the forecasts for nearby provinces like Ubon Ratchathani,” Kasina Limsamamphun, programme coordinator for the British-based charity Oxfam, told IPS.

Little wonder, then, that the CWFC has earned thousands of farmers’ praise and gratitude for connecting agrarian communities to a network fed by the Bangkok-based Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency that uses satellite-supplied information to make very specific predictions.

After two years of trials CWFC has succeeded in providing forecasts particular to small geographic areas, which have helped to reduce losses and damages caused by extreme weather on the farms.

Just last year, for instance, over 1,600 jasmine rice farmers in one part of Yasothorn reported that rice yields dropped by 15 percent from the previous year due to a lengthy dry spell.

“Micro-level weather information is what farmers prefer at a time of erratic rain and drought conditions,” says Suwanasart Konbua, head of the Climate Change Knowledge Management Centre, an affiliate of the CWFC. “Many of the farmers are still struggling to cope with the way the weather keeps changing, destroying crops and harvests.”

The nod towards technology also stems from the fact that unpredictable weather patterns have rendered traditional forecasts unreliable.

One such example is the annual fireworks festival, ‘Bang Fai’, where rockets are fired into the sky at rural fairs throughout the month May, signaling the end of the dry season. According to custom, the rockets are meant to appease the local gods, whose blessings will precipitate heavy monsoon showers.

But farmers can no longer depend on the magic of deities. Severe droughts and unusual storms have come to characterise this region known locally as the ‘Crying Plain’, where unique soil conditions in eight provinces are responsible for producing 80 percent of Thailand’s world famous staple, demand for which is matched only by India’s basmati.

The first hints of the fluctuations that would come to plague jasmine rice farmers in Yasothorn emerged eight years ago, according to Oxfam’s Kasina.

“It became a serious issue five years ago, when they (farmers) perceived a rice yield reduction of 30 to 50 percent.”

According to the Earth Net Foundation, a local grassroots campaigner, some years have seen prolonged dry spells during the early months of the growing season – usually beginning in June – and then heavy rainfall at harvest time, resulting in broken grains.

The loss from climate extremes is made worse by the fact that 6.7 million hectares of Thailand’s estimated 11.2 million hectares of paddy fields are rain-fed.

Thus farmers like Eiem, who earn about 300 dollars a month at the best of times, are entirely dependent on the monsoon rains in order to plough their fields and earn money from a crop that has made Thailand one of the world’s leading rice exporters.

Last year saw Thailand ship 6.9 million tonnes of rice to the world market – of which nearly two million tonnes were jasmine rice – down from the previous year’s exports of 10.7 million tonnes.

Experts attribute the drop to a rice-pledging scheme introduced by the government of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, which made a promise during the 2011 general elections to buy the grain from farmers at 665 dollars per tonne, roughly 40 percent above the market rate.

But the unprecedented windfall for the rural economy will not go far if the government fails to heed warnings by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO): according to a 2012 report by the United Nation’s food agency, rice farmers in Thailand’s northeast should brace for more weather extremes, given that they fall within the Southeast Asian terrain forecast to be seriously affected by the adverse impacts of climate change.

Since early November 2009, rainfall has been consistently below the long-term average in Southeast Asia, a region that accounts for 48 million hectares of the world’s 154 million hectares of rice harvested annually.

“It is estimated that 50 percent of the world’s rice production is affected to a greater or lesser extent by drought,” the report added.

A white rhino at a sanctuary in South Africa’s Limpopo province. Credit: Jennifer McKellar/IPS

By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, May 15 2013 (IPS)

At first glance, the poster appears to be a typical advertisement for an African safari: a large rhinoceros set against a rugged, open terrain. Then you take a closer look and realise something is amiss.

A cluster of human hands has replaced the two horns that distinguish this African animal from the single-horned Indian and Javan rhino. A message over the creature’s head reads: “Rhino horn is made of the same stuff as human nails. Still want some?”

Produced jointly by the wildlife watchdogs TRAFFIC and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), these posters are soon to appear on the walls of public places in major Vietnamese cities including the capital, Hanoi, and Ho Chi Minh City.

Offices, apartment buildings and even airports are all set to become sites in the campaign to end the illegal international trade in rhino horns that is threatening the ungulate to extinction.

Experts say there is no better place than this Southeast Asian nation of 87 million to drive this stark message home. Vietnam has long been singled out by international groups monitoring the illicit wildlife trade for the dramatic rise in domestic demand for African rhino horns.

Close to 290 of the 20,000 rhinos left in South Africa have been killed for their horns since the beginning of this year, according to conservationists worried that such a deadly spree could see the death toll match the record number of 668 rhinos killed by poachers in 2012.

“We are in the midst of a rhino poaching crisis,” Mark Jones, a British veterinarian who heads the London-based Humane Society International, told IPS, adding that Vietnam has recently emerged as the main market for rhino horns.

The spike in demand has been shaped by a belief among locals that has taken root over the past five years: that rhino horn has special medicinal powers, including the ability to treat cancer, cure hangovers, and act as an aphrodisiac.

According to Naomi Doak, coordinator of the Greater Mekong Programme at TRAFFIC, the graphics for the new campaign poster were developed after experts realised that a “large proportion of the Vietnamese public” were not aware that rhino horn, a mass of agglutinated hair, is comprised of keratin, the same basic substance that constitutes human finger and toenails.

She hopes that bringing this fact to light will make people “think twice before consuming rhino horn.”

Yet driving home this message will be “a long and difficult campaign,” Doak admitted in an interview with IPS. “With very few penalties and consequences people really aren’t that concerned about the impacts the consumption of rhino (horn) has either on the animals or on people.”

A status symbol

To understand what wildlife protection groups are up against, one need only take a stroll through Hanoi’s famed Old Quarter, a colourful network of 36 streets where crafts and local products have been hawked for centuries.

Here, shops specialising in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) attract scores of customers seeking remedies made from wild animal parts, including rhino horn.

In his latest documentary ‘Bad Medicine – Illegal Trade in Rhinoceros Horns’, conservationist and filmmaker Karl Amman traces the routes of illegal traffickers from the Africans wilds to the streets of Vietnam, where “rhino horns have also become a status symbol,” he said.

This explains why gold, once the favourite gift among the communist-ruled country’s expanding class of wealthy citizens, has been dethroned by rhino horns, which currently fetch 65,000 dollars per kilogramme.

This is “more than gold, gram for gram,” according to Jones. Though the weight of rhino horns vary, an individual horn can fetch upto 150,000 dollars.

The pressure on Vietnam to curb the demand for illegal rhino horns is expected to grow following the resolutions passed in March at the Bangkok meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). The strong language at this 16^th global gathering of 178 member countries fell just short of imposing sanctions on Hanoi.

The Vietnamese government, meanwhile, has consistently denied allegations that it is a major market in this global trade. It often points an accusing finger at its powerful northern neighbour, China, which is also under scrutiny for boosting the illegal wildlife trade, particularly the demand for tiger parts.

But activists have proof, and are not prepared to remain silent.

Do Quang Tung, deputy director of CITES Vietnam, who headed his country’s delegation to the Bangkok talks, told a Vietnamese newspaper in late March, “From 2004 until now, 13 (individuals) involved in rhino trafficking were arrested, with a total of 150 kg of rhino horns.” Two of these cases, he said, occurred in early 2013.

“Illegal trade in rhino horns involves highly organised, mobile and well-financed criminal groups, mainly composed of Asian nationals based in Africa,” a report published by TRAFFIC and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) revealed early this year.

“These networks have recruited pseudo-hunters including Vietnamese citizens, Thai prostitutes and proxy hunters from the Czech Republic and Poland to obtain rhino horns in South Africa,” added the report.

“Pseudo-hunting has significantly reduced as a result of a decision to prevent nationals of Vietnam from obtaining hunting licenses and changes to South African law in April 2012.”

Another embarrassment for Vietnam has been scandals involving its diplomats at the South African mission who were accused of smuggling rhino horns in 2006 and 2008. When confronted about these incidents at the recent CITES meeting in Bangkok, a Vietnamese government official said that the errant diplomats had received “punishment” for their actions.

Hopes are running high that the impending poster campaign will do its part to educate the public and bring an end to the thriving trade. But it will take more than two animal rights groups to halt rising demand.

Nguyen Thuy Quynh, of WWF Vietnam, said recently, “We are seeking support and cooperation from many businesses, celebrities, universities, international organisations and mass media who all have an important voice in reaching and influencing the community.”

A Japanese flag standing amidst the rubble of the March 2011 tsunami. Credit: Daniel Pierce/CC-BY-2.0

By Marwaan Macan-Markar
MINAMISANRIKU, Japan, Mar 19 2013 (IPS)

As a survivor of Japan’s deadliest tsunami in living memory, Shun Ito dedicates his mornings to evoking stories of heroism that helped to save lives in this port town that was decimated on that fateful March afternoon two years ago.

Two names – Miki Endo and Takeshi Miura – frame the narrative that 37-year-old Ito shares with visitors as he guides them through this once quiet fishing resort, which still bears the scars of devastation left by the powerful waves on Mar. 11, 2011.

Among the few, gutted buildings still standing across empty stretches are the skeletal remains of the three-storey disaster-preparedness centre, where Endo and Miura served as radio operators.

They worked on the second floor and sent out messages through the town’s loudspeakers for people to get to higher ground as the tsunami approached, recalls Ito, who works as a receptionist at a hotel on the edge of this town.

“They remained at their job, giving warnings, even when it was known that the waves were higher than the building they were in.”

“They gave their lives to save others in this town,” adds Ito, standing in front of an impromptu memorial, complete with fresh flowers, which has come up near a blown-out wall of the centre. “We have to remember their sacrifice.”

Minamisanriku lost 1,206 of its 17,000 residents in March 2011, when 16-metre-high waves crashed over the town’s existing tsunami barriers barely 30 minutes after the powerful 9.0-magnitude earthquake ruptured the seabed some 130 kilometres from Japan’s Pacific coastline.

The death toll could have been higher, thousands more, had it not been for the work ethic of Endo, Miura and other members of Japan’s well-drilled disaster response management programme, spread across the 12 prefectures along the coast, who sounded the alarm to save lives.

And as Japan remembered the 15,880 people who were killed and the 2,694 people still missing after the twin terrors of the earthquake and tsunami, the role of the first responders, so pivotal in disaster preparedness efforts, was celebrated.

The ones who died or went missing during their call of duty, like Endo and Miura, include 254 firefighters and volunteer fire corps, 30 police officers and three members of the country’s self defence force, according to official records.

“People tend to forget, that is why such storytelling is important,” affirms Fumihiko Imamura, a senior academic at the International Research Institute of Disaster Science at Tohoku University. “These soft measures help to plan rebuilding and to protect people from the next tsunami.”

Such stories are being added to the graphic video footage of the raging waves crashing through towns as they surged many kilometres inland.

“The video material and other records in the media offer a more comprehensive picture to remember what happened,” Imamura said in an exclusive interview with IPS. “So when communities in the Tohoku region design buildings and plan escape routes, (information about) the height of the waves and how far inland they came will shape their decisions.”

In fact, the practice of stitching together a tapestry of memories and storytelling by members of the devastated communities taps into a Japanese tradition of “handing down memories” that goes back centuries.

The coastal region of this earthquake-prone and tsunami-hit country bears out these narratives in the form of carved warnings on stone tablets.

The memorial stones and rocks, some nearly three metres tall, have clear messages, such as: “If an earthquake comes, beware of tsunamis”, or another, which says, “Do not build your homes below this point”.

The more legible tablets that dot the coast were erected in the wake of the 1896 tsunami that killed 22,000 people, the worst in over a century until the 2011 disaster struck. A tsunami in 1707 killed 30,000 people.

Hundreds of these warnings from the past, some 600 years old, are viewed in this corner of Japan as a glimpse into a world that placed a premium on knowledge sharing in order to survive regular battering from the sea.

But some residents honour the warnings of old as proof that previous victims of deadly tsunamis did not die in vain and that their wisdom ensures successive generations live in safer areas.

This culture of keeping collective memory alive has taken other forms further inland, such as in the southern city of Kobe, which was hit by a devastating earthquake in January 1995 that killed 6,434 people.

There, an earthquake museum has emerged as the centerpiece of efforts to keep alive the memory of the temblor that struck at dawn.

The 500,000 visitors who walk through its halls every year are not only offered visual presentations of what happened, but they also get to hear real accounts from 40 survivors who are part of the museum’s 160 volunteer staff.

“This is a very effective way for the visitors to feel what happened,” admits Masahiko Murata, director of the Kobe-based Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institute. “It is direct, human to human.”

Lessons from past disasters have also begun filling the pages of textbooks being distributed throughout Japan’s school system, adding a new layer to the country’s laudable efforts to reduce the impact of disasters.

“Disaster management manuals for schools are important to prepare future generations,” Murata told IPS. “We need to always keep transferring lessons to the next generations who have not experienced disasters and need to know what to do when caught in one.”

For Ito, one of those lessons is obvious. Minamisanriku’s new disaster preparedness centre should be a taller building and in a safer location to protect future radio operators. “We should do that for the sake of the two radio operators who died in 2011,” he says. “Mr. Miura was my friend. We coached the sports teams at the local school together.”

(END)

When Ko Mynt fled poverty in Myanmar for a job in neighbouring Thailand, the thought of labouring long hours in a shrimp peeling shed was far from his mind. So was this seaside town south of Bangkok. The 29-year-old had set his sights on employment in a garments factory.

Yet the route towards the job he had dreamt of was beyond his control – even though he had paid 500 dollars to a network of brokers operating along the Thai-Myanmar border. After promising work in a factory a year ago, they dumped him in one of Mahachai’s shrimp peeling sheds, where many accounts of labour rights violations have surfaced.

“I have no choice because I am in debt to the broker, who promised me a good job at a garments factory but then brought me here,” Ko says after days of hesitation before speaking. “The brokers control our salary, our life, everything.”

Such fear of brokers stems from his national status: he is one of more than two million migrant workers in Thailand who lack proper documents for employment in a range of fields from construction and farming to factories and fishing. Mahachai reflects this, with only a reported 100,000 of its estimated 400,000 migrant workers being legally registered to work in the sea food factories and the smaller shrimp peeling sheds spread across this town.

“The shrimp peeling sheds run by big companies are okay for the workers; the problem lies in the smaller sheds where workers are forced to peel shrimp from early morning till 10 at night,” Aung Myo Kyaw of the Migrant Workers Rights Network, a group monitoring the plight of foreign workers in Mahachai tells IPS. “The brokers constantly threaten the workers with police arrests and confiscating their passports if they disobey orders inside the sheds.”

Aung Myo Kyaw describes Ko Mynt as “a victim of human trafficking.” Similar accounts abound in many of the estimated 700 shrimp peeling sheds in this town, he tells IPS. “They are the most vulnerable workers here.”

But now these victims have a powerful ally: the United States government. Washington has turned its annual ‘Trafficking in Persons Report’ (TiP), into a diplomatic tool to combat modern day slavery, and to warn Bangkok that human trafficking has to end.

Over the last three years Thailand is ranked on the Tier 2 Watch List of countries under scrutiny by the U.S. State department. Failure to convince the U.S. over standards could see one of its oldest allies downgraded to the diplomatically and economically damning Tier 3 category, that includes countries the U.S. government frequently reprimands, such as Iran and North Korea.

The possibility of such a stain on a booming Thai export industry is not lost on the government and the Thai Frozen Food Association (TFFA). The Southeast Asian country has been shipping close to 7 billion dollars worth of fish and fish products annually, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, a United Nations agency.

Among the top destinations of the country’s renowned tiger prawns is the U.S. market, which accounts for 36 percent of the exported shrimps. They are sold at supermarket chains such as Wal-Mart or offered on the tables of restaurants such as Red Lobster.

“A U.S. ruling will hit the brand and image of Thai shrimp,” Panisuan Jamnarnwej, TFFA president, tells IPS in an interview. “Nobody wants to eat shrimp produced in the Dark Ages.”

And some efforts by his organisation to clean up abusive labour practices have worked, he says, pointing to the drop in the use of child labour in the shrimp peeling sheds. “That was the result of monitoring our members, but not all shrimp peeling sheds are part of our association.”

Thai Foreign Minister Surapong Tovichakchaikul has got into the act, recently leading a delegation of Bangkok-based diplomats on a tour of seafood factories in the Mahachai area to convince them that reports of human trafficking are unfounded. The allegation of the “Thai fishery industry’s involvement in human trafficking, as well as child labour and forced labour, is a cause of grave concern,” he told the envoys.

Thailand also made efforts to convince former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton to give Thailand more time to implement its Anti-Human Trafficking Plan. “We asked Clinton to wait till we do something and I think now the U.S. will be fair in assessing us for this year’s TiP report,” Surapong tells IPS.

The U.S. government is funding a nine million dollar programme led by the International Labour Organisation to end human trafficking in Thailand. “This shows how much the U.S. wants to see the abuse end in places like the shrimp peeling sheds, where there has been little improvement, despite what the government says,” says Andy Hall, a migrant rights activist and author of a recent report, ‘Cheap Has A High Price’ on exploitation of migrant workers in sections of the Thai food industry. (END)

Days before leaders of the European Union (EU) arrived in Norway to collect this year’s Nobel Peace prize, Thai public health activists sent a letter to the northern powerhouse, warning that the EU’s 2012 accolades face a credibility test in this Southeast Asian country.

They had in mind the fate of Thailand’s generic drugs supply-line when Bangkok and the EU begin talks in early 2013 for a free trade agreement (FTA). The letter to Joao Aguiar Machado, deputy director general for trade at the European Commission, called for the bloc to respect global trade rules’ special provisions for developing countries.

The EU’s history of pressuring various developing countries around the world to comply with its conditions and requirements in free trade negotiations – which seek to remove all barriers to EU firms wishing to do business abroad – run “contrary to the expectations” of a Nobel Peace laureate, added the letter sent days before the Dec. 10 awards ceremony in Oslo.

“We are worried that the EU negotiators will force Thailand to accept new conditions on patents that would make access to new generic drugs more difficult,” says Chalermsak Kittitrakul, campaign officer at the AIDS Access Foundation. “People with HIV and patients needing medicines for cancer, heart disease and diabetes will have to pay more.”

“These clauses in a Thai-EU FTA would make it difficult for Thailand to produce or import generic drugs,” he told IPS. “It will pave the way for big pharmaceutical companies to monopolise the market and undermine generic competition.”

The EU is Thailand’s second largest trading partner after the ten-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). According to Thai officials, bilateral trade between the two partners stood at 35 billion dollars in 2010.

Thai activists want the negotiating text for the bilateral trade deal to stay within the bounds of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) law on Trade-Related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which was adopted during the groundbreaking international trade talks in Doha in 2001.

This provision permits developing countries with health emergencies to break the drug patents of pharmaceutical giants to either produce or import generic drugs.

But the FTA negotiations the EU has pursued with Thailand’s southern neighbours, Malaysia and Singapore, have raised concerns about what could lie in wait when the EU begins its bilateral trade talks with Bangkok next year.

“They (the Brussels negotiators) are pushing for TRIP-Plus demands such as data exclusivity,” says Paul Cawthorne, an officer with the Access to Essential Medicines Campaign launched by the global humanitarian agency Doctors Without Borders (known by its French acronym MSF).

According to a leaked document from a Thai trade negotiating team seen by activists here, there is a chance that the EU-Thai FTA could include five years of data exclusivity for new drugs, a clause designed to stop safety-related clinical test or trial data submitted to regulatory authorities from being used by the manufacturers of generic drugs.

“This will slow down the process to produce and supply new drugs to the generic market,” Cawthorne told IPS. “This blocking tactic using data exclusivity will have a broader impact because Thailand has been a producer of generic drugs for years.”

Data exclusivity is not currently required by international law, argues Cawthorne. “The TRIPS agreements require (WTO) member-states to protect clinical data, but there is no obligation to grant any period of monopoly or exclusivity in the use of these data.”

Thai health activists are hoping that their record of mounting successful campaigns against pharmaceutical giants – even from the United States – to ensure a thriving generic drugs market for patients in the country and across the region remains intact.

The last showdown was in mid-2007, when activists threw their weight behind the then Thai government to invoke a WTO rule to secure generic drugs.

In January that year, Bangkok issued a ‘compulsory licence’ (CL) to buy cheaper alternative antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) from India, bringing the country a reputation as another battleground for pharmaceutical giants determined to protect their intellectual property rights and profits from the generic drugs lobby.

Thailand, once one of the region’s countries worst hit by AIDS, is currently home to about 600,000 people with HIV, of which 200,000 people have access to first- and second-line ARVs from government hospitals.

Such ARV coverage has earned the country praise in the region, adding to a long list of achievements to contain the spread of the killer disease and care for those infected.

Issuing CLs has meant Thais with lung and breast cancer and heart disease have had access to cheaper generic drugs since 2007, the year that even saw the Thai push for generics being endorsed by the World Bank.

The Washington-based financial institution revealed in a report that the use of CLs in Thailand’s AIDS treatment programme would slash the cost of second-line drug treatments by 90 percent, helping the country to save an estimated 3.2 billion dollars over 20 years.

Such details are expected to fortify the current campaign. “It makes economic and public health sense for Thailand to strengthen its generic drugs supply and not expose it to TRIPS-plus measures,” says Jacques-chai Chomthongdi, research associate at Focus on the Global South, a Bangkok-based think tank.

“Activists want the process to include public participation to protect the interests of people who need generic drugs,” he told IPS. “They have received word that the EU is insisting that TRIPS-plus provisions be included as a prerequisite to the FTA talks.”

Survivors of the 2010 eruption of Mount Merapi in Indonesia pick through the rubble. Credit: European Commission DG ECHO/CC-BY-ND-2.0

By Marwaan Macan-Markar
PAGER JURANG, Indonesia, Dec 25 2012 (IPS)

From her half-built house, Ari Haryani takes a few steps to reach a freshly cemented path that snakes through the narrow, dusty walkways of this resettlement village. The path offers the 36-year-old a route to safety in case the nearby Mount Merapi, Indonesia’s most active volcano, erupts.

“It has given us some security,” says the mother of three, referring to the path, one of the many features taking shape to aid this community of 380 homes. “We know what to do and where to run when there is another eruption. Even my children know.”

Evacuation drills have also become part of Ari’s regular rhythm as she and her family continue to rebuild their life on this sloppy terrain after their former village, closer to the towering Merapi, was buried under the searing heat of pyroclastic flows and ash when the volcano last roared to life in October 2010.

That eruption killed close to 350 people and destroyed nearly 10,000 homes over a 15-kilometre radius from the mountain’s crater.

But these efforts in Pager Jurang and other villages — including building community health centres capable of treating patients for burns and respiratory problems – mark a departure from the usual rehabilitation drives that follow disasters. The customary top-down role asserted by officials in the capital, Jakarta, has given way to planning shaped by local communities and local governments.

“The local people had a central role in determining what their village needs so they own this disaster risk reduction programme,” Rio Rahadi, a civil engineer with a local reconstruction and rehabilitation agency, told IPS. “They requested what they wanted to reduce casualties the next time the volcano erupts.”

Such a shift in this corner of Southeast Asia’s largest archipelago – and one of its most disaster-prone regions – affirms a pattern gaining momentum across Asia: local communities and governments are discovering their voice and weight to build resilience.

“Decentralisation is the trend across Asia and that has led to greater efforts by local communities to organise themselves and demand resources for disaster reduction,” says Vinod Thomas, director general for independent evaluation at the Manila-based Asian Development Bank. “How local communities react makes a big difference in building resiliency.”

Yet government funding remains slow for these bottom-up initiatives for communities exposed to disasters ranging from storms, floods and earthquakes to tsunamis and volcanic eruptions. “Funding communities to reduce vulnerability is not as visible and political as reacting and helping after a disaster,” Thomas told IPS.

New studies are now questioning the top-down approach, since local communities are the most vulnerable to disasters in Asia.

“The impacts of disasters on communities need to be better understood for practical action,” argues Debby Sapir, director of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), a Brussels-based think tank.

“(In 2012) some high risk countries in the region have made significant progress in controlling disaster impacts. This means that preparedness and prevention measures can be effective.”

“Actions on the ground by local governments and local communities are huge in reducing vulnerability,” adds Jerry Velasquez, head of the Asia-Pacific division of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR). “Governments are steadily becoming more aware of these realities, but there are still gaps.”

New reports exposing the fact the Asia is the “world’s most disaster-prone region” – with floods being the most frequent disaster, having the highest human and economic impact in 2012 – have started to turn the heat up on regional governments.

“(Floods) accounted for 54 percent of the death toll in Asia, 78 percent of people affected and 56 percent of all economic damages in the region,” according to data released this month by UNISDR and CRED.

In southern, southeastern and eastern Asia, 83 disasters caused 3,103 deaths affected a total of 64.5 million people and triggered 15.1 billion dollars in damages in 2012.

“Globally, these three regions accounted for 57 percent of the total deaths, 74 percent of the affected people and 34 percent of the total economic damages caused by disasters in the first 10 months of 2012,” according to the data.

The Asia-Pacific region is the most disaster prone area in the world and it is also the most seriously affected one, states another report released recently by UNISDR and the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), a Bangkok-based U.N. regional body. “Almost two million people were killed in disasters between 1970 and 2011, representing 75 percent of all disaster fatalities globally.”

The most frequent hazards to torment Asians are “hydro-meteorological”, with more than 1.2 billion people being exposed to such hazards since 2000, through 1,215 disasters, compared to the 355 million people exposed to 394 “climatological, biological and geophysical disaster events during the same period,” according to the 134-page report.

“People and governments alike are still struggling to understand how the various components of risk –hazards, vulnerability and exposure – interact to create recurrent disasters.”

With disasters on the rise, community-led responses – such as those in Pager Jurang – are invaluable.

“Early warning and contingency works only if acted upon by local governments and local communities,” says Velasquez of UNISDR.

(END)

As Thailand braces itself to combat drug-resistant malaria, a spread of small, nondescript buildings scattered close to corn and rice fields along its hilly, western border are being cast into a bigger, international role.

Hundreds of these health clinics and malaria posts have become a pivotal frontline to detect the genetic mutation of Plasmodium falciparum, which makes the deadly parasite resistant to artemisinin, the most effective anti-malaria drug used globally.

“They have been equipped to test and treat local people and migrant workers who come down with fever in that malaria belt,” says Wichai Satimai, director of the bureau of vector-borne disease at the Thai Public Health Ministry. “The results of a blood test are given in 15 minutes and the staff will be able to assess if the patient has malaria and what strain.”

This healthcare for the largely farming and migrant labour community has taken on added significance after medical researchers revealed signs of drug-resistant malaria along the border Thailand shares with Myanmar (or Burma) in April this year.

“These blood tests have to be carried out more regularly and frequently in the environments that are conducive to spread the parasite from carriers of drug-resistant malaria,” Wichai told IPS. “The health staff must regularly monitor and treat the patients.”

The efforts to contain drug-resistant malaria in the isolated areas along the border “makes the fight more difficult,” noted Fatoumata Nafo-Traore, head of the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, a global initiative coordinating the drive against the disease, following a recent visit to health clinics along the Thai-Myanmar border. “There are communities living in forest areas and remote areas.

“We need to contain the resistance in these local areas,” she said in an interview with IPS. “This has to be seen as a global concern because there is no other highly effective anti-malaria drug than artemisinin therapy.”

But even as the border health clinics begin to shoulder a bigger role, concerns about funding the free health services offered to local and migrant communities are also growing. Officials of the Thai health ministry warned early this month that the Southeast Asian nation may have to meet the cost of containing drug-resistant malaria if international funding dries up.

Currently, the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which finances programmes to combat these three killer diseases in the developing world, remains a major contributor. It has disbursed 40 million dollars for a range of malaria control programmes, including the running of the 300 malaria posts and health clinics along the Thai border.

Thailand’s fear of a looming funding crisis was echoed in the ‘World Malaria Report 2012’, which was released by the World Health Organisation (WHO) this week. “International funding for malaria appears to have reached a plateau” that is below the estimated level to meet internationally-agreed global malaria targets, it states.

“An estimated 5.1 billion U.S. dollars is needed every year between 2011 and 2020 to achieve universal access to malaria interventions in the 99 countries with on-going malaria transmissions,” it adds. “While many countries have increased domestic financing of malaria control, the total available global funding remained at 2.3 billion U.S. dollars in 2011 – less than half of what is needed.”

The need for sustained funding was underscored by malaria’s global transmission, with 2010 witnessing an estimated 219 million cases occurring, while the disease killed about 660,000 people, mostly children under five years in Africa, according to the WHO’s report.

While South and Southeast Asia’s number of 2.4 million malaria cases in 2010 may be dwarfed by the global rates, the annual malaria report singled out the Mekong River region – shared by Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam – as the epicentre of drug-resistant malaria.

“If resistance to artemisinin develops and spreads to other larger geographical areas, the public health consequences could be dire, as no alternative anti-malarial medicines will be available for at least five years,” the WHO warned.

Artemisinin is the active ingredient in the anti-malarial drug artesunate. It comes from the wormwood plant in China and is the most potent antidote to falciparum malaria, the parasitic strain of malaria responsible for most deaths.

Artemisinin replaced chloroqunine, a once potent anti-malarial drug, following a resistance strain which emerged in Thailand’s eastern border it shares with Cambodia. The resistance to chloroquinine was first detected in Pailin, a Cambodian town that was once the stronghold of that country’s genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, and was then detected along the Thai-Cambodian border before spreading across the world.

Fear of such a repeat with artemisinin also haunts health clinics and malaria outposts along the Thai-Cambodian border, where artemisinin-resistant strains have been detected and contained.

“Good malaria control and elimination will contain the artemisinin-resistant malaria,” said Steven Bjorge, head of the malaria and vectorborne disease section at the WHO’s Cambodia office. “There is no way of knowing that a case of malaria is resistant or sensitive a priori, so detecting and treating each and every case is the proper and necessary means of containing the resistant cases.”

Cambodia’s western provinces such as Pailin, Oddar Meanchey and Battambang – once the spawning ground for the lethal parasite – have seen a reversal of the falciparum strain. “This is an indication of success in preventing transmission,” Bjorge told IPS. “The overall incidence rate has dropped. Deaths have dropped.”

Thailand’s flood-management blueprint  received a jolt when the dykes in Sukhothai were breached by the rain-swollen Yom river last week, submerging large stretches of the former royal capital.Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra toured the flood-damaged historic city 430 km north of Bangkok, reliving relief operations that were mounted last year when the central plains, including the capital, were hit by the worst floods in the country’s history.

The barriers designed to prevent the river overflowing were in need of repair, but this “wasn’t done after last year’s flood,” science and technology minister Plodprasop Suraswadi told a local radio station.

While the scale of the damage from last week’s floods is marginal when compared with last year’s historic disaster, the timing of this latest threat – which could also affect other towns and cities downstream from Sukhothai – puts the one-year-old Yingluck administration in a spot.

After all, it comes barely two weeks after the government unveiled plans about its flood management strategy for the country that conveyed a “new attitude towards coping with floods in urban areas.”

The 11.5-billion-dollar flood management plans were conceived to avoid the mistakes from the past, aiming to “go beyond just defending urban centres from floods,” says Anond Snidvongs, a Thai flood expert. “The main principle in the plan is to include the need to live with the impacts of climate change.”

Factored into these calculations is the new use for the network of rivers and canals that have served as waterways for central regions in this kingdom.

“Water management in the past was geared to make sure that rice farmers got a steady supply of water during the dry season,” said Anond, director of the Southeast Asia regional centre for the Global Change System for Analysis, Research and Training, based in Bangkok. “Now the policy has changed to approach water management to have dual purposes – to deal with flood management also.”

Such a progressive step is in keeping with the “long-term climate change adaptation strategies” that countries must explore, the Thai expert told IPS. “This is the future of water-management infrastructure.”

The tentative steps Thailand is taking following last year’s natural disaster — which claimed 815 lives, affected over 13 million people and dealt an economic blow worth 45 billion dollars – helps to amplify a message being drummed up by the Asian Development Bank (AsDB).

In August, the Manila-based AsDB released a report that sounded a warning: “Rising urban populations mean that over 400 million people in Asian cities may be at risk of coastal flooding and roughly 350 million at risk of inland flooding by 2025.” “Unless managed properly, these trends could lead to widespread environmental degradation and declining standards of living.”

Cities like Bangkok, Dhaka, Ho Chi Minh City and Tianjin are at high risks of both inland and coastal flooding, revealed ‘Green Urbanisation in Asia: Key Indicators for Asia and the Pacific 2012’. “Urbanisation increases vulnerability because life and assets losses are much larger in cities than in the countryside when a disaster strikes.”

Many Asian cities have been built on the deltas of major rivers, so “it is not surprising that many Asian cities are flood prone,” it noted. “But increased flooding induced by climate change may well push these cities’ infrastructure beyond their current capacities, as occurred in Bangkok in late 2011.”

Thailand’s experience with last year’s floods and its flood-management plans are being scrutinised in the region for the lessons it offers.

“It will be difficult if not impossible to disaster-proof cities,” says Jerry Velasquez, senior regional coordinator at the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction for Asia and the Pacific (UNISDR). “However, reducing the impacts of disasters in cities would be possible,” Velasquez told IPS.

Asian cities are more vulnerable to greater damage from floods due to the pattern of economic growth, Velasquez said, pointing to the Chao Phraya river’s basin, which drains in Bangkok, but covers 30 percent of Thailand’s land areas and is where 40 percent of the population live.

“It is also where 66 percent of the total GDP is generated and where 78 percent of the people work,” Velasquez said. “This means that development patterns have set up Bangkok to be extremely exposed economically to flood disaster.”

The picture across Asia is no different when it comes to highly exposed cities, states UNISDR, given the economic loss suffered across the region from disasters that struck in 2011 – 294 billion dollars.

But, despite threats posed by extreme and erratic weather patterns, drafting and implementing a flood-management programme remains a journey through uncharted waters – as the Thai government discovered last week.

After decades of grinding poverty under successive military dictatorships, Myanmar’s rice farmers have a chance at a better future through rural reforms ushered in by the country’s quasi-civilian government. Microfinance is at the root of it.

The guarantees of small, low-interest loans to this least developed country’s debt-ridden farmers turn a page in the ledger of rural credit, which had virtually dried up within the small agriculture banking system during the 50 years of military rule, forcing farmers to borrow from money lenders at usurious interest rates.

Small loans ranging from 60 to 600 dollars are being offered to the agriculture sector by organisations like the Livelihood and Food Security Trust Fund (LIFT), a Western donor-backed microfinance initiative facilitated by the introduction last November of a microfinance law in Myanmar (also known as Burma).

LIFT donors, including Denmark, the European Community, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland and Britain, contribute to livelihoods and food security for achieving the United Nations Millennium Development Goal of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger.

LIFT has stated strategy of  sustainably increasing food availability and incomes of two million targeted beneficiaries.

Small loans, much in need during the current ‘monsoon paddy’ season, are already  providing relief to farmers who must spend 100 to 150 dollars to produce one acre of paddy, says Andrew Kirkwood, LIFT’s fund director. “With affordable credit, more farmers will be able to afford to cultivate all of their land.”

“The new microfinance law has raised hopes that poor people will soon be able to get affordable credit, which is one of the keys to reducing poverty in the country,” he told IPS. “Access to credit from recognised lenders is extremely limited in Myanmar.”

The assistance from one of the 50 local and foreign organsiations that have been granted microfinance licences stands in contrast to the meagre options farmers faced during military rule when the only official source of rural credit – the Myanmar Agriculture Development Bank (MADB) – was, till 2010, offering eight dollars per acre to farmers.

With commercial banks in Myanmar banned from giving loans to farmers, the limited offerings of the MADB only catered to about a third of the farming population. The void was filled by the money lenders who charged interest rates as high as 20 percent per month.

A recent United Nations statement says that the promise of these new low-cost loans, with interest capped at 2.5 percent a month, has seen the demand for microcredit in rural areas inch close to 470 million dollars and that this could balloon to an estimated two billion dollars with growing demand for smaller loans.

This small change of fortunes for farmers in the rice-growing stretches such as the Irrawaddy Delta is part of a broader economic agenda that President Thein Sein has been pushing since last year. The reforms include the creation of a rural development and poverty alleviation central committee, whose objectives range from improving agriculture production to providing rural credit.

“The governmnt’s commitment to reform has led to the development or the revision of at least 25 new laws since (last year’s) first parliamentary session,” says Jenny Swe Swe Myint, policy coordinator for the Myanmar office of Oxfam, the British development agency. “In March, two land laws, the farmland law and vacant, fallow and virgin management law were approved as part of the land rights reform.”

“These laws would benefit the two-thirds of the population relying on agriculture for their livelihoods,” she said in an IPS interview. “However, there are still major gaps in both laws which could have serious negative impacts on farmers.”

The Thein Sein administration’s strategy is sound.  Agriculture accounts for 36 percent of the gross domestic product, employs the majority of the workforce and provides 25 -30 percent of exports by value, according to a new study by the Asian Development Bank.

“The opportunity to expand farm output, both at the extensive margin (more land under cultivation) and the intensive margin (increased productivity) remains enormous,” the Manila-based financial institution revealed in ‘Myanmar in Transition: Opportunities and Challenges’, released in mid-August.

“With its good weather, abundant water resources, and large rural population (about 60 million people) Myanmar could harvest this ‘low hanging fruit’ as a source of growth in the near term and further develop a vibrant export sector in farm products.”

Currently, according to the regional lender, only 18 percent of the country’s total land area of 68 million ha is cultivated and of which 18.5 percent is irrigated for crops ranging from rice, beans, sesame seed to vegetables. Rice coverage dominates the agriculture land, estimated at close to eight million ha.

“The success of the government’s reforms will be tested in the rural areas,” says Sean Turnell, a Myanmar expert at the Sydney-based Macquarie University. “It is so obvious an area of reform and part of that should require strengthening the rural financial sector.”

“The benefits will be profound, given the extent of rural poverty,” the economist who has authored ‘Fiery Dragons: Banks, Moneylenders and Microfinance in Burma’, told IPS. “It is here where the government can really demonstrate that the new economic change is meant to benefit the people and build a broader reform constituency.”

As government negotiators from the world’s poorest countries ended a round of United Nations climate change talks in the Thai capital, they sounded a grave note about what appears imminent when they assemble in November in Doha – the reading of the last rites of the Kyoto Protocol.

“We are concerned that the environmental integrity of the Kyoto Protocol, which is the only international treaty that binds developed nations to lower (greenhouse gas) emissions, and thus our lone assurance that action will be taken, is eroding before our eyes,” declared a statement released by the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and the Africa Group, which represent over a billion people vulnerable to the ravages of extreme weather.

Such concern about the fate of the Kyoto Protocol in the capital of Qatar, where negotiators from over 190 countries will gather for a U.N. climate summit, is with reason. The upcoming 18^th conference of the parties (CoP 18) will be the last meeting before the clock runs out on Dec. 31for the world’s industrialised countries to meet their initial, legally-binding greenhouse gas emission reduction targets and to announce new legally binding cuts for the second period as 2013 dawns.

But as analysts who followed the week-long talks in Bangkok noted, the world’s richer nations appear determined to walk away from the leadership they have been expected to demonstrate under the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 treaty, which entered into force in 2005 after nearly a decade of negotiations.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, a cornerstone of the U.N.’s international climate change architecture – the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFFC) – the world’s 37 industrialised nations and the European Union (EU) pledged to reduce their greenhouse gases by five percent, measured against 1990 levels by the end of 2012, when the first phase of the protocol ends.

During the climate talks here, which ran from Aug. 30 to Sept. 5, the “Annex 1 countries” as the bloc of industrialised countries are dubbed under the Kyoto Protocol, offered little hope to the developing world that the talks will produce new, legally binding emission cuts that are higher than the prevailing five percent to cover a period from 2013-2020.

“The negotiations for the Kyoto Protocol need to be concluded successfully, and that means having the second commitment period in place by the Doha CoP,” says Martin Khor, executive director of the South Centre, a Geneva-based intergovernmental policy think tank of developing countries. “It was meant to be revealed at the last Cop in Durban, but it was postponed by a year.

“That is why the Doha talks will have to be about the Kyoto Protocol; if not what is the point in all these negotiations,” he tells IPS. “The disappointment of developing country negotiators was evident during the final session at the Bangkok talks. They realised that the developed countries are not showing any leadership to meet their obligations under the Kyoto Protocol.”

Even the EU’s offer to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent over an eight-year period from 2013 onwards was dismissed by environmental activists. “The Kyoto Protocol that the European Union wants here is one that is not legal, but merely a ‘political decision’,” says Asad Rehman, head of international climate at Friends of the Earth, a global green campaigner. “The 20 percent target the EU is offering is ‘business as usual,’ and business as usual is killing the climate – it is criminal.”

Environmental activists are fortified by scientific reports that call for more emission cuts to prevent the planet’s temperature from rising to levels that could cause environmental havoc. The Nobel Peace Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has called for global emission cuts of 25 to 40 percent by 2020 to keep the world’s temperature from not rising about two degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial age mark.

And other critics of the industrial countries argue that a climate regime being pushed by the world’s biggest polluters, accounting for 70 percent of the GHGs from 1890 to 2007, could condemn the planet to a worse fate. “What was agreed (at the last CoP in 2011) in Durban is a regime of ‘laissez faire’ until 2020, where only ‘voluntary pledges’ for emission reductions will be done,” wrote leading members of Focus on the Global South, a Bangkok-based think tank, in a commentary in the Bangkok Post.

“The tragedy is that these pledges are going to represent only a 13 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels,” says Pablo Solon, executive director, and Walden Bell, a co-founder, of Focus on the Global South. “This will lead to an increase in the global temperature of at least four to six degrees Celsius in this century.”

The United States, despite being the world’s worst polluter, stood its ground during the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol’s greenhouse gas cuts by refusing to sign onto the legally binding five percent target. And now, it is flexing its muscle to steamroll over expectations the developing world had for the second phase of the Kyoto Protocol.

“The U.S. government is opposed to a top-down structure under the Kyoto Protocol’s second commitment period,” says Meena Raman, legal advisor to the Third World Network, a think tank lobbying for developing country interests, based in Penang, Malaysia. “The U.S. is for a voluntary pledging system to cut emissions that is not based on science nor based on equity.”

Yet even if the deadlock over the future of the Kyoto Protocol is broken in Doha, the scenarios that will unfold leave little room for optimism for the worst affected from climate-related disasters – the world’s poor. “Even if we see a second commitment period emerge, it will look even bleaker, since the targets under the Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period have not been met,” says Dorothy-Grace Guerrero, coordinator of the climate and environment justice programme at Focus on the Global South.

“AOSIS has placed numbers on the negotiating table for the survival of small island states from rising sea level,” she tells IPS. “They want Annex 1 countries to slash their emissions by 50 percent from 1990 levels for the second commitment period.”

When Philippines President Benigno Aquino III delivered his annual state of the union address in July, he appealed to the country’s lawmakers to break a  deadlock on progressive birth control laws in this predominantly Catholic nation.

An estimated 15 Filipina women currently die from pregnancy-related complications every day – up from a daily average of 11 a decade ago – and many of these are teenagers from among the urban and rural poor, according to a government survey.

In the decade after the law was originally proposed, unintended pregnancies have risen by 54 percent, according to the government’s ‘Family Health Survey-2011.’  The bill seeks to addresses this situation by offering contraceptive options, reproductive health care and sex education in schools.

According to the survey, the maternal mortality rate (MMR) reached 221 deaths for every 10,000 live births during the 2006 – 2010 period, marking a 36 percent increase from the 162 deaths during the 2000 – 2005 period.

In early August, the President’s allies in the House of Representatives had occasion to cheer as lawmakers in the Congress voted to end the fractious debate that had trapped ‘The Responsible Parenthood, Reproductive Health and Population Development Act’ in a Lower House parliamentary committee.

But, as the reproductive health (RH) bill makes its way through the Senate and the House for amendments, its sponsors face filibustering by a vocal minority trying to delay passage of the bill before Oct. 15 when the term of the current Congress expires.

“The anti-RH forces know that at the moment the pro-RH forces are likely to have the majority, so their strategy is to prolong the parliamentary process,” Congressman Walden Bello of the Citizens Action Party told IPS in an interview.

“Once we get to mid-October, it will be very difficult to muster quorums to take up legislation since most members of the House will be busy campaigning for reelection (for next May’s election),” Bello said.

According to Bello, the strategy of the vocal minority – about 120 members in the 285-strong Lower House –  is to leverage the political influence that the Catholic Church wields in this archipelago of 96.5 million people.

“The anti-RH forces hope that some of the pro-RH forces will waver and decide against voting for the bill for fear that the Catholic Church hierarchy will tell their Catholic constituents to vote against them,” Bello said.

The clout of the Church is playing out in the  Jesuit-run Ateneo de Manila University where some 190 academics supporting the RH bill have been threatened with heresy proceedings, according to local media.

“The first principle of canon law is that we don’t allow teaching that is against the official teachings of the Church,” Bishop Leonardo Medroso told a local radio station in an interview. “If there is somebody who is giving instructions against the teachings of the Church, then they have to be investigated immediately.”

The Church has also backed street protests against the controversial bill and one “people power” gathering drew an estimated 10,000 people in the capital.

Arguments trotted out against the bill at such meetings include loss of family values in a ‘contraceptive society’ and state interference in what is seen by many as a religious domain.

“The RH bill has become a political question because of the role of the Church in opposing it,” says Harry Roque, professor of constitutional law at the University of the Philippines. “The influence of the Church is ever persuasive.”

“But the reality is that we need this bill,” Roque said in a telephone interview from Manila. “It is important for the President to do what is right. He is deeply committed to supporting this bill.”

To do otherwise would expose the Aquino administration to charges of  being remiss in meeting United Nation’s Millennium Development Goal (MDG)  of slashing by three-quarters the maternal mortality ratio (MMR) by 2015 against what it was in 1990.

Local women’s rights groups and U.N. agencies monitoring the country’s progress in meeting MDG 5 (one of eight goals) relating to maternal health and reducing the MMR hold that the Philippines is likely to miss the target.

“The first RH bill, which was proposed in the Upper and Lower House in 2001, was meant to “respond to the various RH problems in an integrated and rights-based fashion,” says Junice L. Demeterio-Melgar, executive director of Likhaan, a centre for women’s rights and health that is backed by a national network of grassroots activists.

“It specifically wanted to call attention to existing but essentially tabooed issues like adolescent RH, post-abortion care and sex education,” Demetrio-Melgar said.

“A law was needed to mainstream the integrated health and rights-based approach, as well as to override the devolution of the Philippines healthcare system,” she told IPS. “The bill was meant to institutionalise the department of health’s RH programmes.”

The non-passage of the bill has adversely affected lingering poverty in a country  where nearly 20 percent live below the U.N.’s 1.25 dollars-a-day poverty line.

“The richest women want 1.9 children and have two; the poorest women want four children but have six,” says Demeterio-Melgar. “Unintended fertility keeps families poor and families with more than three children have difficulty feeding their children and sending them to school.”

By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Aug 28 2012 (IPS)

Impoverished Laos is unlikely to cancel a Thai project to build a mega dam across the Mekong River at Xayaburi, despite warnings from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) that it could devastate the region’s rich biodiversity.

Over 1,780 known freshwater fish species have been identified in the ‘Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot’ which includes the Mekong and parts of the Chao Phraya River that flows through Thailand, revealed the 158-page report released last week by the IUCN, ahead of its world congress to be held in Jeju, South Korea from Sep. 6-15.

IUCN, which is based Switzerland and is world’s oldest and largest global environmental network, assists societies throughout the world to conserve the integrity and biodiversity of nature and to ensure that the use of natural resources is equitable and ecologically sustainable.

“The Mekong ranks third (after the Amazon and Congo) or second in the world in terms of diversity of river fish depending on whether the verified species total or the higher estimate is accepted,” notes the IUCN study,  ‘The Status and Distribution of Freshwater Biodiversity in Indo-Burma’.

The study has strengthened a growing anti-dam movement that has united campaigners from several countries in the region that are likely to be affected by the 1,260-megawatt hydropower project being built at a cost 3.8 billion dollars.

“This is an unprecedented scientific contribution for us to know what is in the river between (the Laotian cities of) Luang Prabang and Vientiane,” Robert Mather, head of IUCN Southeast Asia, told IPS. “It shows how little we understand the river or the impact of the planned dam.”

The report is expected to feed discussions about dams like the Xayaburi at the IUCN gathering at  Jeju, which is expected to include more than 1,200 government and non-government organisations (NGOs) from 160 countries.

“This study will help to shape the real questions that need to be asked when doing EIAs (environment impact assessments) before building the dam,” Mather said. 

Early August, Thai communities rallying against the Xayaburi dam had lodged a petition against the energy ministry and the state-run Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT) in the country’s administrative courts, charging these bodies with failure to inform the public about the environmental and social impacts of the dam.

But, on Aug. 24, Norkun Sitthiphong, permanent secretary in Thailand’s energy ministry, announced that construction work for the Xayaburi dam was on track and that electricity production was scheduled to begin by 2019.

“The Xayaburi power plant plays a crucial role in Thailand’s power development,” the Thai official said, affirming the close link Thailand has as a major investor of this dam, the first of a cascade of 11 dams being planned to harness the lower waters of Southeast Asia’s largest river.

Earlier studies by the Mekong River Commission (MRC), an inter-government agency, estimate that the proposed dams could result in agricultural losses worth more than 500 million dollars annually and reduce dietary fish intake of Thai and Lao people by 30 percent.

It could also result in the creation of reservoirs along the Mekong,  studies by the MRC, in which Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam are members and Myanmar (or Burma) and China are dialogue partners.   

The MRC is yet to clear construction for the dam and announced in December that it would approach international development partners to study the dam’s implications before doing so.

Activists believe that it is not too late to stop the Xayaburi dam especially because of a growing movement against it.

“This is the first time local communities have gone to the Thai courts to stop a cross-border hydropower project,” says Premrudee Daoroung, co-director of Towards Ecological Recovery and Regional Alliance, Bangkok-based green lobby.

“They are turning to a clause in the Thai constitution that requires government agencies to conduct public hearings on projects like the Xayaburi dam, which will impact Thai communities and Thailand’s biodiversity,” she told IPS.

“Their biggest concern is that the dam will devastate fishing in the Mekong, which has been their main livelihood for generations,” Daoroung told IPS. “Their campaign began out of fear that the Xayaburi dam will affect the annual fish migration in the Mekong.”

Loss of biodiversity is another concern. “The currency for measuring fish biodiversity is species, not kilograms, dollars or catch per unit of effort,” the IUCN report said.

Grassroots communities in Cambodia and Vietnam have expressed similar concerns in their ‘Save the Mekong’ campaign.

The Xayaburi dam could, they say, threaten the livelihoods of some 60 million people living in the lower Mekong, who harvest an estimated 2.2 to 3.9 billion dollars worth of fish caught annually – or about a quarter of the world’s annual inland-water catch.

Besides food security this campaign, which has now been endorsed by nearly 60,000 people, has also forged other bonds.

“The outcry has been strong because of the centrality of the river to millions of people, as well as to the region’s history and cultural identity,” says Carl Middleton, a Mekong River expert who lectures at the International Development Studies Programme at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University.

“Just as the river is shared between the countries, so the proposed Xayaburi dam has brought many people together in opposition to the project,” he told IPS. “The size of the public response opposed to the Xayaburi dam is unprecedented for a hydropower project in the region.”   

But, the protests have produced a mixed response from Laos, one of the poorest of the six countries that shares the Mekong, a 4,880 km-long river that flows through southern China, touching Myanmar (or Burma) and Thailand, and through Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Laos has set its sights on becoming the battery to the region by tapping its rivers through mega-hydropower projects and selling the energy generated to its neighbours, such as Thailand. The foreign exchange, Vientiane argues, can help one-third of the country’s 5.8 million population living in poverty.

Laos had assured neighbours, Western donors and an intergovernmental river development body that it would not proceed with the controversial dam till the cross-border environmental and social impacts have been assessed. In July, Vientiane had even announced suspension of the project.

Ch. Karnchang Plc (CK), one of Thailand’s largest infrastructure builders and owner of 50 percent of the shares of Xayaburi Power, the controversial dam’s developer, suggest otherwise.

In mid-August, CK’s chief executive Plew Trivisvavet confirmed that the dam developer had not skipped a beat in its construction plans. “We’re still working on the project, as no one has told us to stop,” he told journalists.

A refugee camp in Mae Sot, a town on the Thai-Burma border where peace talks are being held. Credit: Mikhail Esteves/CC-BY-2.0

By Marwaan Macan-Markar
MAE SOT, Thailand, Aug 3 2012 (IPS)

In a country where talk of a ceasefire brings representatives from 11 different armed ethnic groups to the table, Myanmar’s chief peace negotiator, Railway Minister Aung Min, is experimenting with an unusual solution to decades of separatist struggles.

Since launching his ceasefire initiative in September last year, the minister has traveled around Myanmar (also known as Burma) and neighbouring countries without so much as a nod to the possible role of foreign observers or international peace facilitators.

“It is unlikely that the government wants third parties at this stage of ceasefire talks and we are okay with this arrangement for now,” Zipporah Sein, the 57-year-old general secretary and first female leader of the separatist Karen National Union (KNU), told IPS during an interview in the group’s office on the edge of town.

“This is part of the trust-building stage that will lead to political and peace talks.”

A formal round of talks that was held in Myanmar last April only allowed three foreigners, including a British and United States diplomat, to witness the negotiations as observers, Sein revealed.

Mae Sot, a town along the Thai-Myanmar border that Aung Min has visited three times in the past year, is a microcosm of the specific challenges of peace negotiations in Myanmar between not just two but multiple ethnic groups, each with their own specific concerns.

For the past two decades this town has been home to the country’s majority Burman community as well as a haven for refugees, mostly from the Karen State, fleeing ethnic violence and persecution.

The ‘Myanmar style’ of peacemaking – one that rejects foreign intervention – is a departure from the customary path similar talks have followed in other Asian countries, where foreign governments or international organisations were recognised as neutral third-parties, tasked with liaising between governments and armed combatants who have been locked in decades-long conflicts.

For instance, Malaysia is currently serving as a facilitator in ongoing peace talks between the Philippines government and the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

Negotiators led by former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari helped establish the August 2005 peace agreement between the Indonesian government and the separatist Islamic Free Aceh Movement. And Norway enjoyed a prominent role as the official go-between during the failed peace talks between the Sri Lankan government and the now-defeated Tamil Tiger rebels over a decade ago.

But Aung Min’s challenge is undoubtedly more complex than most other conflicts, and his divergent approach appears to be reaping some rewards.

Between September 2011 and April 2012, his talks have secured ceasefire agreements with 11 armed ethnic groups. Among these accomplishments was the January breakthrough with the KNU, which has been involved in Asia’s longest-running separatist struggle, spanning 60 years.

Still, Sein did not rule out a shift to accommodate an official, independent peace facilitator as the current talks move towards thornier issues, such as the future of the armed Karen forces and greater autonomy in the Karen State.

“We may need a neutral third party when it comes to discussing the political and development issues in the Karen State,” Sein told IPS. “We are for a federal system with greater rights for ethnic groups, so they can live and participate in a meaningful way.”

Win Min, a Myanmar national security expert, does not believe Aung Min’s is a strategy ironed out by insiders from President Thein Sein’s reformist administration, such as the former major general who specialised as an intelligence operative; rather, he is of the opinion that the new approach stems from Aung Min’s relative inexperience and the fact that he was thrust into a role for which he had no training.

As a result, the latter is operating through a model that reflects “a hint of Burmese pride,” Win Min told IPS.

“Aung Min was stepping into uncharted waters when he was given the role of peace negotiator,” he said. “He had to find his way with each of the ceasefire talks. It was unscripted, with no foreign third party to give directions.”

And the further he went down this road “the more confidence he gained”, according to Win Min. “His modest and friendly personality, and a willingness to listen and accommodate different views, also (lubricated) the process.”

Win Min pointed to a streak of honour that still prevails in the Southeast Asian nation gradually emerging from 50 years of military dictatorships.

“Burmese have that sense of pride that we do not want to be subject to international pressure; to say we can do things ourselves,” said the Harvard-trained academic.

Myanmar Egress, a prominent local NGO, bolstered this attitude when it stepped in to help establish contact between the government and its adversaries from the ethnic minorities.

The move also enabled the Thein Sein administration to turn down offers made by many respected international personalities and organisations to shoulder the role of neutral peace facilitators, including former Finnish President Ahtisaari and The Elders, an independent group of global leaders led by South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

This streak of national pride does not, however, extend to the economic realm. Myanmar has accepted economic support to strengthen its fledgling peace process from the Peace Donor Support Group (PDSG), led by Norway and supported by Australia, the European Union, Britain and the World Bank, all of which have pledged to pour millions of dollars into relief and rehabilitation work in areas where the guns have fallen silent following the ceasefire talks.

That the ceasefire agreements have held so far reflects a shift in thinking from previous regimes’ attempts to end conflicts with ethnic separatists.

“The position the government is taking in relation to the ethnic groups is one of equality,” Paul Keenan, research coordinator at the Burma Centre for Ethnic Studies, based in the northern Thai town of Chiang Mai, told IPS.

“Previously, the government dictated terms to the armed groups and they had to give up their weapons before talks, because security was the priority, not peace and equality,” he added. “But the atmosphere is completely different now. And Aung Min wants to talk to everyone, which is new.”

(END)

A year after the Laotian government launched a safe pregnancy programme news of this initiative,  involving the dispatch of teams of midwives across the country, is yet to reach women in the remote  communities.

A 30-year-old mother of three from the Akha ethnic minority in the Baan Monlem village of the northern province of Bokeo told Mona Girgis, director of Plan International’s local office, that she has never heard of the National Skilled Birth Attendance programme.

But, Girgis told IPS, the woman who identified herself as Noi welcomed the prospect of trained midwives coming to her village to support women in their pregnancies and deliveries.

Noi’s community of 60 families, that makes a living by growing rice on the hilly slopes of Bokeo, currently depends on the experience of older village women rather than a skilled birth attendant or midwife.

The situation of pregnant women in Baan Monlem is true for most other rural communities in Laos. A majority of the country’s 6.5 million people live in rural communities scattered across this mountainous Southeast Asian nation, and over 80 percent of the women give birth at home, according to studies by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

Laos’s mountain communities include some 100 ethnic minorities, forming one-fourth of the population and contributing heavily to the country’s high maternal mortality ratio (MMR) of 470 deaths per 100,000 live births.

Laos currently has the worst national record in Asia, topping even war-torn Afghanistan which has a MMR of 460 for every 100,000 live births, according to ‘Trends in Maternal Mortality: 1990-2010’, a study by the World Bank, World Health Organisation and UNFPA released this year.

“Families living in remote ethnic communities are usually very poor, and do not have the financial resources to pay for transport or fees to receive (health care) services,” explains Girgis.

“I have frequently heard this from women in different parts of Laos,” Girgis said. “We are aware that there are other obstacles, such as the condition of roads, language barriers and awareness of the need to seek medical care,” she added.

Lack of professional help has resulted in an average of two women dying every day in Laos from pregnancy-related complications and childbirth, notes the UNFPA in a report. “For every woman who dies many more suffer from illnesses or disability from complications during pregnancy and childbirth.”

It was to overcome Laos’s notoriety as the most dangerous place in Asia for a woman to give birth that drove Vientiane to aggressively advance the cause of safe pregnancies.

June saw 80 midwives graduate from a special programme shaped by the ministry of health, international donors and the UNFPA. This second graduating class added to the initial group of 140 midwives who qualified last year, pioneering a professional cadre of community midwives in the communist-ruled country.

The programme received a shot in the arm when the government declared June as the “Month of Midwives,” going beyond just the one day, on May 5, when the world annually marks the International Day of Midwives.

“Every community needs to have its own professional midwife to work with community leaders, families,individual women and adolescent girls to improve knowledge of safe pregnancy, childbirth and care of mothers and babies after birth,” Som Ock Kingsada, vice-minister of health, was reported saying at an event to mark the special month.

The current midwives training programme comes after a lapse of two decades during which no midwives were produced in the country. It has a curriculum that addresses a national weakness – low use of health facilities.

“We had to build in a lot of skills with laboratory work as trainees have limited access to cases, given the low utilisation of health facilities,” says Della Sherratt, international programme coordinator for skilled birth attendance at the Laos office of UNFPA.

“They are required to do a lot of hands on practice and case loads, as would be expected in other countries, (and) we have to send them to clinical areas with some exposure first,” Sherrat said.

And as the community midwives programme forges ahead, focus is shifting to more professional care in isolated communities in the mountainous areas and rural lowlands. “We are focusing this year on those areas where there are no health workers,” Sherrat told IPS.

These efforts are expected to help Laos meet one of the targets in the United Nations Millennium Development Goal of reducing MMR by 75 percent between 1990 and 2015.

According to the World Bank,  women dying while giving birth represents  a “determinant of poverty as well as a constraint to overcoming poverty.”

“Broader interventions that improve the macroeconomic and socioeconomic environment in the country are needed,” Ajay Tandon, the Bank’s senior economist focusing on health-related issues in Laos, said in an interview.

“Many of the determinants of poor maternal health are due to factors outside the health system, (such as) poor road connectivity, poor education, inadequate water and sanitation facilities, as well as low income levels.”

From a wooden, weather-beaten building on the edge of this border town, Mahn Mahn charts dangerous missions deep Myanmar (also Burma) for the 2,000-odd health workers under his wing.

These tours, through the mine-infested stretches of eastern Myanmar, include supplying basic maternity kits for pregnant women from the country’s ethnic minorities.

Beneficiaries of these humanitarian forays by the Back Pack Health Worker Team (BPHWT), the non-profit group that Mahn Mahn is secretary of, include the Karen, Karenni, Mon and Shan communities.

In staying its course, this group, which began its mission over a decade ago, implies that little has changed on the ground despite ceasefire agreements signed over the past 10 months between the reformist government of President Thein Sein and armed ethnic groups.

The communities affected by the decades-long conflict on the mountainous, jungle terrain of the Thai-Myanmar border are highly vulnerable. Human rights groups estimate that the fighting has rendered 500,000 villagers as internally displaced persons (IDPs).

“If you want to know about the impact of the conflicts, start with maternal mortality (MM) along eastern Burma – the worst in the country,” says Mahn Mahn, the 48-year-old medic from the Karen ethnic minority. “One in 12 pregnant women risks dying because of complications.”

His words are echoed by other international and local public health organisations working along the Thai-Myanmar border. In eastern Myanmar, MM rates have hovered between 721 and 1,200 per 100,000 live births compared to Myanmar’s national average of 240 per 100,000 live births.

These MM rates “dwarf the rates in Thailand (44 deaths for 100,000 live births), leaving women in eastern Burma with the worst pregnancy outcomes anywhere in Asia,” noted a report released this February by the Global Health Access Programme (GHAP), a U.S. non-governmental organisation.

The report, ‘Separated by Borders, United by Need’, describes the reproductive health crisis as a “public health emergency.” The absence of skilled birth attendants, lack of access to contraception, limited health information and absence of health clinics within easy reach have fuelled such deaths at childbirth, it said.

Too many women dying of complications arising from unsafe abortions and post-partum haemorrhage also expose the level of human rights violations perpetrated by Myanmar’s military during its armed campaigns against ethnic rebel groups.

The government’s official policies in the conflict zones work to deny healthcare to the ethnic minorities and prevent international humanitarian organisations from stepping in.

“We have documented that the experience of human rights violations is correlated with negative health outcomes,” says Jen Leigh, field director for GHAP. “Households that have experienced forced displacement have higher odds of infant and child death, child malnutrition and failure to use contraception.”

In a region where, according to surveys, some 18 percent of women of reproductive age are malnourished, stories of MM cases come as no surprise.

“From the information I gathered, attending trainings with midwives or health workers from our partner organisations, it appears like everybody knows somebody who died of pregnancy-related complications,” Leigh said in an IPS interview.

Little wonder why the Mae Tao clinic in Mae Sot, run by the legendary Dr. Cynthia Maung, has become a magnet for pregnant women along the border. Its reproductive health team delivers between 3 -15 babies daily as part of a free service.

Last year saw the clinic assisting a record 3,033 live births, up from the previous year’s 2,758 live births.

Close to half of the women who gave birth at the clinic came from across the border, following antenatal care they had received from Dr. Cynthia, an ethnic Karen who has won six international awards for her humanitarian work at the clinic since 1989.

But deep in the conflict zones, where the guns have gone silent, women have no choice, no hope for clinical care when giving birth. “Between 80 to 90 percent deliveries are at home with untrained midwives,” says Dr. Cynthia, as she is known here. “Only four percent have access to emergency care in a clinic.”

“There is a need for more trained birth attendants in those areas,” she told IPS. “They could save lives if they know safe birth techniques and be supplied with birth-kits. Even cutting an umbilical cord properly is a matter of life and death.”

Dr. Cynthia’s clinic has helped the BPHWT train women from remote areas about safe birthing practices. Over 800 local women have been given training trained and supplied with sterilisation equipment, gloves and razor blades to cut umbilical cords.

“The communities have begun to depend on our trained birth attendants,” says Mahn Mahn. “We are helping women who are unable to make it to the Mae Tao clinic or the few other clinics in the ethnic areas.”

He expects this local variant of a mobile health service to continue. After all, the BPHWT, which has 95 teams that fan out across the rugged terrain with health supplies slung behind their back, handles other health emergencies too, such as aiding landmine victims.

“It is going to be a long time before the ceasefires become meaningful for communities along the border,” Mahn Mahn notes. “Let’s say it will be so when the MM rates come down.”

The just-ended United Nations sustainable development summit in Rio de Janeiro has exposed the discomfort that many developing Asian countries have over buzz words like ‘green economy’ and ‘green growth’ in development diplomacy.

With the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), the U.N. regional development arm, endorsing these concepts, the body’s 58 member-countries find themselves at odds with Asian giants like China.

This divergence became apparent as the Rio+20 summit entered its final days.

A lengthy commentary by China’s ambassador to Thailand, published in a Bangkok daily, touched on the significance of the summit in charting a new blueprint for sustainable development while avoiding  terms like  ‘green economy’ and ‘green growth’.

“China has not only found a path to sustainable development suitable to its national conditions, but also made positive contributions to sustainable development worldwide,” argued ambassador Guan Mu in his views that appeared in the Jun. 21 edition of ‘The Nation’.

“China is willing,” the ambassador wrote, “to strengthen cooperation and joint efforts with other parties – to make more contributions in promoting global sustainable development on the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’.”

In Manila, activists led by Kalikasan, a Philippines-based network of environmental groups, protested outside the United States embassy, a day before, to “denounce the green economy path to enriching corporations”.

“We, the people, who are not allowed to speak at the summit, whose rights are being trampled upon, will not be silenced,” said Lyn Pano, general secretary of the Asia Pacific Research Network, during the protest. “We will strengthen our ranks and constantly struggle (to reject the green economy).”

Despite the vocal protests the ESCAP chief’s message to participants at the Rio summit suggested that countries in Asia and the Pacific were  embracing green growth as part of their development plans.

“We are pleased that green economy policies have been recognised as an important tool for sustainable development and poverty eradication,” Noeleen Heyzer, executive secretary of ESCAP said during a high-level meeting.

The rush by U.N. bodies – including the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) – to endorse green economy policies ignores concerns in Asia that it “is being used to undermine the accepted sustainable development framework,” said Shalmali Guttal, senior researcher at Focus on the Global South, a Bangkok-based think tank.

“There is alarm that this is an attempt by the developed countries, the world’s major polluters, to enforce ‘green protectionism’ in international trade,” she told IPS.

“Developing countries in Asia have a reason to be nervous because this is another attempt by industrialised countries to avoid the commitments they have made to help developing countries meet their development targets,” Guttal said. “U.N. bodies should listen to the people they are supposed to be helping.”

Disagreements between ESCAP and larger governments in the region over the terms “green growth” surfaced at an October 2010 ministerial meeting in Kazakhstan. A press release circulated at the end of the sixth U.N. ministerial conference on environment and development for Asia and the Pacific (MCED-6) had to be reformulated.

Four countries – China, India, Iran and Russia – objected to the words ‘green growth’ appearing prominently (including in the press release headline) as a policy that had been endorsed by Asian ministers, forcing ESCAP to issue a new press statement identifying green growth as “one approach to sustainable development.”

“This is an area that has become contentious since then,” a Bangkok-based Asian diplomat told IPS on condition of anonymity. “We pay more attention to ESCAP statements to scrutinise how the words ‘green growth’ and ‘green economy’ are used.”

“Internally, most countries are doing their bit towards developing low-carbon alternatives and investing in green technology,” he explained. “But we object to being pushed to endorse a green economy in the context of sustainable development.”

ESCAP, in fact, was in the vanguard of “green growth” debate, recognising it as a sustainable development alternative in 2005. It stemmed from the MCED-5 hosted by South Korea, an emerging leader in green economics.

Three years later, following the 2008 financial crisis, others endorsed the green growth model, ranging from UNEP to the heads of the world’s 20 largest economies.

“Asian countries are facing resource constraints, the price of fuel is rising, and this is an impediment to their development,” says Rae Kwon Chung, director of ESCAP’s environment and development division. “Poverty cannot be resolved without resolving the resource constraints. The recent food and fuel crisis will have to trigger a sea change.”

“Developing countries need a different energy system than the current system,” he told IPS. “The green economy is one of the strategies how to operationalise sustainable development.”

The need for this shift, an ESCAP report titled ‘Low Carbon Green Growth Roadmap for Asia and the Pacific’ argues, was because the region uses three times as much resources as the rest of the world to produce one dollar.

Many of the region’s economies are net importers of resources and vulnerable to price hikes, notes the ESCAP document, released ahead of the Rio+20 summit.

An estimated 42 million people were pushed back into poverty in this region in 2011 as a result of oil and food price increases, adding to the 19 million people who lapsed into poverty the previous year, notes the ESCAP report.

“The region needs now to urgently shift away from business-as-usual resource-intensive strategies and embrace a growth strategy that is based on resource efficiency,” the report says.

Asia’s large developing economies, China and India, and smaller ones like Cambodia and Vietnam, were commended in the report for introducing programmes to “green their economies.”

But, the larger Asian economies raise a red flag when green growth is placed in another context – as a new, internationally-binding prescription for sustainable development in the Global South.

“This will remain a fractious issue in Asia and ESCAP sessions will reflect this in the future,” the Asian diplomat remarked. “Some governments have already said enough is enough.”

Reports of sectarian violence in western Myanmar have exposed the plight of 800,000 Muslim Rohingya, a persecuted minority that a regional human rights body described in 2006 as facing a “slow-burning genocide”.

By Thursday, clashes between the Buddhist Rakhine and the Rohingya in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar (formerly Burma) had resulted in 29 deaths, of which 16 were Rohingya and 13 were Rakhine, and 30,000 displaced, according to official accounts of the worst communal violence in the Southeast Asian country in years.

Over 2,500 houses have been torched and nine Buddhist monasteries and seven mosques destroyed since riots broke out.

On Jun. 3, a mob of 300 Buddhists intercepted a bus carrying Muslim pilgrims and beat 10 of them to death. Rights groups have pointed to the event as symbolic of the hostility swirling in the Rakhine State, for decades a tinderbox of ethnic tensions.

The spark for this latest attack on the Rohingya was a story that had spread around the province about a 27-year-old Rakhine woman being raped and murdered by three Muslim men in the Rambree Township.

Reports of the police detaining the three Rohingya men did little to calm Rakhine anger, which was further fanned by anti-Rohingya leaflets calling for revenge on the “Kalar,” a derogatory racial epithet for people with darker complexions and South Asian features.

“We are now getting calls daily from Rohingya living in fear and not knowing what will happen next,” a desperate-sounding Nurul Islam, an exiled political leader of the Rohingya, told IPS on a telephone call from London. “Piles of bodies have been noticed in the houses of the Rohingya and many people have (gone) missing.”

A curfew imposed by the reformist government of President Thein Sein has failed to rein in the mobs, revealed a 29-year-old Muslim from the affected areas who goes by the name of Htike and has been monitoring the violence from her room in Bangkok.

“The curfew has only been for the Muslim people to stay at home. The mobs are free to set fire to our houses,” she said.

But the terror on the streets is not all that the Rohingya have had to endure. Websites, blogs and Facebook pages based in and outside of Myanmar are brimming with hate speech calling for the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya.

“One day, after we solve (our) political issues, we will drive them away and never let them step on our soil again,” one poster proclaimed.

This online outburst by Buddhists inside the country and in the diaspora, “openly asserting that action tantamount to genocide is acceptable”, has surprised even long-time human rights champions in Myanmar.

“We have never seen it this bad online,” admitted Debbie Stothard, head of the Alternative ASEAN Network on Burma (ALTSEAN), a regional advocacy group. “Some have called for the rape of female Rohingya activists.”

“The Rohingya are one of the most threatened communities in the world,” added Stothard, whose organisation first raised the alarm of the “genocide-like conditions” faced by this minority six years ago.

“The repression they have faced for decades falls within the conditions identified in the international convention to prevent genocide.”

The anti-Rohingya rage has exposed a troubling side of Myanmar’s ethnic politics that could worsen, warns Richard Horsey, an independent political analyst who has authored many reports on the political situation in the country. “(Inter-communal) tensions exist in many parts of Myanmar (but) Rakhine State is one area where tensions are highest.”

“There is a serious risk of the violence worsening, and spreading beyond Rakhine State,” Horsey told IPS. “The government has acknowledged this, which is why the president has personally taken a very visible role in addressing the situation.”

Government-sanctioned discrimination

But the government’s supposed efforts to restore calm and ensure the international community that its reform agenda launched last March is still on track are belied by the ever-lengthening catalogue of abuses the Rohingya are being forced to ignore.

“The government has actually confirmed existing discriminatory polices implemented against the Rohingya by previous military regimes,” Chris Lewa, head of the Arakan Project, an NGO that advocates for Rohingya rights worldwide, told IPS.

“This was evident as recently as March this year during parliamentary sessions, when Rohingya MPs asked ministers if the government had plans to lift the restrictions imposed on the Rohingya and were informed that the policies will not be changed.”

The government has long failed to recognise the Rohingya as one of Myanmar’s 135 ethnic communities. Ever since the 1962 military coup, the Rohingya were violently and systematically targeted by the army, which resulted in widespread killings of civilians, rape and torture.

In the 1980s, the ruling military junta stripped this Muslim minority of its citizenship, deprived them of identity cards and effectively created a stateless community.

Last January, Lewa informed the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, “Myanmar blacklists Rohingya babies as part of its continuing oppression of a stateless minority.”

The lead researcher of the Arakan Project revealed that an estimated 40,000 Rohingya children have been condemned to a life of forced labour, denied access to health services and the formal job market and stripped of the freedom to travel beyond their villages – a fate shared by adults, too. Rohingya couples are even banned from getting married unless they get official permission.

In 1978 the military launched its ‘King Dragon Operation’ to drive out the Rohingya, prompting over 200,000 to flee the Rakhine State to neighbouring Bangladesh, where they lived in squalid refugee camps for decades.

A similar campaign followed in 1991-1992, forcing over 250,000 to flee as refugees. Persecution has pushed the number of Rohingya living in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, India, Malaysia and Bangladesh to 1.5 million.

The Rohingya last hit international headlines in 2009, when Thai authorities intercepted boatloads of exhausted men in seas close to Thailand’s southwestern coast. Rights groups said at the time that the fate of over 1,000 Rohingya, who were driven back to the seas by the Thai military, remained unknown.

(END)

Lucena Duman readies for her tour-guide role on Ang Pulo island. Credit: Marwaan Macan-Markar/IPS.

By Marwaan Macan-Markar
ANG PULO, Philippines, Jun 15 2012 (IPS)

On a humid islet covered with mangroves, Lucena Duman and her neighbours have found a route out of poverty. They work as conservationists and tour guides in this isolated corner of the Philippines.

After feeding her goats, which were once her only source of income, the 46-year-old Duman dons a wide-brimmed sun hat, slips into a yellow guides T-shirt and heads out on her bamboo raft. She is going from her village of small-scale fishers and farmers to Ang Pulo island in the South China Sea.

Her work on the 7.5 hectare islet has brought a new appreciation of mangroves. “All I knew of mangroves before was that they were a source of firewood and food – snails,” she admitted during a break from guiding visitors to plant mangrove seedlings. “But after being trained, we realise it is a richer place for us if we protect mangroves.”

The sea change since late 2009 is not limited to the Philippines. Similar accounts are heard across Southeast Asia as regional and international organisations promoting biodiversity encourage local communities to become foot soldiers to defend what is left of some 63,000 sq km of mangrove forests.

“This is a phenomenon spreading across the forestry eco-system in Southeast Asia and the rest of the continent,” says Simmathiri Appanah, forestry officer at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation’s Asia and Pacific office in Bangkok. “Communities living close to forests are being drawn to manage and preserve them, and what is happening with mangroves reflects this.”

The new formula offers communities an economic incentive to protect mangroves and, at times, the special rights as co-owners of mangroves. “It is better than policies that prevailed before, where government agencies played a dominant role in managing mangroves, ignoring the people who lived nearby,” Appanah tells IPS.

All ten countries that belong to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), a regional bloc, have programmes to protect these salt-tolerant trees and shrubs with their thick roots. Local communities, school children and even the private sector have been drawn to this effort.

In Indonesia, the largest country in the region and home to 62 percent of mangrove cover in ASEAN, college students rallying under the banner Green Community are involved in managing the coastal ecosystems near their schools, according to the ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity (ACB), an intergovernmental body promoting conservation in the regional bloc. “They plant mangroves with a number of partners.”

In Malaysia, a mangrove conservation project supported by a private bank has “resulted in an alternative source of income for the communities through the establishment of mangrove nurseries,” adds the ACB. In neighbouring Singapore “children (are being taught) how to appreciate its mangrove ecosystem.”

“The territory occupied by the Philippines and the rest of the ASEAN member states houses a third of the world’s mangroves, coral reefs and seagrass areas,” says Rodrigo Fuentes, executive director of ACB, based in the Philippines city Los Banos. “These ecosystems support the highest concentration of coastal and marine fauna and flora in the planet.”

Consequently, the economic value of mangroves needs to be seen in a different light as offering a “stream of ecosystem services” that matter to the fishing and tourism sectors, he explains in an interview. “This paradigm shift is happening now, putting a full value to mangroves to benefit an estimated 600 million people in the ASEAN region who depend on these resources for food and income.”

But there are other benefits, too. Mangroves serve as an important buffer for coastal communities hit by storms that churn up tidal surges, and as a frontline defence of expected sea level rises due to global warming.

Research in Malaysia offers another feature about mangroves helping the planet combat climate change – a high capacity for sequestering carbon. “They represent a potentially vast carbon sink, absorbing and storing excess carbon from the atmosphere,” states Dicky Simorangkir, international advisor to a biodiversity project run by the German international development agency (GIZ). “They are able to sequester some 1.5 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year.”

Yet, such growing appreciation for mangroves is not universal, Simorangkir admits. He points to the steady loss of mangroves for firewood, to produce charcoal, and wood chips and timber for sale. Mangroves are also felled in large swathes to make way for shrimp farms. “About 150,000 hectares of mangroves are lost a year around the globe.”

And so the Ang Pulo mangrove conservation park matters in Southeast Asia, which has seen its coastlines lose some 600 sq km of mangroves annually for the last 20 years. “Only one percent of mangroves are protected globally, like the Ang Pulo reserve,” says Simorangkir.

For Duman, it means guiding those who visit the islet, from university students to Filipinos driving from Manila for a weekend holiday, to discover the signs of a mangrove on the mend after trunks were slashed years ago. “There are more crabs and shrimp and over 20 different types of birds now,” she says. “These mangroves are our future.”

When Thai police raided the headquarters of the popular alternative news portal ‘Prachatai’ and arrested its executive director, Chiranuch Premchaiporn, back in 2009, the 46-year-old media worker was completely in the dark about her crime.

Premchaiporn claims she had never heard the expression “intermediary liability” before that fateful day.

“I had difficulty pronouncing and spelling this term correctly,” she recalled to IPS in a noisy canteen. “It was not easy to explain to people what it meant and I could not find the proper translation in Thai to explain its actual implications.”

Now she has had a harsh lesson in one of the more insidious aspects of censorship laws in the country. Intermediary liability falls under the 2007 Computer Crimes Act (CCA), approved by a parliament selected after the military coup in 2006, which threatens jail terms for those who allow the distribution of “prohibited” information in cyberspace.

A landmark verdict by the criminal court on May 30 found Premchaiporn guilty of neglecting her role as an “intermediary” by failing to monitor the comments on Prachatai’s online message board.

Her oversight resulted in a violation of the notorious lese majeste law, which threatens long jail terms for the publication of comments or actions deemed insulting to the royal family.

In justifying the verdict of a one-year suspended prison term for the media worker, presiding judge Kampol Rungrat brought into sharp focus the new responsibilities managers of websites, blogs and Facebook pages will now have to bear – to immediately censor “prohibited” comments posted on message boards.

As a webmaster, Premchaiporn was expected to bear the “liability of an intermediary,” the judge pointed out, adding that the she should have reviewed all messages on the website and removed any comments that were “prohibited by the CCA.”

It did not matter that the offending message had appeared at a time when Prachatai, then only five years since its launch and operating with a skeleton staff, was attracting between 20,000 to 30,000 users to a message board registering 2,800 comments daily, covering about 300 topics.

Since the country’s 18th coup in 2006, and the military’s ongoing domination of politics, scores of netizens were drawn to the website’s critical coverage of politics and forum for intense debates.

“This case was a test of how the criminal courts will interpret the CCA,” Teerapan Pankeere, Premchaiporn’s lawyer, told IPS. “This verdict should put all Internet service providers on (guard): they will have to seriously control and check messages posted on their website.”

The ruling comes at a time when Thailand is witnessing a rise in Internet traffic, with over 18 million of the country’s 66 million people online. The registered 14.2 million Facebook users partially explain why 27 percent of this Southeast Asian nation’s citizens are spending long hours surfing the net.

Thailand’s online business sector is also growing, with the global multinational Google helping 80,000 small and medium Thai companies “come on line to help improve their business” in the past year alone.

Many experts and press freedom advocates are growing increasingly concerned about the “chilling effect” draconian censorship laws are having on Thailand’s vibrant Internet community. Particularly worrying is a new wave of self-censorship that will likely gather speed as fear seeps into online fora.

“The guilty verdict for Chiranuch Premchaiporn, for something somebody else wrote on her website, is a serious threat to the future of the Internet in Thailand,” remarked Taj Meadows, spokesman for Google’s Asia-Pacific division.

“Telephone companies are not penalised for things people say on the phone and responsible website owners should not be punished for comments users post on their sites – but Thailand’s Computer Crimes Act is being used to do just that,” Meadows told IPS from his Tokyo office. “The precedent set is bad for Thai businesses, users and the innovative potential of Thailand’s Internet economy.”

The case has already created a “chill” on the message boards of many websites, and this self-censorship is going to worsen, warned Gayathry Venkiteswaran, head of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA), a Bangkok-based regional media rights watchdog. “Thai websites that hosted web boards and forums have begun to take them down.”

Premchaiporn’s case came as yet another blow to the country’s netizens, who, aside from struggling under the military’s severe press regulations since the 2006 coup, have had to contend with efforts by a military-backed government to black out websites as part of a clamp-down on freedom of expression during bloody street protests in Bangkok in 2010.

Netizens have also had to endure the ministry of information and communication technology seeking court orders to shut down websites that supposedly violated the CCA.

According to Freedom Against Censorship, Thailand, a Bangkok-based media rights lobby, government officials have blocked close to 878,196 web pages since the 2006 coup, among them 90,000 Facebook pages.

The new burden on Internet intermediaries here places Thailand in the same league as other Asian countries such as Malaysia and India, which have passed laws that demand close scrutiny of online dialogue in response to the growing power of independent media. Some Asian governments such as China, North Korea, Singapore and Vietnam have been even harsher, authorising direct and often violent interventions against press freedom.

In Europe, by contrast, intermediaries are not held responsible for content posted on websites of which they are not the authors – an argument used by an international witness who appeared in the trial to bolster Premchaiporn’s defence.

One explanation for this difference is that Internet intermediaries here are mistakenly viewed as newspaper editors, who are subject to national press laws. “Thailand’s CCA is being used very much like the country’s press laws that hold editors liable for the content of their publications,” remarked Pirongrong Ramasoota, head of the journalism department at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, at a seminar on Internet freedom.

“You cannot treat intermediaries and web service providers as if they were newspaper editors,” she argued. “Till this difference is recognised, laws like the CCA will be used as roadblocks to slow down Internet traffic.”

(END)

Political reforms unfolding in Myanmar (or Burma) are giving health workers a chance to address a resurgence of drug-resistant falciparum malaria in the war-torn ethnic minority enclaves along the country’s eastern borders.

Carrying medical aid in backpacks they have been dodging bullets and avoiding mines to deliver healthcare to villagers in the remote border areas that are home to ethnic minorities such as the Karen, Shan and Kachin.

“Due to recent political changes, our health workers have more freedom to access areas formerly restricted by the Burmese army,” Mahn Mahn, secretary of the Back Pack Health Worker Team (BPHWT), a non-profit that has been attending to the health needs of nearly 200,000 ethnic minority people in Myanmar for over a decade, told IPS.

Improved healthcare along eastern Myanmar could not have been timed better because of emerging concern over possible genetic mutation of the Plasmodium falciparum that makes the deadly parasite resistant to artemisinin, the most effective anti-malaria drug.

Researchers from the Shoklo Malaria Research Unit, on the Thai-Myanmar border, which is supported by the Tropical Medicine Research Programme of Oxford University and the Bangkok-based Mahidol University, have concluded that there is now a resurgence of the deadly strain of falciparum malaria.

The researchers arrived at that conclusion after studying 3,202 patients with falciparum malaria who were on oral artesunate (an artemisinin derivate). The study, conducted along the Thailand-Myanmar border, spanned a 10-year period that ended in 2010.

According to a study published in the British medical journal ‘Lancet’ in April, the longer time taken for oral anti-malaria drugs to act on parasites in the bloodstream suggested increasing resistance.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has called for more attention to be paid to Myanmar – in addition to Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam that are under watch – to manage resistance to artemisinin and its derivates.

WHO stated its concerns ahead of World Malaria Day, on Apr. 25. “The four countries most affected by resistance to artemisinin resistance are Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam and Myanmar. Of these Myanmar has by far the greatest malaria burden.”

“Given its extensive migrant population, the widespread use of oral artemisinin-based mono therapies and its close geographical proximity to India, Myanmar is critical to the success of efforts to prevent the emergence of artemisinin resistance globally,” the WHO adds.

But programmes to combat the spread of malaria in remote ethnic areas – often among the most vulnerable – need to address the link between disease prevalence and human rights violations in Myanmar, says Bill Davis, Burma project director for Physicians for Human Rights, a United States-based global campaigner for health and rights.

“Research done in the Karen state a few years ago showed that people who had experienced human rights violations were more likely to be positive with malaria than those who did not experience rights abuse,” he told IPS of a region where government troops and Karen rebels have been locked in an ethnic conflict spanning 60 years.

“Human rights abuses have a direct impact on public health,” he asserted. “Forced labour, having food stolen, forced displacement, all have negative effects on health.”

According to the WHO, there were 2.4 million malaria cases reported in 2010 in South and Southeast Asia, of which three countries accounted for over 90 percent of the confirmed cases. India accounted for 66 percent, Myanmar 18 percent and Indonesia 10 percent.

WHO studies reveal that close to 40 million people, nearly 69 percent of the population, live in malaria endemic zones in Myanmar. Of that, some 24 million people live in high-transmission areas – where BPHT operates.

In 2010, Myanmar reported 650,000 cases and 788 malaria-related deaths, according the WHO.

Myanmar dominated the other two Asian countries in the spike in malaria cases over a 10-year period, from 2000 to 2010, according to the ‘World Malaria Report 2011’. It recorded the highest increase in cases – 250 percent – because of “the changes associated with a large increase in the external diagnostic testing,” the report adds.

The spectre of artemisinin resistance in this corner of Southeast Asia affirms why it has been labelled the “epicentre of drug-resistant malaria in the world.”

The battle to contain the malaria parasite’s resistance to chloroquinine, once the drug of choice, was lost in these parts. Malaria resistance to chloroquinine was first detected in Pailin, a war-torn corner along the Thai-Cambodian border, from where it spread around the world.

“The threat of drug resistance must be taken seriously,” Shin Young-soo, regional director for the WHO’s Western Pacific division, said this week in a message to mark Malaria Day. “A particular concern is that artemisinin resistance will also develop in Africa, which has the world’s greatest malaria burden.”

“Our task is to prevent and to protect the gains that have been achieved by continuing artemisinin resistance containment efforts in the affected areas, and by preventing the development of resistance in other areas,” he added. “In the countries with detected artemisinin resistance, elimination of resistant parasites is vital.”

Mahn Mahn hopes that the government will give border-based organisations like the BPHWT, that have been providing much needed humanitarian assistance for many years, recognition, “so that we can improve our healthcare programmes and activities in remote areas.”

“We are unable to purchase medicines and supplies inside Burma because we are not an organisation registered with the government,” he said.

A pioneer of citizens’ journalism in Vietnam is risking 20 years in jail for defending Internet freedom and exposing the draconian censorship laws in this communist party-ruled country.

Nguyen Van Hai, who writes under the pen name ‘Dieu Cay’ (Peasant’s Pipe), has refused to accept the charges brought up against him, limiting the possibility of an acquittal, his lawyers have told human rights groups.

The lawyers fear that if Dieu Cay persists with his attitude, “they would have little chance of obtaining an acquittal or even a light sentence,” the Paris-based Vietnam Committee on Human Rights (VCHR) said ahead of his impending trial.

Dieu Cay’s refusal to sign on the dotted line comes as Hanoi gears up to implement in June the new ‘Decree on the Management, Provision, Use of Internet Services and Information Content Online’.

The 60-year-old war veteran has been detained for the past 17 months for postings critical of the Vietnamese government on the Club for Free Journalists (CFJ), a blog established in September 2007 to promote independent journalism in a country where media are in the iron grip of the one-party state.

“He should have never been arrested in the first place,” Vo Van Ai, president of VCHR, said in a statement on the charges Dieu Cay faces for violating Vietnamese criminal laws on “spreading propaganda against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.”

The maximum sentence for those charged under this law is 20 years in prison.

“Courts in Vietnam are kangaroo courts because the entire outcome is fixed ahead of the trial. What is decided at the trial is the extent of the sentence,” Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), the New York-based global rights campaigner, told IPS.

“Nguyen Van Hai may be slapped with the maximum 20-year prison term by refusing to sign any papers that he committed any crime, which rules out the option of negotiating a lower sentence,” Robertson said.

The plight of this famous blogger is shared by two other founding members of the CFJ, Phan Thanh Hai, 42, and Ta Phong Tan, 43. The former has been detained for 16 months and the latter for seven months.

The one-day trial for all three scheduled for Apr. 17 was suddenly postponed, a human rights activist said. “The government wanted to avoid negative media coverage ahead of the Apr. 30 (1975) anniversary (when the communist forces finally took complete control of the country after decades of war).”

The state’s prosecutors are armed with 421 blogs posted by all three on the CFJ’s website from September 2007 till October 2010, as these accounts were “distorting the truth (and) denigrating the (communist) party and the state,” said a report this month in the state-run ‘Thanh Nien’ newspaper.

That charge runs along lines that the only woman among the victims predicted two years ago.

“The government endlessly repeats that ‘Vietnam respects and promotes human rights’. But the way they have treated me proves that they do the opposite of what they say to the international community,” Ta Phong Tan, a former police officer and former communist party member, blogged on Apr.4, 2010.

“Everybody knows that I don’t belong to any organisation, no political party. I don’t call for the overthrow of the regime and I have violated no laws,” she wrote in the blog titled: “I am facing a plot (against me).”

“I am just a journalist, a free-thinker … I denounce anything I believe is unjust, things that my friends and I have suffered directly, and I speak out for ordinary people who are victims of injustice. That is what the state holds against me,” she then wrote.

Her words reflect the mission of the CFJ, which broke new ground to tap cyberspace, the only avenue available for free expression. It drew a huge following in the months that followed its launch, because it covered topics that the mainstream media barely touched.

Issues that CFJ took up ranged from local anger at China’s role in a controversial bauxite mine to China’s pressure on Hanoi regarding claims over the South China Sea, growing labour unrest, illegal land confiscation and heavy taxation of the poor.

Vietnam’s relationship with China has been fertile ground for critics who accuse its rulers of kowtowing to the more formidable communist party that governs from Beijing. And blogging has provided Vietnamese an “escape route” to air their views.

“Many blogs vocally supported public protests held in Hanoi last year about Chinese encroachment in the South China Sea,” Vo Tran Nhat, executive secretary of Action for Democracy in Vietnam, a Paris-based group of Vietnamese political exiles, told IPS. “They were surprisingly bold in their criticism of the government and the party.”

The CFJ was a new phenomenon in Vietnam and the authorities took some time before striking out at these pioneers of blogging in the country, said Robertson of HRW, whose organisation informed the European Union earlier this year of the 33 bloggers and rights activists convicted in 2011 “of crimes for expressing their political and religious beliefs.”

Such crackdowns come at a time when Internet usage in Vietnam is growing. “Internet penetration grew to 24.2 million users, representing 28 percent of the population,” the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based media rights campaigner, said in its annual report last year.

But the space for bloggers is bound to shrink further, warns another media rights watchdog, Reporters Without Borders (RSF), once the Decree on the Management, Provision, Use of Internet Services and Information Content Online is implemented.

“(It) would increase online censorship to an utterly unacceptable level and exacerbate the already very disturbing situation of freedom of expression in Vietnam,” RSF added in a mid-April statement. “It could criminalise any expression of dissident views and reporting of news that strays from the Communist Party official line.”

With Vietnam’s fertile Mekong delta threatened by rising sea levels and salt water ingress, the country’s future as a major rice exporter depends critically on research underway in the Philippines.

Scientists at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) are working with Vietnamese counterparts in the town of Los Banos, 63 km southeast of Manila, to develop a new strain of rice that can withstand submergence for over two weeks and also resist salinity.

A flood-tolerant variety, dubbed ‘scuba rice’, which has the submergence (SUB 1) rice gene, already offers half the solution.

“IRRI is experimenting to find a rice variety to deal with both problems,” says Bjorn Ole Sander, a scientist at the world’s leading non-governmental research centre on rice. “Even if we have rice crops that are tolerant to floods they can die because of salinity.”

The search for this new grain had its roots in the Indian state of Orissa, home to the flood-resistant rice variety that resumes growth after being underwater for even 14 days – unlike other rice varieties that die if submerged for just over a week.

“This has been achieved without genetic manipulation, by breeding the SUB 1 variety,” Sander said in an interview. “It can be submerged for 17 days.”

But the quest for a salinity-tolerant variety that could be blended with scuba rice is more daunting. “It will take at least four years to find a rice variety that will be tolerant to both – salinity and flooding,” he said.

“That would be the answer to the problems faced in the Mekong Delta from flooding and salinity from the rising sea tides,” he added.

Salt water from the South China Sea now spreads 40 km into the delta, unlike the 10 km inland reach of the sea 30 years ago.

“The future of the delta is at stake. That is why we are working with IRRI to develop a rice variety to deal with floods and salinity,” says Nguyen Van Bo, president of the Vietnam Academy of Agricultural Science, a government-backed entity in Hanoi. “Seven percent of the paddy fields in the delta are affected by rising sea levels.”

Already farmers have begun to change occupations, many going from rice farming to shrimp farming, he told IPS. “There is a very noticeable shift from the previous times when growing rice and shrimp farming were seasonal.”

And Vietnam’s fate – particularly on the delta – is going to worsen, warned Asian agriculture scientists and climate change specialists at a meeting in Bangkok, Apr. 11-12. It would add to existing woes from erratic weather patterns that have hit the region’s other major rice producers like Thailand, they added.

The delta accounts for nearly 50 percent of the 42 million tonnes of unmilled rice produced in Vietnam – the world’s second largest rice exporter after Thailand – with three annual harvests.

In 2011, Vietnam exported a record seven million tonnes of rice, mainly to the Philippines and other Asian markets.

For over 17 million of Vietnam’s 87 million people, who call the flat, humid delta their home, the network of waterways has been pivotal to rice production.

These arteries are fed by the Mekong River, Southeast Asia’s largest body of water, which begins its 4,880-km route in the Tibetan plateau and flows through southern China, touches Myanmar and Thailand, and winds its way through Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam before flowing out into the South China Sea.

Four dams built by China on the Mekong were the first to impact the delta’s rice farmers. As the usual water flow ebbed, salt water raced inland and the alluvial soil dumped on the delta by the river during the annual monsoon floods also dropped, reducing the natural fertility.

But, the dams provided clues to the possible impact of climate change. Almost one-third of the delta, where nearly half of Vietnam’s rice is grown, could be submerged by salt water if there is a one-metre rise in the sea levels, a report by the country’s National Institute for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Science warned in 2009.

World Bank studies rank Mekong delta communities among the most threatened by sea level rise in 87 developing countries surveyed.

Warnings that 21 percent of Asia’s crops will be affected by climate change by 2050 are yet to push government leaders from the 190 countries who gather at the annual United Nations climate change summit to include agriculture in the negotiations.

“Agriculture and food production are mentioned in the UNFCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) but they have not been translated into language that will initiate a specific work programme on agriculture in relation to climate change,” says Bruce Campbell at the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

“There isn’t a common voice on agriculture at the UNFCCC negotiations,” said Campbell, a director at CGIAR which is sponsored by the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the United Nations Development Programme and the World Bank.

“Climate change is impacting farming systems and it is endangering crops,” Campbell told IPS. “Agriculture systems have to be transformed to make agriculture climate resilient.”

Long Southeast Asia’s black sheep, Myanmar is enjoying an image change following its landmark Apr. 1 by-elections. Tongues are now wagging about the region’s new beacon of hope for democratic change.

The just concluded summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in the Cambodian capital revealed hints of the new image of Myanmar (also known as Burma) as it embraces political reform after 50 years of military dictatorships.

Activists and opposition politicians point to the landslide victory of Myanmar’s pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) party as a sign of openness – absent in ASEAN countries such as Laos, Vietnam and Brunei and under siege in Cambodia and Singapore.

“In Cambodia, we are already taking Burma as a good example of a democratic feature: justice will prevail,” Mu Sochua, parliamentarian from the country’s opposition Sam Rainsy party, told IPS. “If Burma can do it, why not Cambodia?”

“In Vietnam, freedoms and human rights are not even discussed in the country as it is considered treason,” she added. “When I was in Singapore as a guest of the opposition Democrat party that has no seats in parliament, the meeting was cancelled and the organisers continue to be questioned even two years later.”

Others expect Myanmar’s small steps towards democracy to reverberate across ASEAN, whose other members include Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand.

“The reform in Myanmar will not be limited to its borders but holds out the possibility of spilling over across the rest of ASEAN,” says Yuyun Wahyuningrum, senior advisor at Indonesia’s non-governmental organisation, Coalition for International Human Rights Advocacy (HRWG), who attended the regional summit on Apr. 3 – 4 in Phnom Penh.

“More people in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and even Singapore are talking of this possibility,” she told IPS from HRWG’s office in Jakarta. “I am looking forward to this moment in the sub-region.”

But there are other implications from the democratic dividend that Myanmar’s President Thein Sein is enjoying after his one-year old quasi-civilian government held the by-elections, where the NLD party of Nobel Peace laureate Suu Kyi, won 43 of the 45 seats contested.

In easing the pressure off a reforming Mynamar, ASEAN will lay open the democratic deficits of its other members who have not been exposed for their harsh treatment of opposition figures, of suppressing the media or refusing the rights of political and civil liberties.

“For many years the non-democratic countries in ASEAN had been hiding in a very comfortable place behind Myanmar, evading international criticism,” reveals Yuyun. “Now I think they will begin to panic since they will soon be exposed for their human rights record and practices.”

“Eyes will move to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and the rest,” she added. “Until 2010 Vietnam spoke on behalf of Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar and itself, especially when Myanmar faced criticisms.”

ASEAN’s attempt to improve its image through an intergovernmental human rights commission and drafting an ASEAN human rights declaration will add heat on these countries, says Sinapan Samydorai, director of Think Centre, a Singaporean think tank. “They will be exposed to more critical reviews in terms of civil and political rights.

“Lack of freedom of expression and association, corruption and the abuse of political power and the lack of the rule of law will place Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam in an awkward corner,” Samydorai told IPS. “Civil society groups in Cambodia and in other ASEAN countries have begun to express this view.”

The singling out of Myanmar as an embarrassment began in 2001, four years after it joined a bloc that has two communist-ruled countries, Vietnam and Laos, and an absolute monarchy, Brunei. ASEAN also has one-party authoritarian states such as Cambodia and Singapore.

Malaysia and Thailand have democratic credentials that are under a cloud, leaving Indonesia and the Philippines as the only ASEAN members with claims to being robust democracies.

ASEAN summits typically end with a statement on the political situation in Myanmar, under ‘Regional and International Issues’. ASEAN summits, with the United States as dialogue partner, were under pressure to get the junta in Myanmar to ease its iron grip on power.

Myanmar as a diplomatic embarrassment even precipitated tension within the bloc as governments talked of “constructive engagement” and “flexible engagement” to shield their regional neighbour from Western criticism.

“ASEAN has now reached a stage where it is not possible to defend a member when that member is not making any attempt to cooperate or to help itself,” a visibly frustrated former Malaysian foreign minister Seyed Hamid Albar said in 2006. And in 2007, ASEAN expressed “revulsion” at the brutal crackdown on protesting Buddhist monks in Myanmar’s cities.

“It is easy to find black sheep in this region,” says Pavin Chachavalponpun, associate professor at the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University, in Japan. “As much as ASEAN liked to support political developments in Burma, it was content to see the global attention being paid only to Burma all along.

“This way they could get away with certain behaviours that potentially undermined democracy,” the academic told IPS. “Thailand I think is a country that could also be exposed, because the 2006 coup weakened democratic institutions by the concentration of royal power.”

With extreme weather pounding countries across a wide arc in the Asia-Pacific region, questions hover over entitlements for millions of people displaced by climate change, pledged under the Green Climate Fund (GCF) and other sources.

Will the long wait by climate change migrants – including the 42 million people displaced by storms, floods and droughts in Asia and the Pacific during 2010 and 2011 – be finally over? Will they be able to tap international aid to help them adapt to extreme weather?

The International Organisation of Migration (IOM) hopes it is so as it sets its sights on the annual United Nations climate change summit to be held in Qatar later this year.

The Geneva-based body is looking to the 18th session of the Conference of the Parties (CoP 18) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to deliver on a breakthrough that emerged at the end of acrimonious negotiations at the CoP 16, held in the Mexican resort of Cancun in December 2010.

At Cancun, government leaders from over 190 countries affirmed that climate change migrants qualify for assistance from the GCF. A paragraph of the Cancun Adaptation Framework said victims of “climate change induced displacement (and) migration” are eligible for the billions of dollars pledged by the GCF.

“The IOM is pushing to implement this para at the next CoP in Qatar,” says Diana Ionesco, migration policy office at IOM, referring to paragraph 14f in the Cancun document. “Migration can now be part of the global adaptation strategy, which was not the case before Cancun.”

“We want people who have been victims of climate change – including those who cannot move – to benefit from this new policy that has recognised migration as part of the climate change adaptation framework,” she told IPS. “It opens the way to apply for adaptation- related funding to help migrants.”

Following the negotiations at the CoP 15 in Copenhagen, the GCF produced a blueprint unveiled the following year in Cancun to start dispensing funds by 2020. It will finance projects using green- friendly technologies, help communities adapt to climate change and promote ways of mitigating the impact of greenhouse gases responsible for global warming.

A 2010 report by U.N. secretary-general Ban ki-Moon’s climate financing advisory group estimates that 100 billion dollars a year would be needed for a raft of climate change initiatives in the developing world.

This estimate dwarfs the amounts dispensed by the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), a 1991 financial organisation backed by over 180 governments and international development institutions, that, till now, has been one of the leading financiers of green- friendly projects in the developing world.

GEF has pumped in 10 billion dollars in direct financing and 47 billion dollars in co-financing in over 2,800 projects in over 168 developing countries.

For its part, the IOM had even more limited resources to assist migrants who are victims of humanitarian emergencies – the 6.5 million dollar IOM development fund for 2012 and the newly established IOM migration emergency fund in 2011, which aimed to raise 30 million dollars.

The marginalisation of climate change migrants during adaptation negotiations at the CoPs stems from the political implications of who a climate change migrant is. Neither IOM nor the United Nations refugee agency use the term “climate refugees” to describe people displaced by natural disasters.

“Very often when we talk about adaptation we don’t talk about migration,” says Francois Gemenne, climate and migration research fellow at the Paris-based Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations. “It is seen as too complicated and too sensitive.”

“Migration will only become a fatality if we don’t address it today,” he added during a recent panel discussion held in the Thai capital on ‘Climate Induced Migration and Livelihood Security’. “We need to guarantee people the right to stay for those who want to stay and also provide migration options for those who want to leave.”

Their growing numbers in the Asia-Pacific region makes this vulnerable community hard to ignore, argues the Asian Development Bank (AsDB), the Manila-based regional financial institution in a recent report, ‘Addressing Climate Change and Migration in Asia and the Pacific’.

The estimated 42 million people who were displaced by environmental disasters in 2010 and 2011 confirms that “the environment is becoming a significant driver of migration in Asia and the Pacific as the population grows in vulnerable areas, such as low-lying coastal zones and eroding river banks,” says Bindu Lohani, the Bank’s vice- president for knowledge management and sustainable development.

“Migration should be viewed as one component of a broader adaptation strategy, and a tool with which to strengthen the resilience of those who remain in communities threatened by environmental challenges,” he adds.

Yet a financial challenge for adaptation looms in the Asia-Pacific region. While the annual climate adaptation costs for the region would reach 50 billion dollars in 2050, “less than 10 percent of that has been available to date,” according to the AsDB.

“It is unclear what kind of policy interventions will be available for funding under the GCF,” notes AsDB’s 81-page report. “A key challenge for future negotiations will be in making (paragraph 14f) operational, determining how adaptation funding can be attributed to policies related to climate-induced migration.”

“The Qatar CoP should open the way to apply for funding for adaptation-related projects,” asserts IOM’s Ionesco. “We need funds to prevent forced migrations and to provide assistance to prepare for migration.”

Following her historic victory in Sunday’s by-elections Aung San Suu Kyi takes on a new role as opposition lawmaker, after a 22-year existence as Myanmar’s most famous political prisoner.

The 66-year-old’s presence in parliament will be fortified by other candidates from her National League for Democracy (NLD) triumphant in the landmark mini-poll on Apr.1. An informal tally by NLD has shown the party winning 40 of the 45 seats up for grabs in the 664-member bicameral legislature.

“It is not so much our triumph as a triumph of the people, who have decided that they must be involved in the political process of this country,” the beaming Nobel Peace laureate told thousands of cheering supporters gathered outside the party’s headquarters in Yangon, the former capital, on Monday.

“We hope this will be the beginning of a new era when there will be more emphasis on the role of the people in everyday politics of our country,” she added.

The voters who ensured her place in the third elections in Myanmar (also called Burma) in 50 years come from the Karen ethnic minority. It was in the Kawhmu township, home to this impoverished ethnic community on the southwestern fringes of Yangon, that Suu Kyi contested for her first seat in the 440-member ‘Pyithu Hluttaw’ (Lower House).

Suu Kyi has set her sights on the need for the rule of law and to amend the 2008 constitution among her priorities in the legislature, a body dominated by Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), a proxy of the Southeast Asian nation’s last military junta, and a bloc of non-elected military officers.

In the Lower House, the USDP has 219 seats following a fraud-plagued 2010 general elections – which the NLD boycotted – and the military bloc enjoys 110 seats. And, in the ‘Amyotha Hluttaw’, the Upper House, the USDP controls 123 seats and the military bloc, 56 seats.

The small numbers on the opposition benches will include the National Democratic Force (NDF), a breakaway faction of the NLD, and a clutch of ethnic minority parties and independents.

While the NLD will only add marginal weight to the opposition numbers, it is Suu Kyi’s performance in parliament that analysts say will serve as a yardstick to measure how much space a “loyal opposition” will enjoy in Myanmar’s changing political landscape under President Thein Sein.

And besides the reformist Thein Sein, whose one-year-old quasi-civilian government has been dismantling five decades of oppressive military rule, Suu Kyi will also have to engage with the powerful speaker of the Lower House, Shwe Man, a former general like Thein Sein, who is also competing for the reformist’s mantle.

“All sides will have to adjust to the new realities to pursue the current pace of reform,” says Aung Naing Oo, deputy director of the Vahu Development Institute, a think tank helping to shape public policies in Myanmar. “The government will have to come to terms with a strong voice like Aung San Suu Kyi’s in parliament for the first time.”

She will have to negotiate with the USDP and the military bloc if she wants to “expand her role from being a minority member in parliament to introducing new laws,” he told IPS. “This means even reaching out to the army chief (Gen. Min Aung Hlaing) who directs the votes of the military bloc in the parliament.”

The “surprising” presence of reform-minded parliamentarians within the pro-government camp will be a fertile ground for Suu Kyi to establish her opposition credentials, adds Win Min, a Myanmar national security expert. “She had a friendly meeting with Shwe Man during a recent visit to Naypidaw (the capital).”

She could also play a “balancing role” to help “reduce the ongoing tension between the parliament and the president since both need her,” he explained in an interview. “The president will need her to help lift the (economic) sanctions (imposed by the United States and the European Union) and the speaker will need her to increase its power in a non-threatening way.”

For Myanmarese like Zinn Linn a vibrant opposition in parliament harks back to an era before the 1962 military coup. “They were known for their passionate debates and open challenges to the then prime minister U Nu,” said the 65-year-old who lives in exile in Bangkok. “The government’s programmes came in for severe scrutiny.”

The opposition heroes of that era, including Aung Than, an uncle of Suu Kyi, were part of the left-leaning bloc that was challenging the U Nu administration, elected to power as the country’s first government after colonial rule ended.

“The political and parliamentary culture of that time was shaped by British traditions, so the role of an opposition was accepted,” Zin Linn told IPS.

There were few expectations of such a revival following the return of opposition politics after the 2010 general elections. The previous British parliamentary traditions had, after all, given way to the dominant military culture that had crushed all dissent since 1962.

Yet Suu Kyi’s arrival could change the equation following the by-elections. “The government has permitted that space and it has been received positively,” says David Scott Mathieson, Burma researcher for the global rights campaigner Human Rights Watch.

“The opposition is not in any way close to being robust, but what they have done, using the legislative process in a limited way, has surprised many people,” he explained to IPS. “Suu Kyi joining these ranks would help in this transition.”

By Marwaan Macan-Markar and - -
BANGKOK, Mar 23 2012 (IPS)

For thousands of ethnic Kachins who fled fighting between government troops and rebels and survived a bitter winter in the refugee camps that dot northern Myanmar (or Burma), another test of survival looms – gale force winds.

From April, seasonal gales followed by heavy monsoon rains sweep through the rugged, snow-capped mountain terrain close to Myanmar’s border with China. Here, in territory held by the rebel Kachin Independence Army (KIA), over 45,000 villagers are hunkered down in makeshift bamboo huts.

Another 20,000 villagers – displaced since the current round of clashes between Myanmar troops and the KIA erupted in June last year – are housed in Myitkyina, capital of the resource-rich Kachin state, and Bhamo, both in government-controlled areas.

An estimated 10,000 Kachins have crossed into China to live as “unrecognised refugees in squalid, improvised and jungle camps,” according to the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW).

“It is important that all the victims of the conflict get assistance before the monsoon breaks,” says Barbara Manzi, head of the United Nations Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Yangon (or Rangoon). “It is very critical.”

“The heavy winds break the tarpaulin that provides shelter for the displaced and the monsoon rains make access to the victims difficult,” she said over telephone from the former colonial capital. “The roads are small and are difficult to drive on to deliver assistance.”

But for that, a more troubling question is crying for an answer: Will President Thein Sein, who heads a one-year-old quasi-civilian government, permit U.N.-led relief efforts reach humanitarian aid to thousands of internally displaced in rebel-held territory?

It comes in the wake of a scathing report released this week by HRW accusing the Thein Sein administration of blocking relief to Kachin refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) who are in “desperate need of food, medicine and shelter.”

“The government’s longstanding unwillingness to allow domestic and international humanitarian agencies to provide assistance in KIA and other rebel-controlled areas has deterred some humanitarian groups from seeking formal approval from the Burmese authorities to access certain areas,” says HRW in a new 83-page report.

“These agencies, all with an interest in expanding humanitarian space, have expressed concern that even making such requests could result in government reprisals against their other officially approved projects in the country,” adds the report, ‘Untold Miseries: Wartime Abuse and Forced Displacement in Burma’s Kachin State’.

The administration’s roadblocks allowed a trickle of relief, two trucks loaded with food packages, to flow to Laiza, a town deep in KIA-controlled territory, last December.

Following this initial presence of U.N. relief, six months after fighting began, the prospect of a humanitarian corridor emerged.

The United Nations Children’s Fund was among agencies operating in the still military-dominated country that had hoped the breakthrough in December would lead to “additional relief supplies (being) allowed to reach the most vulnerable people displaced in and around Laiza.”

But an OCHA report released early March conveys the limited success U.N. agencies have had in securing a change of heart from the Myanmar government.

Efforts by the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in June last year for government permission to assist all the victims opened a corridor to assist IDPs in government-controlled areas and “hard-to-reach areas in December 2011,” states the ‘Humanitarian Situation and Response Plan in Kachin’.

“However, sustained access for provision of assistance for relief and eventually recovery operations is yet to be achieved,” it adds.

“There is no doubt that the government is denying aid access,” Mathew Smith, lead author of the HRW report, told IPS. “They have prevented U.N. aid convoys gaining access to the displaced in the KIA-held areas.”

The looming humanitarian crisis undermines the reformist image being projected by Thein Sein, adds Smith. “The decision to prevent aid going into the Kachin state is a political decision made in (the new capital of) Naypidaw”.

Since August last year, Myanmar has gone from being an international pariah to a country convulsed by change, marking an end of 50 years of military dictatorships.

Thein Sein has been its principle architect, easing the iron grip military regimes have had on the local media, freeing political prisoners, permitting political dissidents to openly campaign for the Apr. 1 by-elections and holding peace talks with some ethnic rebel groups.

And he was even spared from total blame for the conflict and the human rights violations in the Kachin state. The president’s defenders said that the former general had no control over the Southeast Asian nation’s powerful army – including the military campaign against the Kachin.

For the Kachins, it is a contradiction that exposes the Thein Sein presidency. “His policies to deny humanitarian aid have been exposed,” Col. James Lum Dau, deputy chief of foreign affairs for the KIA’s political wing, told IPS. “They are causing much hardship. Refugees, mothers and children, are being forced to eat less, to share food.”

The current plight the Kachins face is reminiscent of the humanitarian crisis and human rights abuses the country’s ethnic minorities have faced over the past five decades, during which conflicts between government troops and ethnic rebels forced close to 500,000 people to flee their homes and live as IDPs for years.

The clashes since June last year brought to an end a ceasefire that Kachin leaders signed with military leaders of the then Burma in 1994, one of many peace deals struck with 17 other ethnic separatists since the early 1990s.

“It was the Burmese troops that started the fight in June. They broke the ceasefire,” asserts Lum Dau. “They thought they could crush us in a few weeks. But we will not surrender.”

Excerpt:

By Marwaan Macan-Markar and - -
BANGKOK, Mar 16 2012 (IPS)

In a move expected to deepen political reform, the quasi-civilian government in Myanmar (also known as Burma) is permitting the distribution of leaflets that will help thousands of people in the country’s ethnic enclaves learn to resist forced labour.

The leaflets offer residents in the ethnic minority areas a chance to raise the alarm with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) about the horrors they endure at the hands of government troops deployed in their areas.

The Shan ethnic minority is the first to benefit from this new measure, one among a growing list of reform policies – including freeing political prisoners, easing the iron grip on the media and permitting public campaigns by political dissidents – that President Thein Sein has ushered in during his first year in office.

The one-page, A-4-size sheets of paper that have been flowing from Yangon (also known as Rangoon), the former capital, to the Shan state since January has been hailed by the ILO for using the local Shan language – stepping away from the policy of previous military regimes to suppress ethnic languages.

Following the distribution of nearly 30,000 leaflets in the Shan state over the past two months, the ILO has set its sights on raising awareness about its “complaints mechanism for forced labour” in six other ethnic areas, where Burmese troops have been fighting separatist rebels.

“The government agreed this year for the production of the ILO’s awareness raising materials on the complaints mechanism for forced labour in other languages, including Karen, Kachin, Chin, Rakhine and Mon,” says Steve Marshall, the Geneva-based body’s representative in Myanmar.

“It is hoped that these will be available for distribution very shortly,” Marshal said.

“This dramatic change is clearly linked to the new government’s response to the issues ILO is raising, reflecting the change of leadership, philosophy and priorities of the government,” Marshall said in an interview in Bangkok.

But reaching this milestone has been tough. The ILO office in Rangoon began pushing the case following a March 2008 decision by the ILO governing body to raise the need for “the production of awareness raising materials on forced labour, explaining the agreed ILO complaints mechanism in the country.”

Then military strongman Senior Gen. Than Shwe permitted the brochures to be printed only in Burmese, the language of the country’s largest ethnic group and it It took two years of negotiations between the military regime and the ILO to “get agreement to the wording”.

Since its June 2010 distribution in the central region, which is home to majority ethnic Burmese in the country of 55 million people, the ILO noticed a steady increase in cases being lodged.

While a mere drop when compared with the scale of such human rights violations, the over 1,160 forced labour complaints that the ILO has received in the past four years offer a glimpse into who the victims are and the abuse they have been subjected to.

The majority of cases from the dominant Burmese side have been children forced to swell the ranks of the military, according to the ILO.

The few complaints of forced labour lodged by ethnic communities have ranged from villagers compelled by troops to help build public works, carry goods and ammunition for the Burmese army and clear land.

But, human rights groups have long accused the Burmese military of more violations in areas where battles with ethnic separatist groups have raged since 1949. They have included slave-like duties to clean military camps, build military structures and walking ahead of troops in terrain infested with landmines.

“Whether it is carrying supplies for the army, building their camps, standing sentry duty along roads or serving as vassals for under-supplied and poorly disciplined garrison battalions, the Burmese army as it currently stands is a burden to local communities,” says David Scott Mathieson, Burma consultant for Human Rights Watch (HRW), the New York-based global rights lobby.

Consequently, the plight of forced labour victims in the ethnic areas was not forgotten during the early round of peace talks that the country’s largest rebel groups – the Karen and the Shan – have had with the Thein Sein administration since late last year.

The Karen National Union (KNU) demanded an immediate end to “forced labour, arbitrary taxation and extortion of villagers” as the sixth item in an 11-point plan for peace talks with Burma’s railway minister, Aung Min, head of the government negotiating team.

“Fighting in the Karen area has resulted in a lot of forced labour, so we wanted it included in the early round of talks,” David Tharckbaw, KNU vice-president and head of the movement’s peace committee, said during a telephone interview from the Thai-Burma border. “They (the Burmese government) accepted these concerns in principle.”

But complaints have continued, given the presence of nearly 200 military camps in the Karen state, near the Thai border. “As of February 2012, forced labour was ongoing in five villages in the Tantabin township,” revealed the Karen Human Rights Group in a Mar. 12 field report.

A similar picture prevails in the Shan state. “Forced labour was discussed during the talks but never put on the agenda,” says Khuensai Jaiyen, editor of a Shan news agency and a member of the Shan negotiating team in talks with the government.

“It is time the Burmese army mends its ways to build up trust among local ethnic populations,” he explained during a telephone interview from northern Thailand. “They should end forced labour.”

The government’s nod to the ILO taps into such a prospect. “This initiative will be valuable support to ongoing ceasefire and peace talks,” says ILO’s Marshall.

Excerpt:

By Marwaan Macan-Markar and - -
CHIANG MAI, Thailand, Mar 10 2012 (IPS)

When he returned home after over two decades as a political exile, Aung Zaw, a prominent figure among Burma’s exiled media community, was served a slice of truth by the country’s notorious censorship board.

Aung Zaw, editor, 'The Irrawaddy' Credit: 'The Irrawaddy'

It was just one of the many encouraging experiences of Aung Zaw during his five-day visit in February. Another was freedom to travel and meet contacts and dissidents, including pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, without being tailed by government spies.

The openness and sense of hope he felt in the Burma under its quasi-civilian government was in stark contrast to the climate of oppression that had gripped the country in 1988, the year he fled, hiding in remote villages, till he reached the Thai border.

In 1993, this trenchant critics of the military junta launched ‘The Irrawaddy’ on a shoestring budget to cover political events in Burma. The publication’s two-decade presence, first as a monthly and then as a website with daily updates, set the tone for the growth of the exiled media – a new phenomenon in Burmese journalism. It now has close to 20 media outlets in Norway, India, Bangladesh and Thailand.

“I don’t see ourselves as exiled media now, after the government lifted the restrictions to access our website inside Burma,” he said during an interview in his editorial office in Thailand’s northern city of Chiang Mai.

Excerpts from the interview follow:

Q: You returned to Burma after 24 years in exile, during which time you set up ‘The Irrawaddy’ to expose the oppression by military regimes back home. Are the days of military dictatorships since the 1962 coup drawing to an end? A: Burma is changing, it is going through a transition period; it is at a crossroad, definitely. But if this change is not managed well, not done intelligently, in a more creative way, I am afraid we are going to lose this period of transition. That would be a shame. This is a golden opportunity for Burma.

Q: Among the places you visited was Naypidaw, the new administrative capital, to meet officials of President Thein Sein’s government. What did that visit feel like, since your publication was scathing in its coverage of the former junta’s plans to build this new seat of power? A: I got a call on my first morning in Rangoon from the government asking me to come to Naypidaw as soon as possible. I was expecting to make this journey at the end. So, I went immediately.

It was a funny journey (laughs) as I talked with the others in the vehicle about the number of stories we had written about this secret, jungle hideout, how much money was spent and the kinds of clandestine operations and deals struck by the military regime in the past. And then finally to see it – looked like a place in China; I felt it in the style of the buildings.

But I had a very warm, incredible reception with the officials from the president’s office. We had extensive talks, didn’t beat around the bush.

Q: Like what? A: Media laws in Burma, press freedom and the censorship board – when are they going to abolish it. How much freedom the media inside the country has and the changing media landscape since last year and will there be more openness.

Q: Does it mean you are planning to relocate The Irrawaddy to Burma? A: I did talk about our intentions to go back, at some point, and launch our publication at home. But is that possible? How much freedom will we have? These are questions of concern about the media space for us, because inside the country the cronies, the tycoons and family members of the military dominate and control the media, the many layers of publishing, even contents and editorial policies.

But I think there is potential for journalism to grow, for more professional journalism to take root. There are groups of people who are committed and very dedicated, very determined; they are relatively small. They need support and I see them as partners to reeducate journalists about what is good journalism, independent journalism, press freedom, and the role journalists have to achieve this.

Q: And will the government permit this possible flowering of a vibrant, independent media inside Burma? A: Actually, since last year, the government has relaxed media controls a lot. There is more space to publish and report. I also think the government wants to see a more professional media. They are very disappointed with the state of the media. They even asked at one point what we can do to help them with training.

Q: That would be something, given how you have been seen as an enemy by the military regimes all these years. Would the ministry of information and information minister Kyaw Hsan, your nemesis, be able to stomach it? A: (Laughs)… I only had a brief handshake with Kyaw Hsan, but I did meet the deputy minister (Soe Win) and he was very expressive as if he was meeting a long lost friend. He admitted being a big reader of the Irrawaddy. I was surprised (laughs).

Q: One of the problems exiles around the world face when they return to their country at peace after years of conflict or, in your case, decades of military oppression, are feelings of resentment by those who stayed back and felt the full force of domestic turmoil. You will face this, won’t you? A: Definitely, definitely. I think my first visit was a honeymoon. Even movie stars who had followed my work, seen me on our TV programmes, came and said hello to me in restaurants, as did other people I met in the markets, on the streets of Rangoon and even in the shops in Naypidaw. But the more exiles start making inroads in the professional fields, they will encounter resentment. It is natural.

Q: So is it time for exiles in professions such as journalism, health, education, finance to go back and deal with this reality check? A: I think it is time for a visit; get a feel for the change. But time will come for them to do more, to go back and help. And I think the government – there is a problem – also has to do something to welcome exiles back. They have to create incentives for people who left the country since 1960s to return and not be seen as people coming back to disrupt the society.

Excerpt:

By Marwaan Macan-Markar and - -
BAAN LOONG SUMLAN, Thailand, Mar 8 2012 (IPS)

As fingers of morning light slip through the mango and banana orchards of his village, Suchin Utanarat heads out in a boat to net a fresh catch from the nearby canals teeming with shrimp.

But there is more to this idyllic, riverine scene. By stirring the waters through his daily routine, this 40-year-old fisher is showing the advantages of a sustainable local economy that is small, simple and green.

A few hours in the brackish waters and Suchin has netted catches worth 1,000 baht (33 dollars). “This is my main income and it is enough for our family,” he says, sorting the shrimp, seated in his boat of carved teak. “This shrimp goes to seafood restaurants, even in Bangkok.

“Most of the families in our village catch shrimp in the canals all year and depend on it for a livelihood,” he adds. “It is a small economy but it is a safe one. And we want to keep it that way,” he says.

Suchin’s sentiments are shared by many who live in Baan Loong Sumlan and other villages spread across a province bountiful with fruit orchards and crisscrossed by a network of canals.

What has steeled the determination of people like Suchin was Samut Songhkram province’s disastrous experiment with industrial-scale shrimp farming.

Large swathes of mangroves were levelled to make way for the big shrimp farms, and a province that had 8,000 hectares of mangroves in 1986 now has only 256 hectares of the protective vegetation.

Samut Songkhram’s aquaculture ambitions took a when a virus, first detected in 1992, swept through shrimp farms across this marshy delta. Fear of the virus has kept the villagers from going back to industrial shrimp farming of the type that dot other southern provinces.

It is a choice that makes villagers like Wong Takrudthong, 70, beam with an air of community pride, knowing that it sets communities here apart from those making a killing from the large shrimp farms.

In 2011, the southern provinces produced over 600,000 tonnes of shrimp, guaranteeing Thailand’s place as the world’s largest shrimp exporter.

“We learnt our lesson once. Families lost a lot. And we will not take another risk,” says Wong, a respected village elder. “People would like to see Samut Songkhram remain a small place with a sustainable economy.”

But the province’s location 63 km south of Bangkok has brought new challenges. Investors want to covert some of the barren tracts into industrial zones like the Map Ta Phut industrial estate in the nearby province of Rayong.

“A lot of land was bought up after the shrimp farms closed and now these new landowners want to convert them into industrial zones,” says Amonsak Chatratin, deputy chairman of a village council. “We are against it because of the pollution.

“We have learnt lessons from the industrial parks in the neighbouring provinces,” he told IPS. “We do not want another Map Ta Phut here.”

Map Ta Phut, home to 117 industrial plants that include 45 petrochemical factories, eight coal-fired power plants and 12 chemical factories, dominated the national news in 2009 and 2010 following a successful court case by a local environmentalist to shut the estate.

Community-based small-scale tourism, a new money-spinner for the province, will be affected if big industries move in, warns Surajit Chirawet, former head of the province’s chamber of commerce. “This has become an important lifeline for us. Many families drive down here from Bangkok for the weekends.”

The riverine lifestyle offers a welcome contrast to Thailand’s sprawling modern capital. Among the reminders of quieter, less bustling times are scenes of Buddhist monks paddling in boats at dawn on their daily rounds to collect food.

Consequently, local concerns have seen the emergence of a grassroots movement rallying around twin causes – respecting the local sentiment for small, environment-friendly economic policies and keeping away large-scale, polluting industries.

“Local people are against the big projects and are applying pressure on the provincial authorities to have public hearings,” revealed Manop Yanpisitkul, environmentalist at the provincial office of resources and environment. “They only support eco-friendly projects”.

This eco-friendly initiative is supported by the United Nations Development Programe (UNDP) and the U.N. Environment Programme. “We are helping the local communities to make their case to the provincial and national government,” says Sutharin Koonphol, programme analyst at the UNDP’s environment division.

Assistance under the Poverty-Environment Initiative (PEI) of the U.N. agencies helps lobby the grassroots cause with Thailand’s powerful interior ministry, which controls Thailand’s development planning.

“We are trying to convince the ministry to strengthen the public participation process and see the merits of a bottom-up development approach,” Sutharin told IPS. “The green growth vision of Samut Songkhram is particularly important for Thailand.”

Suchin, the shrimp fisher, will settle for no other. “They may like industrialisation in other provinces, but we prefer to make a living from fishing in the canals, our fruit orchards and home-stay tourism.”

Excerpt:

Credit:Marwaan Macan-Markar/IPS

By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Feb 24 2012 (IPS)

Malaysia’s charismatic opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim is tapping the spirit of the Arab Spring to end the 55-year unbroken rule of the United Malay National Organsiation (UMNO) and its allies in the Southeast Asian nation.

“Malaysia cannot be isolated from what is happening throughout the world, particularly the Muslim world,” said the 64-year-old head of the Parti Kedilan Rakyat (PKR), or People’s Justice Party. “For us in Malaysia these are very reassuring signs: this trend towards democracy, freedom and more accountability in the Arab world.”

His ongoing campaign for more freedom will be tested in Malaysia’s provincial and national legislatures, where the PKR made history in the 2008 polls, winning five state governments out of 13, and 82 seats out of 222 in the national parliament.

But Anwar admitted during an interview in the Thai capital that he faces a formidable challenge, given how UMNO where he was once a rising star has persecuted him since he was fired as the country’s deputy prime minister in 1998 on charges of corruption and sodomy.

He was freed after six years in jail after a court overturned the charges. But fresh allegations were made in 2008 that he had sodomised a former male aide, another case that was overturned by a court in January this year.

Excerpts from the interview follow:

Q: Has your January court victory boosted your political fortunes?

A: It does not make a difference among my supporters because they know the case was based on trumped up charges. But it does make a difference for those who are non-committal or ruling party supporters. They received a daily barrage of news from the media during the case that Anwar is guilty and the judiciary is independent.

Q: Would you prefer a general election early this year? Or when the current parliament’s term runs out in March 2013?

A: It is very likely the elections will be held this year. The massive campaign now by the government suggests that they may go for an election in late March or any time in June. So, we have to be prepared because elections in Malaysia are a mockery of the democratic system. The media is controlled and the campaign period is only seven to eight days – the shortest in the world.

Q: You have emerged as a symbol of a new Malaysia after decades of corrupt and authoritarian rule by the governing coalition. Do voters have a reason for optimism?

A: Although I am not that young (laughs) …, our policies are clear for Malaysia to mature as a democracy. What the Arab Spring people are talking about and the Occupy Wall Street movement is talking about in terms of justice and being opposed to unbridled capitalism that caters only to the very rich and the very few are what we have been articulating.

Q: Does that mean a break from the state-driven capitalism of UMNO?

A: Our economic agenda seeks to offer an alternative to this policy, which I consider obsolete. It only benefitted the rich families, members of the ruling clique and their cronies through contracts and shares. They became billionaires by using the Malay privileges. And they continue to defend this system tooth and nail because of their personal interest.

Q: UMNO’s other defining feature has been its race-based politics. But you head a coalition drawing on many ethnic groups. Is Malaysia ready for your politics seeking to transcend these deep divisions, particularly the Malay majority?

A: It is challenging. I don’t deny the fact that it will be difficult. I have been accused by the governing party of trying to sell the country to the Chinese, or under us the country will be Christianised, and if I attend Hindu functions it has also become an issue. So, they are using these racist lines to attack me.

To be discriminated because of race is something unthinkable and unacceptable in this day and age. I believe the majority of Malaysians can be convinced to accept this view.

Q: What about sodomy?

A: I have said that the law on sodomy is a crime. That does not mean I am pro-gay marriage. As a Muslim I and even the majority of non-Muslims in Malaysia believe in the sanctity of marriage.

Q: You are not the only opposition figure in Southeast Asia who has been harassed by their respective governments. Burma has Aung San Suu Kyi, Cambodia has Sam Rainsy and Singapore has Chee Soon Juan. Why do they fear a vibrant opposition?

A: We have been late in the process of understanding that our countries must mature as a democracy, to respect democratic institutions, respect the right to dissent and the right to freedom. The Arab Spring has been particularly useful for us in the Muslim world in this regard. It has had an impact about the meaning of democracy.

Q: So is it time to write a requiem for ‘Asian Values,’ which was asserted by strongmen like Singapore’s former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew and your former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad to justify authoritarian rule for decades?

A: The notion of ‘Asian Values’ is obsolete. It was never relevant in the first place. It was not even Asian values as we talk about Islamic values. It was a perverted excuse to benefit those in power.

Q: But you were part of the system and benefited from it before you fell out with former premier Mahathir?

A: I cannot absolve myself. But in my speeches I did talk about the condescending view leaders had towards their citizens. Such views have no place in politics today.

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Excerpt:

BANGKOK, Feb 20, 2012 (IPS) – When World Bank president Robert Zoellick steps down in June, the tiger will lose an ally who worked to prevent the decimation of Asia’s iconic animal by a voracious demand for its bones and parts in newly affluent China.

Keshav Sharma Credit:World Bank

Under Zoellick’s watch, the Washington-based financial powerhouse launched the Global Tiger Initiative (GTI) – focusing on an animal that roams 13 countries – as a symbol of its commitment to protect the planet’s biodiversity and thwart the illegal wildlife trade.

“There was a need for urgent, concentrated action to protect the tigers,” says Keshav Varma, head of the GTI. “There was a decline both in the number of tigers and in their habitats.” Launched in June 2008 the GTI provided a powerful platform to “bring the tiger range countries into the forefront of conservation.”

These countries, with Russia at one end and Indonesia at the other, are home to 3,200 wild tigers. They are a fraction of the 100,000 striped, majestic beasts that existed in the early 20th century in the tiger range that includes India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan as also China, Burma, Cambodia,Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Malaysia.

The Bank’s efforts have given these countries prominence in the efforts to save the tiger, Varma said, in an interview on the sidelines of a meeting here of the International Consortium on Combating Wildlife Crime.

Excerpts from the interview follow:

Q: The Bank has said that it sees the tiger as the face of biodiversity. Is this still the case four years after the GTI was launched?

A: Yes, because they are an iconic indicator of the pressure biodiversity is facing. Through the eyes of the tiger you come to know what is happening in remote areas. We have seen tiger habitats reduced to the borders of countries, or where development and urbanisation have completely destroyed or fragmented their habitat. So, if it were not for the tigers you would not know what is happening to the forests.

Q: What do you bring to the table that is new to helping the tiger range countries?

A: Six countries have been assured resources – 100 million dollars in concessional lending – by the Bank and GEF (Global Environmental Facility) with 65 million dollars in grants. We have also launched a multi-donor trust fund for another 30 million dollars. And we have created partnerships with the Smithsonian to train park rangers in modern management.

Q: Are you saying that park management was ignored till the Bank stepped in?

A: It was something where attention was not being paid before. The parks have to be managed according to modern, scientific systems. There has to be a management of information. This is a weak link in this whole area. And what has also prevailed is that people in these countries are better trained in forestry than wildlife management.

Park ecology is not being monitored properly. We have taken initial steps by training 300 people in tiger range countries.

Q: That may boost the Bank’s commitment as a conservationist, but your critics in civil society see this foray into a new territory as ‘greenwashing,’ since the Bank’s funds to build roads, dams and large infrastructure projects have caused untold environmental damage?

A: No, no, it is not greenwashing. We are conscious of the environment and environment sustainability is an important issue for the Bank. This is not new. It has been bank territory before. We have lent 20 billion dollars for biodiversity projects and some of these were directed towards conservation of wildlife.

Since launching the GTI, it has affected the way we do business within the Bank. There is much awareness on how we plan infrastructure projects. For instance, there is a rural road programme in India, and they are coming to the GTI and are coordinating their work to ensure that the roads do not adversely impact habitat.

There is a filter in terms of environmental impact analysis, where you are taking a much closer look at how our programmes do not impact the environment. We also conduct evaluations based on that; definitely, there is a greater amount of consciousness in the Bank. So the GTI has become a bit of a catalyst in terms of reassuring better awareness.

Q: Since Asia is the testing ground for the GTI, China does come into the picture, given the large number of tiger farms it has. Conservationists estimate that nearly 5,000 tigers have been bred in captivity to feed the trade in tiger products. Is the Bank calling for such farms to be closed?

A: Our position is that tiger farms help the market commercialisation of tiger parts. The Bank is prepared to offer assistance to countries to phase them out. In the interim, they need to be better regulated and better managed. There are definitely a lot of tiger farms and tiger parts are commercially produced in the region. China is not the only place.

Q: Is your concern about tiger farms shared by the tiger range countries?

A: Some countries are concerned that tiger farms are getting out of control and may ask GTI for assistance. They are aware about the surge in demand for tiger parts due to the emergence of a richer class in Asia and the illegal trade being more aggressive and better organised.

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