By Jim Lobe and Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Nov 5 2010 (IPS)

Just days after his party suffered defeat in the U.S. congressional elections, President Barack Obama is finally taking a twice-postponed trip to Asia.

The meetings are expected to focus on security cooperation, clean energy and global economic challenges, but, in the wake of the electorate’s rebuke, Obama has made U.S. economic interests the main priority.

In a 10-day trip, the president will visit Indonesia – where he spent part of his childhood – as well as Japan, India and South Korea, with stops at both the G20 meetings in Seoul and the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Yokohama.

Mike Hammer, a spokesman for the National Security Council, says that Obama, whose foreign policy priorities have been mainly hijacked by the fighting of two wars, has wanted to focus more on Asia since the start of his administration almost two years ago.

“The United States is a Pacific nation. The president, as he has said himself, is a Pacific president. He considers himself that,” says Hammer. “And in that sense, clearly we have very important interests to advance in promoting economic growth and stability throughout the region.”

The trip comes as China is taking what the U.S. and its allies see as increasingly assertive positions on both territorial and economic matters. Highlighting Washington’s concerns over these matters, Hillary Clinton became the first U.S. secretary of state to attend the East Asia Summit earlier this week, where she hoped to help mediate territorial disputes between China and its neighbours.

Clinton also traveled to other countries in the region, laying the groundwork for Obama’s highly anticipated visits beginning this weekend.

But, following Tuesday’s elections, in which Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives and made major gains in the Senate due primarily to economic discontent, the goal of promoting U.S. economic interests in Asia seems to have become at least as important to Obama as enhancing Washington’s geo-strategic position in the region.

One way the U.S. is looking to increase economic cooperation with India is through a joint initiative on clean energy sources like solar and biofuels, which the countries are expected to announce during the meetings. This clean energy centre would be funded in part by private sector partners, and look to capitalise on economic opportunities in the emerging sector.

Mostly, though, the president hopes to increase U.S. exports to India and its neighbours.

The most recent data on U.S. unemployment, released Friday, show significant improvement from recent months, but Obama said he would not be satisfied until everyone looking for a job can find one. India and other emerging markets might have a major role to play in that mission.

“One of the keys to creating jobs is to open markets to American goods made by American workers,” Obama said Friday. “And that’s why I’ve set a goal of doubling America’s exports over the next five years. And that’s why on the trip that I’m about to take, I’m going to be talking about opening up additional markets in places like India, so that American businesses can sell more products abroad in order to create more jobs here at home.”

Obama has said that for every additional $1 billion the U.S. exports, thousands of jobs are created in the U.S. Already, U.S. exports to India have quadrupled over the past seven years to $17 billion.

That figure is set to go up even more in the near future as a series of arms and manufacturing sales are expected to be announced during the U.S.-India meetings.

Obama hopes to sign new arms deals worth up to $12 billion, including contracts cargo aircraft, helicopters, jet engines and maritime reconnaissance aircraft, as well as a possible five billion-dollar deal for ten C-17 cargo planes.

He also hopes to give the U.S. manufacturers Boeing and Lockheed Martin a leg up on the fierce competition for a contract to build the new fleet of India’s tactical fighter aircraft. That deal is expected to be decided in the next year and to be worth ten billion dollars – and thousands of jobs.

But U.S. arms deals with India may require Washington to ease some export-control measures and possibly accede to Indian laws that require foreign sellers to invest in local defence industries as an “offset” to arms purchasers.

The administration has been pressing Delhi to drop these offset requirements and other restrictions on foreign investment in the country’s defence industries.

It has also taken issue with a new law that holds suppliers of nuclear reactors liable for accidents occurring in India. India signed an international convention on compensation for nuclear damage just last week, so this topic is expected to come up at Obama’s meetings in New Delhi.

The administration is also mulling long-standing appeals by Delhi to publicly support its claim to a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council. Of the five current permanent Council members, only the U.S. and China have not yet come out in support of India’s claim.

India’s appeals for the U.S. to change its position were strongly endorsed in the past month by separate reports released by two independent think tanks with particularly close ties to the administration: the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the guest of honour at Obama’s first White House state dinner one year ago, is also expected to press the president to put more pressure on Pakistan to curb anti-Indian terrorist groups, particularly the Lashkar-e-Taiba, which two years ago carried out a commando attack on high-profile targets in Mumba in which nearly 200 people were killed.

He is also expected to seek reassurance that Washington will not carry out a rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan beginning next year that would permit the Taliban and its Pakistani backers to seriously threaten the government of President Hamid Karzai, for which New Delhi has provided hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and security assistance.

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

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By Matthew O. Berger and Peter Boaz
WASHINGTON, Oct 20 2010 (IPS)

Amidst fears of a recurring food crisis, the World Bank has reactivated its Global Food Crisis Response Programme (GFRP), dedicating up to 760 million dollars to countries at risk of food price volatility.

In announcing the programme’s extension, World Bank President Robert Zoellick cited “growing concern among countries about continuing volatility and uncertainty in food markets”.

The programme, equipped with a wide array of options for food crisis response, is expected to enable the World Bank to respond more quickly if countries are facing dangerous prices spikes.

“World food price volatility remains significant and, in some countries, the volatility is adding to already higher local food prices due to other factors such as adverse weather,” Zoellick said.

The Bank’s decision follows a number of disquieting indicators that food prices could reach the dangerous levels of 2007 to 2008, when riots broke out in several hunger- stricken countries and the number of people suffering from hunger reached record highs.

“We do expect high volatility in food prices to continue until at least 2015, so reactivating the Bank’s food crisis fund means we’re ready to help countries calling for assistance,” said World Bank Managing Director Ngozi Okonjo- Iweala.

The GFRP was originally launched in May 2008 and, to date, has conducted 1.2 billion dollars worth of assistance operations, reaching 35 countries, especially in the most affected regions in Africa and Asia, according to the Bank. It says that external donors have also funded an additional 200 million dollars of operations.

The ways in which countries may choose to deploy funds include support for local food production such as supplying seeds and fertiliser or improving irrigation, social safety net programmes, or budget support to offset tariff reductions.

The agricultural aspects of the programme have reached 5.9 million households while the social protection programmes have reached over 5.6 million people, said Mark Cackler, manager of the Bank’s Agriculture and Rural Development Department.

“In the last two years the GFRP has been effective at catalyzing and targeting funding for food security and agriculture at a critical time,” Cackler told IPS in an email, citing concern over food price volatility as the reason for extending the programme.

Not new money

The programme is not an extra fund that would provide funding on top of that to which countries are already entitled. Rather, the 760 million dollars will come from money already destined for countries through the Bank’s low- income country lending programme, the International Development Association (IDA), or its middle-income programme, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD).

It will, however, allow money needed for the immediate needs of the people most vulnerable to the effects of rapid food price rises to be made available much sooner than IDA or IBRD funds normally would be.

This authority to “fast-track” funds under the GFRP had expired on Jun. 30, but the vote by the Bank’s executive board to extend the programme, announced Monday, extends this authority to Jun. 30, 2011.

Ultimately, though, minimising the impacts of food price volatility on vulnerable populations will require increased investment in women and smallholder farmers, says Neil Watkins, director of policy and campaigns at ActionAid.

“To the extent that countries are responding to a crisis that is largely external,” he says, “we don’t think loans are the appropriate tool.”

He says grants, especially for the poorest countries, would be better. It should be noted that while money coming through IBRD would be loans, that through IDA is usually termed “credits”, with no interest and long repayment periods.

Watkins sees the food price volatility acknowledged in the Bank’s GFRP announcement as a product of an international market that is increasingly affected by demand for biofuels such as corn-derived ethanol and subject to the whims of commodity traders.

“As more and more investors get involved in commodity markets, [food markets] are being pulled away from real purchasers and sellers and more into the financial world,” he says.

World Bank emerging as significant agricultural lender

But he thinks institutions are beginning to understand how they can help make communities less vulnerable to the whims of international markets: invest in smallholder farmers that produce food locally for their communities.

For its part, the World Bank seems to be playing a key role in these efforts. As the trustee of the Global Agriculture and Food Security Programme (GAFSP), launched in April, it facilitates a programme focused on long-term solutions to what are turning out to be recurring food crises. The money for GASFP comes from donor countries and the Gates Foundation and is in addition to any Bank loans or grants.

Watkins, who is on the steering committee of GAFSP as a civil society representative, says the programme “is one fund where you can tell the money that is being delivered is new money. One of the challenges of pledges in the past has been you can’t tell what pledges are new money and what is just being redirected from previous commitments.”

And ahead of the Millennium Development Goals summit at the United Nations in September the Bank announced it was increasing its agricultural lending to 8.3 billion dollars a year, 45 percent of which would be through IDA.

Chris Delgado, a strategy and policy adviser in the Bank’s Agriculture and Rural Development Department who coordinates GFRP and is programme manager for GAFSP, told IPS following that announcement that he expected agriculture and rural lending to continue to increase in future years. In 1980, he said, it was 30 percent of total Bank lending, then dipped to seven percent around the start of this decade before rebounding to about 12 percent now.

Watkins says the Bank is “showing some promise” as a place where country-led proposals for smallholder farming can find a home.

Excerpt:

By Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Oct 7 2010 (IPS)

Among the topics expected to be discussed at the annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) that started this week and will continue through the weekend is the reform of the IMF’s governance.

The latest chapter in this ongoing governance debate came Thursday when the Group of 24 (G24) developing and emerging economies met here and came out in favour of the reform – specifically of realigning the quotas of votes allotted to countries on the institution’s board.

“The realignment must reflect the rapidly evolving weights in the world economy,” said the communiqué from the G24 meeting, noting that the legitimacy, relevance and effectiveness of the IMF rests on how it addresses “the imbalance in voice and representation.”

The composition of the IMF’s board and the number of votes allotted to the countries represented there were set following World War II and still largely reflect the relative economic weight of countries at that time.

With the emergence of China, India, Brazil and other countries, however, there have been increasing demands for rebalancing countries’ say in the IMF’s day-to-day operations.

Those demands finally bubbled over in August when the U.S. made good on threats to use its veto power over the size of the IMF board to demand a larger voting share for emerging economies – thus cementing the issue’s importance amongst the laundry list of topics to be discussed here this weekend.

The IMF has come out in favour of giving these developing countries more influence, and Europe therefore is under increasing pressure to relinquish some of its seats and votes. European countries currently hold about a third of the seats on the board, despite accounting for an increasingly small portion of the global economy.

A book put out by the World Bank last week concluded that developing countries have “come to the rescue” of the global economy – picking up the slack of the advanced economies in the wake of the financial crisis.

And in a major speech last week, World Bank president Robert Zoellick said, “The developing world is becoming the driver of the global economy. Led by emerging markets, developing countries now account for half of global growth and are leading the recovery in world trade.”

Yet Belgium and the Netherlands still combine for a larger vote total than China, while India and Brazil each hold fewer votes than either of those small European countries. Brazil, in fact, holds about the same number of votes as Spain – and less than half those allotted to Italy or Canada. Likewise, Europe currently holds nine seats on the board, while Africa holds two.

“Africa is hugely under-represented at the IMF. A third chair for Africa would be a step towards making the institution fit for purpose in the 21st century,” said Oxfam’s Elizabeth Stuart. “The IMF reform battle is a confrontation between the old and new, and it’s time for the old guard to move aside.”

The IMF board originally consisted of 20 seats. Maintaining a board with 24 seats requires an 85 percent majority vote every two years. The U.S., however, holds a large enough percentage of the vote – about 17 percent – that it can veto this re-approval, which is what it did in August, meaning the board will shrink by four seats by the end of October if the U.S. does not change its mind.

This move has started a scramble to rearrange the board, and, says ActionAid’s Soren Ambrose, “forces the European countries that control 9 out of 24 seats to either give some up or watch as Brazil, India, Argentina, and 23 African countries lose all their representation on the board.”

“It is absurd that it has come to this. Europe must get its act together and agree on a way to consolidate,” Ambrose adds.

The European Union offered a plan late last week. It proposed adding two additional groupings of countries, which would be made up of emerging economies.

It drew less than enthusiastic responses from U.S. and developing country analysts. The most likely outcome remains that the European countries will lose seats. It is also possible the 85 percent majority will be reduced, thus depriving the U.S. of its veto power.

Another possible reform would be ending the long-standing – though unofficial – agreement whereby the World Bank president is from the U.S. and the IMF managing director is from Europe, thus making the selection of these senior positions a more transparent and potentially egalitarian process.

Whether that will come to pass remains to be seen, but IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn addressed the topic briefly at a press conference Thursday.

“I think that is one important part of the governance reform, and I think it has been accepted,” he said. “The idea has been accepted, the so-called agreement between the U.S. and Europe for the leadership of the two sister institutions has to disappear. I think that on that principle, everybody agrees. The question is how will it be implemented. That is another point.”

NGOs like the London-based Bretton Woods Project question whether the reforms that are on the table will go far enough. They point to proposals offered by the IMF in July and a G20 working group in August that would shift less than three percent of voting shares to under-represented developing countries, short of the five percent shift the IMF promised at the conclusion of its annual meetings a year ago.

There is also “a real danger that the promised shift in IMF board quotas will end up just shuffling power from of one set of emerging countries to another,” says Oxfam’s Stuart.

A senior U.S. Treasury official told Dow Jones Newswires Tuesday that he does not expect a governance compromise to be reached this weekend, and instead indicated an agreement may be worked out ahead of the G20 meet in Seoul.

Excerpt:

By Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Oct 1 2010 (IPS)

The march toward domesticating the last wild food source may be about to take a major step forward in Washington – for better or worse.

Following a series of hearings last week the U.S. government’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is considering whether to approve for human consumption a genetically engineered species of Atlantic salmon.

The debate here has focused on whether raising this salmon in aquaculture operations would pose a hazard to human or environmental health. However that debate turns out, though – and the FDA has already decided the fish is safe to eat – the genetic modification of a fish to make it easier and more efficient to raise for human consumption is a significant milestone in the ongoing, and contentious, effort to expand aquaculture to feed a growing population.

Fish farming – which produced only one million tonnes of fish in 1950 – has since emerged as an 80 billion dollar-industry producing over five times that amount of fish with operations around the world, and that acceleration is primed to start moving even faster.

Meanwhile, over a billion people depend on fish for the protein in their diets, and with the human population booming that number is set to rise. A large part of that population is also becoming more affluent, and thus eating more and more of the predatory fish – like salmon – that advanced-economy consumers tend to prefer.

In that sense, the development of a faster-growing, more farm-friendly salmon seems almost inevitable.

It took generations and generations to breed land animals like cattle and sheep into the domesticated food sources we know today. But, through genetic engineering, in just the time it took for research and testing, a company called AquaBounty has developed a salmon – called the AquAdvantage salmon – that reaches its full size in half the time a normal salmon takes, with the help of a gene from the Pacific salmon and a gene promoter from the ocean pout.

Food safety groups see something decidedly fishy about this interference with natural processes, but it looks more than likely that the GE fish will eventually be in U.S. grocery stores. This raises several interesting issues in the context of the growth of aquaculture.

Much more dangerous than the spectre of a GE salmon escaping into the wild – AquaBounty has said its salmon will all be sterile females and grown in inland tanks – are the other difficulties associated with farming salmon sustainably.

Some fish, like tilapia, are well suited to being domesticated and raised in a farm setting. Others, like salmon, are much less so. While producing farmed salmon takes some pressure off depleted wild populations, salmon, which are carnivorous, require large amounts of feed to grow, and feed fish are taken from the wild at increasingly unsustainable rates.

Yet salmon remains one of the most popular fish among consumers – a popularity that is beyond what wild populations can sustain. Rather than searching for other, more aquaculture-appropriate species to fill that demand, then, it seems AquaBounty has decided to make salmon a bit more aquaculture-friendly.

Typically, three pounds of feed fish is required to produce one pound of farmed salmon. Since AquAdvantage salmon grow faster and thus have shorter life spans, they would presumably require less food – AquaBounty says that its fish will require 10 percent less food per pound of salmon produced.

But feed conversation ratios, the amount of feed needed to produce a pound of farmed fish, is not the only obstacle to raising salmon sustainably – even leaving ecological and ethical concerns over genetic modification aside.

The ocean pens in which most farmed salmon are raised are notorious for allowing large quantities of antibiotics and additives leak out and damage the surrounding environment, as well as leading to farmed salmon escaping and potentially spreading disease to and contaminating the gene pool of wild salmon.

But AquaBounty maintains that their faster-growing fish will “enhance the economic viability” of operations that raise salmon inland, thus mitigating these potential pollution and escape problems.

The say their efforts, which also include work on transgenic trout and tilapia, are helping to build a more efficient and sustainable aquaculture industry.

In any case, it is becoming clear that GE animals may have an increasingly large part to play in feeding a crowded planet. Randall Lutter, a visiting scholar at the think tank Resources for the Future and former FDA official, points to the “enviro-pig” said to be under consideration at the FDA which would have very low levels of phosphorous in its waste and thus help mitigate the pollution associated with run-off from pig facilities. A GE cow resistant to mad cow disease is also said to be under review.

Though no country has yet approved a GE animal to be sold for human consumption, Lutter thinks approval of the AquAdvantage salmon might open a path. “Genetic engineering of farm animals, if regulated in a manner that adequately protects animal health and food safety and preserves incentives for research and development, offers the promise of low-cost solutions to a number of social and economic problems,” he says.

Some consumer groups fear that the reviews of the possible health and environmental effects of the GE salmon were not thorough enough. They point out that the data related to the salmon shows that up to five percent of the GE eggs produced might be fertile.

Possibly of more pressing concern to feeding a growing population with a dwindling supply of fish, though, is the argument that we simply should not be relying on farming salmon. “We all know there is a great appetite for salmon, but the solution is not to ‘farm’ genetically-engineered versions to put more on our dinner tables; the solution is to work to bring our wild salmon populations back,” says Jonathan Rosenfield, a conservation biologist and president of the SalmonAID Foundation, a coalition of commercial, tribal and conservation interests. “The approval of these transgenic fish will only exacerbate the problems facing our wild fisheries.”

Excerpt:

By Matthew O. Berger and Peter Boaz
WASHINGTON, Sep 28 2010 (IPS)

Although the world will miss the 2010 deadline for universal access to HIV treatment, some countries, notably in sub- Saharan Africa, have made real strides forward, three United Nations agencies reported Tuesday.

The goal was set in 2006, but, as the joint report lays out, only some countries will achieve universal access, defined as coverage of at least 80 percent of the population in need, by the end of this year.

As with many health goals, progress is marked by unevenness both between regions and between aspects of the treatment needed.

While prevention efforts to reach the most at-risk populations globally – sex workers, drug users and men who have sex with men – are still limited, for instance, the report points to steady progress in providing access to services meant to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV.

Over half of all pregnant women with HIV in low- and middle- income countries received antiretroviral treatment to prevent transmission to their children, said the report, by UNICEF, UNAIDS and the World Health Organisation.

Within that number, there are sharp disparities between countries. “There are countries, especially in southern Africa, that have made really encouraging progress, and in fact four of them have reached the universal access targets,” Jimmy Kolker, chief of HIV and AIDS at UNICEF, told IPS Tuesday.

But, he said, the same is not true in places like Nigeria, home to almost a third of the women globally who should be but are not getting antiretrovirals to prevent trasmission to newborns.

Half of that global unmet need, in fact, is in just four countries – Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, India and Uganda.

The report is based on 2009 numbers, so the final word on progress toward the universal access goal will come next year. New goals for how best to proceed in response to HIV/AIDS globally also will be set next year.

Within that discussion, Kolker said that there is now a sense that the 2015 goal should be elimination of mother-to- child transimission – a slight change in emphasis from the access-to-care goals of 2006 to 2010. “It would be measuring not input, which is giving drugs to the mother, but output, which is an AIDS-free kid,” he explained.

One obstacle toward both new and existing goals is the stagnation and even decline in donor funding over the past several years, largely attributed to the financial crisis. This is highlighted in the report, which said that the sustainability of many HIV programmes is being paradoxically put at risk due to lack of financial commitments at the same time that there is more evidence than ever before that such programmes are having a positive and growing impact.

How much is needed to keep these programmes afloat? Ten billion dollars, Bernhard Schwartlander, director of evidence, strategy and results at UNAIDS, told IPS.

Next week, donor countries are expected to reaffirm their commitments to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria at a meeting at the U.N. in New York.

But, going forward, the fight will take more than donor largesse, said Kolker.

“Because of the financial situation globally and the fact that the money is unlikely to get larger, national governments [in developing countries] themselves need to pick up the slack,” he said. “The good news is that more of the AIDS expenditure proportionally is coming from national governments. Decisions in countries like Kenya, Botswana, South Africa, Namibia to pay for the antiretrovirals themselves is a huge step forward, and that needs to be encouraged.”

“We are not going to be able to reverse the epidemic unless national partners and especially national governments see this as a good investment of their own resources,” he added.

That investment will also likely need to be used differently and put to better use. “The problem is we defintely need more money, but we also recognise we need to be more efficient in the way we are doing business,” said Schwartlander.

Part of that is integrating HIV work better with work in other, related health areas. Kolker mentioned how the Global Fund and the U.S. fund known as PEPFAR began as emergency responses, but as the worst of the HIV crisis is brought under control they will need to address related issues like those relating to maternal health.

“Services will need to be integrated and not provided at different locations as unlinked services. The direction we are going in clearly is in integration of services,” he said.

And progress against the worst of the crisis is being made.

Though there are still 33.4 million people living with HIV worldwide and 2.7 million diagnosed in 2008 alone, the number of people receiving antiretroviral therapy in low- and middle-income countries increased by 1.2 million in 2009, representing the largest single-year increase ever and bringing the number to 5.25 million, according to the Tuesday’s report, entitled “Towards Universal Access”.

Still, two-thirds of the population in need remains without access to antiretroviral therapy, an estimated 60 percent of developing-world patients do not know their HIV status, and many prevention efforts continue to lag.

The report warns that national strategies must include special efforts to reach the poorest of the poor and those who are socially excluded and that efforts to reach Millennium Development Goal six – to halt and reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS and other diseases by 2015 – has spurred changes in many national health systems.

As Kolker explained, HIV treatment was originally introduced at central hospitals with specialised care, but “the universal access principal meant that had to be brought to the lowest level of care. In the case of mother-to-child transmission that meant going into the maternity clinics, the antenatal clinics, the village health units and that has largely been done…The effort to make this universally available has succeeded largely in almost every country.”

But, he warns, “access to facilities is not the same as actual prevention of a new infection.”

Excerpt:

By Peter Boaz and Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Sep 22 2010 (IPS)

Meeting the growing demand for energy in the U.S., even through sustainable means, could entail greater threats to the environment, new research shows.

The study was carried out by Circle of Blue, a network of journalists and scientists dedicated to water sustainability, and could have implications not just for the relationship between energy demand and water scarcity in the U.S. but elsewhere in the world, as well. “It is not just that energy production could not occur without using vast amounts of water. It’s also that it’s occurring in the era of climate change, population growth and steadily increasing demand for energy,” explained Circle of Blue’s Keith Schneider, who presented the findings in Washington Wednesday.

“The result is that the competition for water at every stage of the mining, processing, production, shipping and use of energy is growing more fierce, more complex and much more difficult to resolve,” he said. About half the 410 billion gallons of water the U.S. withdraws daily goes to cooling thermoelectric power plants, and most of that to cooling coal-burning plants, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Meanwhile, climate change is leading to decreased snowmelt, rains and freshwater supplies, says Circle of Blue.

One of the things missing from the discussion, then, is the recognition that saving energy also saves water, the group contends.

The U.S. government has not been blind to the conflict between energy and water needs. The first part of a report commissioned by the U.S. Congress in 2005 laid out the consequences of not paying enough attention to water supply issues in increasing energy production. The second part, which would have laid out a research agenda and begun developing solutions, has yet to be made public, says Schneider.

He says the U.S. Department of Energy has declined repeated requests to explain why the report has not been published.

Energy demand in the U.S. is expected to increase by 40 percent as the U.S. population rises above 440 million by 2050. The water supply will not be able to support that growth, Schneider says.

Renewable sources of energy will certainly be a large part of trying to meet that energy demand, but these, too, come with a hidden water cost.

In 2009, the U.S. dedicated 23 million acres of public lands in six states for new solar electricity-generating plants as part of its economic stimulus package, which apportioned nearly 100 billion dollars for clean energy projects. Though the plan appeared promising, environmentalists soon began to point it could have damaging, unintended consequences. Schneider notes that criticism of the impact the water-cooled solar plants could have on water priorities in the U.S. Southwest even came from within the government.

“In arid settings, the increased water demand from concentrating solar energy systems employing water-cooled technology could strain limited water resources already under development pressure from urbanization, irrigation expansion, commercial interests and mining,” wrote Jon Jarvis, then head of the National Park Service’s Pacific West Region, in a February 2009 internal memo. “Solar generating plants that use conventional cooling technology use two to three times as much water as coal- fired power plants,” Schneider noted.

In other countries, the threat of water scarcity is even more pertinent.

Egypt, for example, has a population of approximately 82 million, but an annual water quota of about 86 billion cubic metres – and the population is expected to rise by more than 10 million people in the next decade.

Yet 30 European blue chip companies are set to invest 560 billion dollars over the next 40 years to build solar power plants in North Africa as part of the Desertec Industrial Initiative. Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia have agreed to work with the initiative. Comparing this project with the U.S.’s, Schneider notes that in an environment that faces even greater water scarcity than the southwestern U.S., such projects could prove disastrous. Circle of Blue calls the intersection of a rising demand for energy and diminishing supply water a “choke point”, but energy development – whether of the fossil fuel or renewable variety – is just one aspect of the water scarcity crisis that is unfolding in various regions of the globe.

Yemen is widely seen as the place where this scarcity will hit first and hardest.

“Analysts are worried Yemen could be the first country in the world to effectively run out of water,” said Christine Parthemore, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, where she studies the intersection of natural resources and security issues. She spoke at a separate event Wednesday.

Yemen, which has no rivers and cannot afford desalination, is drawing water at around 400 times its replacement rate, she says, and this looming crisis is compounding other issues in the region, like the fact that Yemen has become a key recruiting spot for groups like al Qaeda.

“We are about to see water wars in the future,” said U.S. General Anthony Zinni. “We have seen fuel wars; we’re about to see water wars.”

Excerpt:

Ten years after setting the goal of halving the proportion of people suffering from poverty and hunger by 2015, only mixed success can be found for the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and the degree of success is dependent not only on what country is examined but which evaluation is used.

Everyone seems to agree, however, that the food and financial crises of recent years drastically affected the progress on hunger.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation and World Food Programme announced Tuesday that the number of people suffering from chronic hunger this year has decreased by 98 million to 925 million.

But that same day Oxfam America pointed out in a report that this decrease means that the proportion of the world’s hungry has gone down by only half a percentage point since 2000 – from 14 to 13.5 percent.

The culprit, it seems, is the “double whammy” of the food and financial crises of 2007 and 2008.

“We had two successive economic shocks that produced very bad numbers, but both are easing,” said Alan Jury, director of U.S. relations at the WFP, Thursday in Washington. “What we have on hunger numbers is similar to what we have on food prices, which is they soared in 2008, they have come back down, but the new plateau is significantly worse than it was.”

With global food prices peaking in the summer of 2008, over one billion people were undernourished in 2009 – an all-time high – making the first MDG one of the most off track. A summit to discuss progress and action with just five years to go before the MDGs’ 2015 deadline will be held early next week at United Nations headquarters in New York.

“Most hunger is really a function of access rather than availability,” notes Jury, and with prices too high, access became much more difficult.

Before the food and financial crises, “Everybody was singing growth,” said Vera Songwe, an adviser to the managing director at the World Bank. “Then, people for whom we thought that life was going to be good going forward fell back into poverty. So the question became how do we get back to the growth we had before and pick up the people who had dropped into poverty?”

“I think New York next week would be totally different if we hadn’t had the crises,” said Songwe.

The FAO’s estimate of 925 million undernourished in 2010, then, marks a 9.6 percent reduction in that number from 2009, but an increase from the pre-crisis number of 830 million people.

Even within those who have been brought out of hunger in the last year, negative news can be found. Eighty million of those no longer hungry were in Asia, while only 12 million were in sub-Saharan Africa. A third of people in sub-Saharan African remain undernourished.

And new potential crises loom. After dropping since 2008, food prices have risen recently. Wheat prices jumped five percent in August, according to the FAO.

But the FAO notes that historically the number of undernourished has continued to increase even in periods of high growth and relatively low prices, meaning that economic growth, while essential, is not sufficient to eliminate hunger.

Oxfam points to “structural causes” that might both make hunger harder to overcome and a new food price crisis more likely: biofuel subsidies, commodity speculation, growing demand for meat and energy in countries with rapidly growing middle classes, and stagnating agricultural production in sub-Saharan Africa.

“The dip in the number of hungry people has more to do with luck and a weak economy than action. In places like Pakistan, Mozambique and Niger, millions of people around the world are on the brink of hunger every day and disasters great and small can push them into desperate situations. A new global food crisis could explode at any time unless governments tackle the underlying causes of hunger, which include decades of under investment in agriculture, climate change, and unfair trade rules that make it difficult for families to earn a living through farming,” Gaiwan Kripke, policy director at Oxfam America, said in releasing their report.

The lack of progress on combating hunger could have repercussions on other MDGs, as well.

Songwe pointed out that some HIV antiretroviral medications require a minimum caloric intake to work. The government of Zambia had been having trouble containing the spread of HIV even after expanding the production and distribution of antiretrovirals, but with limited success. After realising the problem was that children were not eating enough and addressing that problem, “their success has more than doubled in the past two years as opposed to the two years prior,” she said.

The experiences of some countries, though, are giving development experts hope.

“There are countries is every region of the world – including sub-Saharan Africa that are on track to meet the MDG one hunger goals – Ghana, Mali, Vietnam, Brazil, Nicaragua have all met or about to meet it,” said Jury.

He also pointed to Ethiopia as a country that has made a lot of progress but which still, because it started with such a high percentage of hungry people, has a ways to go. “They still have a very high percentage because they started with such a difficult situation but seem to be on track to meet the goal,” Jury said.

For these reasons, he said, “As we go into the summit, the message is not going to be ‘it’s hopeless’, it’s going to be ‘there’s areas we can work on’.”

The first of those areas may be increasing aid from richer countries. Oxfam estimates 75 billion dollars more a year is needed for hunger and malnutrition, with 37.5 billion of that coming from the industrialised world and the rest from developing countries’ own budgets.

Oxfam also recommends a two-track approach whereby short- term food assistance is provided to those suffering from hunger now, and help to increase agricultural production, particularly by smallholders, is provided so that countries can feed themselves in the longer-term.

Jury agrees with this two-track approach, and sees it as an expansion of the famous proverb, “If you give a man a fish you feed him for a day; if you teach a man to fish you feed him for a lifetime.”

“If you don’t give him some fish before he learns to fish, he will die before he catches anything,” Jury said.

By Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Sep 3 2010 (IPS)

A surprisingly small number of scientists have studied the impacts of the oil spill resulting from the 1979 blowout at the Ixtoc I oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Wes Tunnell, who first studied the spill’s effects in July and August of 1980 and has returned many times since, is one of the few exceptions.

Days after speaking to IPS in June, he flew back to Veracruz to see what remnants, if any, are still present from the disaster – the largest accidental oil spill in history before the spill resulting from the Apr. 20 blowout at the Deepwater Horizon rig eclipsed that record this summer.

“We’re going to do a really good search to see if there’s any [oil remnants] left or if they’re all gone, just to fill in the story,” Tunnel, a biologist at the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi, said in June.

Later that week, he was snorkelling in Enmedio reef, north of Veracruz, where he has watched the tar mats that settled there in 1979 slowly degrade over the decades.

“So I pretty well knew where the [tar] was,” he told IPS in a phone interview. “Instead of being a foot thick like it was back in 1979, though, it was about two inches thick.”

But when he picked up a piece in shallow water and broke it open, he could still see the shininess inside and the smell of petroleum. “It kind of surprised me. It’s kind of inert on the outer edge but you can still see or smell the petroleum on the inside,” Tunnell said.

On his next trip, in July, Tunnell went to mangrove forests along the western Yucatan – the first time he or anyone has studied the spill’s effects there since there were no roads leading to the area when the Ixtoc spill occurred, he says.

There, he found a landscape not unlike that near where the brunt of the Deepwater Horizon spill’s impact is likely to be felt. “All that open marsh just faces the open Gulf of Mexico, so it’s kind of the tropical counterpart of the eastern side of the Mississippi Delta,” Tunnell says.

After some searching, his team again found tar, about three-quarters of an inch thick, that when cut open unlocked the shininess and smell of petroleum.

What effects might these crusted-over oil remnants be having? Tunnell thinks there is no impact once several inches of shell and sand build up on the tar found in the reefs. And in the mangroves, he even observed roots “going down through where the tar was.”

But the picture may be a bit more complicated for the mangrove habitat. He describes open areas in the vegetation – an anomaly in the normally dense thicket of branches and roots.

He and his team went into one of those open areas and found something that looked like peat, “but you wouldn’t typically find that in a mangrove swamp, so I think it was probably degraded oil,” he says. Upon further searching, they found another three-quarters-of-an-inch-thick band of tar.

Without further sampling, though, it is impossible to say whether that tar is left over from Ixtoc or another, smaller, more recent spill.

Some of the other evidence of impacts Tunnel’s team encountered are as compelling as they are anecdotal.

The researchers did not see any mangrove oysters in the areas they visited, for instance, and several fishermen said the oysters had died following Ixtoc and never came back. One old fisherman, however, said he knew where some were.

“While he ate them, they tasted fine, but afterwards, a burp would have a taste or smell of oil,” Tunnell said, though he notes that thirty-year old oil would not be that aromatic and that the taste must come from a more recent spill.

Their last stop was the shore south of Campeche. There, they found small patches of tar along the rocky shore, about three feet above the water line. In the town of Champoton, a 78-year-old spear fisher told them how he used to catch plenty of grouper and snapper in the days before Ixtoc. Even though only a small amount of oil reached that area in 1979, his mask and body would get covered in a film of oil. The spear fisher found that dead fish were washing ashore and stopped fishing.

But Tunnell cautions that there is wide variation in the stories fisher-folk tell along the coast from Veracruz to Campeche. “Some of them said it didn’t affect them in any way, some said it took 2 years for the fish to come back, some said it took four to five years. One guy said it took 20 years,” he said. “You don’t know who to believe and it’s just really unfortunate we didn’t have any scientific data or sampling from the area to really prove the effects.”

As for the Ixtoc’s relationship to Deepwater Horizon, he surmises that so much dispersant was used on the oil that the marshes on the U.S. gulf coast would receive a “medium oiling” as opposed to Ixtoc’s “heavy oiling” – in which mats of oil over a foot thick washed up. But the dispersants, of course, add a further layer of unknowns to the ecological legacy of the Deepwater Horizon spill.

For Ixtoc, though, the final chapters are finally nearing completion. Tunnell is sufficiently convinced that the tar he found on the reefs and rocky shore are from the Ixtoc spill and that those have degraded steadily over time, most quickly in areas with lots of waves and wind. All that remains is to determine whether the tar from mangroves is from Ixtoc or a more recent spill. The samples are currently being analysed at labs in Mexico.

Excerpt:

By Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Sep 2 2010 (IPS)

A loan deal between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and flood-stricken Pakistan announced Thursday has drawn the ire of several NGOs that claim the deal represents an “inadequate” and “cynical” response to the disaster that is estimated to have affected the lives of millions.

The news of the loan follows more than a week of talks between Pakistani and IMF officials here, in which Pakistan hoped some of the terms of the 10.66 billion dollar loan granted in 2008 would be loosened in light of the floods which have left a dent in the Pakistani economy that is likely to last long after the floodwaters have receded.

Those loan terms set deficit and inflation targets Pakistan has said it will be unable to meet in a post-flood economy. The IMF, for its part, as recently as June has called for Pakistan to take stronger steps to meet those reforms.

Efforts to maintain fiscal discipline, for instance, “proved initially successful, but since June 2009, the authorities have repeatedly exceeded the quarterly budget deficit targets under the program,” an IMF statement said in June of this year. It also noted that inflation has been on the rise, reaching 13 percent in March.

But given the magnitude of the damage and suffering caused by the flood since late July, those macroeconomic and fiscal concerns should be irrelevant for the time being, some groups are saying.

“Pakistan can not be expected to service debt as it struggles to cope,” said Elizabeth Stuart, a senior policy advisor at Oxfam, a group of NGOs from three continents working worldwide to fight poverty.

“Pakistan’s resources must now be directed at recovery from this disaster, and a debt burden can not be allowed to impede recovery,” Stuart said, noting a third of Pakistan’s budget revenues are currently spent on loan repayments.

The IMF announcement Thursday includes 450 million dollars for “immediate emergency financing,” according to the Fund’s chief, Dominique Strauss- Kahn. The emergency financing should be made available later this month, thus bypassing the usual, much longer timeline for loan money to get to beneficiary countries.

But the loosening of loan terms Pakistani officials had wanted was turned down. Strauss-Kahn said the officials agreed to aim to implement the reform measures required in the loan conditions in order for the fifth review of the reform programme’s progress to take place later this year.

The completion of that review would mean an additional 1.7 billion dollars in loans for Pakistan from the IMF, in addition to the emergency assistance.

“We will stay in close contact as these efforts proceed,” Strauss-Kahn said.

Separately, the World Bank announced it was stepping up its emergency support for Pakistan to 1 billion dollars. That money would be in the form of a soft loan with no interest payments.

Pakistan’s other largest creditor, the Asian Development Bank (ADB), has already promised a 2 billion dollar emergency loan.

But Oxfam and others are calling on the country’s creditors to cancel its debt in light of the extraordinary circumstances.

The Jubilee Debt Campaign, a coalition of groups seeking cancellation of “unpayable and illegitimate developing country debts,” says, prior to the floods, Pakistan spent three times as much on debt repayment as it did on healthcare.

“To continue to force Pakistan to repay these loans, giving even more loans in the meantime and forcing the country to implement economic conditions that will make poverty even worse, is reprehensible and reckless,” said Jubilee director Nick Dearden in a statement.

The remainder of Haiti’s debt to the IMF was cancelled in July to facilitate reconstruction following the massive earthquakes that rocked the country in January. The United States, Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) and other lenders have done the same. Why would Pakistan not get the same treatment?

“Technically, the IMF cannot cancel Pakistan’s debt,” explains Stuart, since, unlike Haiti, Pakistan is not defined as a low-income country by the institution. Haiti is, so there was a clear path to relieving that debt burden.

But these technicalities “are exactly why the rules need to change,” says Stuart, in order to allow the IMF to respond adequately to exceptional circumstances like the floods. A better response, she says, would be grants – an option available for countries like Haiti but not Pakistan.

Ultimately, changing these rules will be up to the Fund’s shareholders. In that sense, she says, “It’s really about political will, as so many things are.”

As many others have, Stuart points to the fact that many more people have lost their livelihoods due to the flooding than did on account of the Haitian earthquake.

Over 17.2 million people are estimated to have lost their homes or livelihoods, with 1,600 losing their lives.

The Pakistani government estimates that the country’s inflation rate may jump to 20 percent following the destruction of crops and infrastructure by the floods. It says there has been about 1 billion dollars in damage to crops on hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland.

Excerpt:

By Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Sep 1 2010 (IPS)

As a new administration takes over in Bogotá, some groups are hoping for change in the human rights record of Colombia – and that the U.S. will use its clout in the country to ensure that change occurs.

At some point in September, the U.S. State Department will likely certify that Colombia is meeting the human rights conditions required for receiving some of the military aid provided by the U.S. But in the year since the last certification numerous human rights violations have occurred in the country, Colombian and U.S. NGOs said in a statement issued Monday.

The groups hope that the fact that those human rights violations occurred while former president Álvaro Uribe was in power means that Colombia has a chance to break that trend under new president Juan Miguel Santos – and that the U.S., which gives hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Colombia each year, has a chance to pressure them to do so.

The certification requirement only affects U.S. military assistance – and only a percentage of it. Moreover, the State Department has never not certified that Colombia meets the human rights conditions required for receipt of the aid in the ten years that certification has been required.

The certification requirement has “still been a useful tool because the State Department, in anticipating these decisions, sometimes delays certifying and discusses with the Colombian government the serious issues of human rights,” says Lisa Haugaard, executive director of the Latin America Working Group, one of the 18 groups behind the statement.

“It’s been the one tool we have available to put some pressure not just on the Colombian government but on the State Department,” she told IPS.

Rather than simply asking for delays, the groups would like the State Department to not certify Colombia’s human rights record. Haugaard explains that it has been a particularly bad year for human rights in the country. “We’ve seen considerable backsliding, particularly in terms of investigating and prosecuting effectively abuses by the army, even the most egregious ones,” she says.

Over the past year, several infractions have remained unaddressed, including the supposed failure to prosecute rights violations like the “false positive” extrajudicial executions in which Colombian military personnel have allegedly executed civilians then dressed them up as guerrillas in order to inflate their combat body count.

Though the cases involve 3,000 victims of extrajudicial executions dating back to 2002, results are slow, according to the groups.

In response to the false positive scandal, 27 military personnel were dismissed in 2008, but none have been charged with crimes, they say.

They also write that 31 union leaders, 7 community leaders and one indigenous leader have been killed so far in 2010, and that there has been an “exponential increase in threats against defenders via email since April 2010.”

They also point to the expanded operations of paramilitaries and criminal groups as well as evidence of military-paramilitary cooperation.

Six of the groups – WOLA, CIP, Human Rights First, Latin America Working Group, Lutheran World Relief and the U.S. Office on Colombia – wrote a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Aug. 20 in which they ask the U.S. to press for reform in these areas and in protecting human rights defenders.

Their hope is that the new Colombian administration will offer a new opportunity for reform.

Uribe’s government had come under fire for presiding over a multitude of human rights abuses, including, most famously, a scandal in which recordings of the wire-tapped conversations of people supposed to be critics of the government – including human rights defenders, politicians, journalists and even Supreme Court justices – became public.

The majority of blame for the eavesdropping activities – illegal under Colombian law – was directed at the Department of Administrative Services, or DAS, an intelligence agency under the president’s authority. DAS had grown considerably in size and scope since being founded in the 1950s, but following the wiretapping scandals, and especially the discovery of a recording of a conversation between a Supreme Court justice and a U.S. embassy attaché, Uribe ordered the dismantling of DAS. That dismantling has yet to be carried out.

These actions by DAS are the “very antithesis” of the condition that Colombia respect the rights of human rights defenders – required for them to receive some of the U.S. aid, the groups behind Monday’s statement say.

For his part, Santos has showed signs that he will move to distance himself from his predecessor’s record.

In his inaugural speech Aug. 7, he vowed to do more to defend human rights, and in the weeks since his government has continued to emphasise making human rights – as well as social issues – a more central issue than they were under Uribe.

But, says Haugaard, “He’s no clean slate.” She notes that as Defense Minister under Uribe, Santos “was somebody who put in place policies that escalated the killings of civilians.

“But he was also somebody who then, after there was international pressure and outcry, put in place some policies that began to bring down the number of killings of civilians,” she adds. “So he’s somebody who listens to what the international community thinks, but also someone who was implicated in the problems in the first place.”

In the statement, the groups are asking the State Department “to withhold certification until marked results are seen in advancing human rights cases and combating Colombia’s rampant impunity.”

While she feels the evidence for non-certification is there, Haugaard is realistic about the prospects of their request’s success. “I think the State Department will be reluctant to not certify right now – not only because it always has but also because a new government is coming in – but [our request] is based on the past year of the facts on the ground, and that’s what we’re asking the State Department to look at.”

And if the certification goes ahead anyway? “We’ll see what’s next,” she says.

Excerpt:

By Matthew O. Berger
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 19 2010 (IPS)

The U.N. General Assembly met Thursday to express the world community’s solidarity with the people of Pakistan and to urge member states to step up their aid commitment to the flood stricken country.

Envoys called for “filling the gap” in the initial appeal of 460 million dollars launched last week. So far, only half of that has been pledged.

“Pakistan is facing a slow-motion tsunami,” said Secretary- General Ban Ki-moon, who visited Pakistan last weekend. “This is a disaster, a global challenge. It is one of the greatest tests of global solidarity of our times.”

Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Quereshi drew attention to the severe impact the floods have had on the mainly agrarian economy and the dangers of food shortages in the sixth most populous country in the world.

He also stressed that Pakistan is still committed to the fight against terrorism, but added that if the upheaval and economic losses caused by the flood are not dealt with effectively, the hard won gains made by the government in tackling extremism and terrorism may be undermined.

U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton announced that the U.S., already the biggest donor, will give an extra 60 million dollars in addition to the 90 million already pledged. She also said that part of the 7.5 billion dollars that the U.S. will give to Pakistan over the next five years for non-military assistance will be devoted to rebuilding the country’s infrastructure in the mid- to long-term future.

The European Union was represented in the assembly meeting by Belgian Foreign Minister Steven Vanackere. European Union Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton was unable to attend the meeting because as representative of the EU, which is not formally a member of the assembly, she has “no speaking rights”.

However, Ashton said that the EU will increase its assistance to Pakistan by 30 million euros, to reach a total of 105 million euros (135 million dollars).

The list of over 60 speakers included countries such as Georgia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Italy. However, only about half of those countries took the floor as the meeting was adjourned early.

Quereshi claimed that the new pledges were an encouraging sign of solidarity and that he would be returning to Pakistan reassured that the initial 460-million-dollar initial appeal would be reached.

Earlier in the day, several dignitaries made a high-profile appeal for aid before a morning crowd at the Asia Society. The speakers also touched on the ways in which their organisations are helping.

Rajiv Shah, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, pointed to the successes of U.S. help in response to the 2005 earthquake centred in Pakistan administrated Kashmir. There, the goal was to “build back better”, he said.

Shah hoped the response to this disaster will follow a similar model, using new technology and new strategies to rebuild the infrastructure and communities more resilient than before. “The recovery will take a long time,” said Shah, “but it also affords an opportunity to build back in a better way.”

For now, the focus is simply on helping the people on the ground who are continuing to suffer. Shah said that aid is currently meeting the needs of 700,000 to 1.2 million people, but that this is clearly not enough. About 20 million people have been affected by the floods, as well as 1.7 million acres of productive, planted farmland and the livestock there, he said.

But some are willing to look deeper than the immediate emergency. Billionaire philanthropist George Soros noted the donor fatigue “in responding to these disasters because there are too many of them…They are connected. There is climate change and it has a human cause.” Soros said governments must act to help Pakistan but “must also do something about the root causes,” including reducing fossil fuel emissions.

Foreign Minister Qureshi echoed those climate concerns. He pointed to the combination of high rainfall in the north, increased glacier melt in the Himalayas and unseasonable monsoons as leading to the devastating floods.

As for the U.S. response, U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke says it is “focused solely on helping. We’re not doing it because of Pakistan’s neighbours, we’re doing it because Pakistan matters.”

“We want to be the first with the most assistance, and we have been,” Holbrooke said, though he noted the response will require an international and continued effort.

*Matthew Berger reported from Washington.

Excerpt:

By Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Jul 20 2010 (IPS)

As farmed fish consumption catches up on wild, a search for sustainable aquaculture picks up steam.

Some experts are predicting this is the year in which humans, globally, will begin to consume more farmed seafood than wild-caught. Whether the milestone is reached this year or not, though, it is clear the trend is here to stay and that – with wild fish stocks continuing to dwindle – aquaculture, or fish farming, has a major role to play in ensuring global food security. With that in mind, work is being done to address the serious questions about aquaculture’s negative impacts.

Over the past several decades, wild-caught fish landings have widely stagnated or declined, yet global seafood demand has continued to rise – as has, due to aquaculture, global seafood supply. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has predicted that, due to population growth, by 2030 we will need an additional 37 million tonnes of farmed fish per year to maintain the current levels of per capita seafood consumption.

In response to this demand, aquaculture has already emerged as the fastest growing food sector industry. An industry that produced one million tons of fish in 1950 has since emerged as a sprawling, 80 billion dollar-industry producing over five times that amount of fish with operations around the world.

But its rapid growth has resulted in myriad environmental problems being largely overlooked.

“What happens when you see that type of accelerated growth and when the majority of that is coming from the developing world… sometimes you see a greater emphasis on expansion and technology development as opposed to conservation and sustainability and managing environmental and social impacts,” said Jose Villalon, director of the World Wildlife Fund, based in the U.S.

The negative impacts are well documented. Salmon farming, in which the fish are usually raised in pens in the ocean, requires vast amounts of wild fish as feed – about three pounds of feed fish for every pound of salmon produced. The salmon waste, as well as antibiotics and additives used to make salmon flesh pink can leak out and damage the surrounding environment. Finally, when farmed salmon escape, they can spread disease and contaminate the gene pool of wild salmon.

Other species can be farmed more sustainably, but even operations like shrimp farming sometimes have impacts – like the removal of mangrove habitat in order to set up farms. This type of impact has hurt nearby communities and the environment, especially in aquaculture hotspots in Southeast Asia and in Chile.

Still, the degree, as well as the type, of impact can vary widely depending on the species and the methods used.

“When we’re talking about eating more aquaculture fish than wild-caught fish we’re talking about all types of fish, including molluscs like mussels and oysters. Those are not as bad as raising carnivorous salmon in an open-net pen,” noted Andrea Kavanagh, manager of the Pew Environment Group’s marine aquaculture campaign.

For now, the growth of the industry still seems to be largely outpacing the development of more sustainable aquaculture methods, and regulations and technical advances to mitigate those problems have so far been unable to keep up. But there is confidence that this gap can be overcome.

Villalon, himself a 26-year veteran of the shrimp-farming industry, points to a number of technical advances that have occurred in recent decades. While about a third of wild fish caught still go toward the fish meal and fish oil needed to feed farmed fish, he says salmon aquaculture has seen almost a halving of the feed-conversion ratios – the number of pounds of food needed to produce one pound of farmed fish. There has been a similar improvement in the farming of shrimp, he says.

Kavanagh pointed to advances in raising some freshwater salmon species in closed-system inland pens in Washington State.

“I would hope that eventually there is going to be a more sustainable way to raise salmon, given its popularity. And I do think we are moving towards that – I think we have to. It’s not feasible for it to continue going the way it is,” she told IPS.

WWF has also spearheaded a joint effort by NGOs and producer groups to form consensus on what sustainable aquaculture looks like for different species. The standards resulting from these Aquaculture Dialogues will be used by a new group, the Aquaculture Stewardship Council, to certify certain fish farming operations as sustainable and thus pressure ones that are not to improve their practices.

The results of the tilapia dialogue were released in December and the salmon dialogue draft is expected to come out Jul. 28. Villalon, who oversees the dialogue project, told IPS the salmon standards will have seven principles that farms will need to fulfil, dealing with everything from compliance with laws, to conserving local biodiversity, to abiding by international labour standards.

Setting out a list of standards like these is not a particularly new undertaking, but Villalon says this effort is unique because of the broad group of stakeholders involved and the measurability of operations’ compliance.

He says there will be a clear threshold: “You’re either compliant or you’re not.”

And with many humans becoming increasingly dependent on farmed fish for their protein, environmental NGOs are not the only ones concerned about the way these fish are farmed.

The Canadian government released new rules for fish farms in the province of British Colombia last week following a court case that found fish farming off the B.C. coast impacted the ocean and thus was under federal jurisdiction.

In Washington, D.C., the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is in the process of developing an aquaculture policy that “will provide a foundation for sustainable aquaculture.” Of the 47 percent of U.S. seafood consumption that comes from aquaculture, however, 42 percent is imported.

International certifying organisations like the Accredited Standards Committee (ASC) may therefore have a key role to play. The ASC is expected to begin its work in mid-2011, though certification of tilapia farms on an interim basis will start sooner.

Excerpt:

By Matthew O. Berger and Emilio Godoy
WASHINGTON/MEXICO CITY, Jun 16 2010 (IPS)

On a spring day in the Gulf of Mexico, a pipe issuing from the sea floor ruptured, sending an explosion rippling up to the drilling platform above and spewing oil into the surrounding waters. Experts scrambled to seal off the ever-increasing mass of oil by capping the pipe, clogging it or covering it. Nothing worked.

The Ixtoc I oil well blowout lasted from June 1979 to March 1980. Credit: NOAA

Work began on the drilling of a relief well. Oil continued to gush into the ecologically fragile and economically critical waters.

That was 31 years ago.

The 1979 explosion at Pemex’s Ixtoc I offshore oil rig was the worst accidental oil spill in history, releasing an estimated 140 million gallons of crude oil before the relief well could plug the leak 290 days after it began.

The amount of oil issuing from the well under the BP-owned Deepwater Horizon rig – relatively young at only 56 days old – is expected to surpass Ixtoc’s record. Some estimates say it already has.

What effect that oil will ultimately have on the surrounding environment and communities is far from clear, but the Ixtoc spill is certainly the most logical place to look for answers. Unfortunately, strikingly few studies were done in the wake of that catastrophe.

One, titled “Impacto ecológico de la industria petrolera en la Sonda de Campeche, México, tras tres décadas de actividad” (Ecological Impact of the Oil Industry in the Bay of Campeche, Mexico, After Three Decades) found that the most persistent issues were pollution of estuaries and coastal lagoons lining the bay, and especially the effects on breeding and growth of several food fish species.

He has studied the southern Gulf of Mexico and the Bay of Campeche – where the Ixtoc I rig was located – for about 45 years, including regular visits to certain spill-impacted localities in the 30 years since 1979.

But even he admits, “It’s pretty baffling for most of us who studied that spill to know what happened to that oil and where it all went.”

He does know a few things about its impact, though.

The blowout that led to the spill occurred on Jun. 3. Currents eventually washed the crude oil ashore in the Mexican states of Campeche, Tabasco, Veracruz and Tamaulipas. By the time it reached the south Texas coast in the first week of August, Tunnell was ready.

“Over the next six weeks it pretty much coated the south Texas beaches for about 30 miles – a 20- to 30-foot wide band of oil and tar about a half-an-inch thick to one-foot thick in some places,” he told IPS in a phone interview.

With other researchers, he had taken samples before the oil got there, in July. They returned for more studies in September, after the oil had arrived and “been stirred up by some storms”.

What they discovered was that two groups of organisms that “can be found by the thousands per metre squared in the sand beneath your feet when you’re walking along in the surf zone” – marine worms and amphipods – were reduced by 80 percent in the inter-tidal zone and 50 percent in the sub- tidal zone, though he emphasises that those numbers represent the averages of lots of different samples.

“So we didn’t see a drop in the number of species but a drop in the number of individuals. We thought ‘Oh, boy, this is really severe’,” Tunnell said.

Two and half years after the spill, he got a graduate student to go do a thesis project on the same Texas beaches. It was discovered that by then the worm and amphipod numbers had rebounded.

“So you can probably say that within two to three years the beach fauna or beach populations were back to where they were before the spill. I think that’s probably a pretty standard thing. Fine-grain, sandy beaches can be cleaned up pretty easily,” Tunnell explained.

He also recalls a colleague who had studied the shrimp fishery based in Campeche, Mexico – the largest in the southern gulf – assuming that the fishery “would be devastated for years to come” by the oil from Ixtoc.

But, he says, “The second year after the spill the shrimp populations were back to where they were before the spill, which is, again, pretty amazing to us.”

Tom Shirley, also of the Harte Institute, has some insights into why these organisms were able to bounce back so quickly.

The equivalent of an oil tanker seeps into the water from oil deposits under the sea floor each year, and organisms have adapted to cope with the constant presence of oil in the water. That coping means that the animals in the gulf have a striking capacity to break down oil molecules, Shirley said.

“So the gulf, due to these seeps, is more ready to deal with oil than most anywhere else,” he said. “[It’s] an amazingly resilient habitat.”

But, he explained, the naturally-occurring seeps happen in a much more gradual way that is likely much easier for organisms to manage and cope with than the tens of thousands of barrels in the water right now.

“As long as oil spills remain out on the open sea, the effects are relatively limited,” Daniel Lluch-Cota, a biologist at the state Northwest Biological Research Centre and one of the four authors of the 2004 study, told IPS. “The real trouble begins when they reach the shore.”

The effects on coastal flora and fauna “are serious, and include from reduced phytoplankton productivity to direct damage to seabirds and other species,” he said.

Remnants of the Ixtoc spill could still be seen and touched as recently as seven years ago, and Tunnell is setting out this week to determine whether they are still there today.

In the fall of 1979, while he was studying the impact of the oil washing up in Texas, he sent a couple graduate students to the reefs in the southern gulf, near Veracruz. They found that the oil had come in on a tropical storm and was floating over the top of the reefs where it did not directly impact them. It had, however ringed a lot of the reef islands with 12 to 15 inch-thick mats of oil.

He continued to track and map these mats, returning each June with his class. “They slowly continued to break down, particularly in the next five to six years after the spill. After that time it was pretty hard to find any remnants of the spill,” he said.

Still, environmental campaigners note that no authoritative assessment has ever been made.

“We don’t know if the damage done [at Ixtoc] has been remedied. Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX, the state oil company) has limited capacity for cleaning up pollution,” Gustavo Ampugnani, Greenpeace International political coordinator for Latin America, told IPS.

*Emilio Godoy reported from Mexico.

Excerpt:

With only five years left to meet the Millennium Development Goals’ 2015 deadline for reducing child mortality, progress toward that goal may be coming faster than was previously thought.

Past studies have indicated many countries are not moving quickly enough toward the goal of a two-thirds reduction in deaths of children under five years old, but a new study sees an acceleration of this reduction in several low-income countries.

The study, published online Monday by the British medical journal The Lancet, finds that 7.7 million children under five are projected to die this year – down from the 11.9 million who died in 1990.

While other studies have also pointed to decreasing child mortality rates, this study finds the most dramatic decreases. Those new findings are a result of new methods of analysing data and using it to predict and generalise child mortality trends.

“This undoubtedly is the biggest advance in mortality measurements in four decades. Seriously,” said Alan Lopez, head of the School of Population Health at the University of Queensland and a co-author of the study.

Of the 7.7 million projected deaths in 2010, 5.4 million are anticipated to be children under a year of age, with 3.1 million of those from children who die within the first month of being born.

Those neonatal deaths are the largest category of child mortality, but the study finds that even the rates of neonatal deaths are declining. Previous estimates have shown little or no improvement.

The overall numbers of child mortality are declining faster than expected as well. Globally, child mortality rates have declined around two per cent a year over the past two decades, according to the study.

Moreover, the authors found that the decline in child mortality rates accelerated between 2000 to 2010 versus 1990 to 2000 in many parts of the world, especially in parts of Latin America, North Africa and Southwest Asia.

The drop in child mortality rates has not been as fast in the U.S. While it, too, has seen fewer child deaths, the drop-off has not been as significant as elsewhere. The Czech Republic and Malaysia were both ranked below the U.S. in child mortality rate in 1990, but have since cut their rates by about 70 percent, surpassing the U.S. The U.S.’s rate has only declined by 42 percent in the last decade.

The authors found that Singapore leads all countries with the lowest child mortality rate in the world after it cut its rate by 75 percent since 1990.

Less than one percent of child deaths occur in high-income countries like the U.S. and Singapore, the study notes, with a third occurring in south Asia generally and nearly half in sub-Saharan Africa.

Another study released Monday by The Lancet found that maternal health has improved such that there were about 251 maternal deaths per 1,000 live births in 2008, compared with 422 in 1980. This marks substantial progress towards Millennium Development Goal 5, which seeks a three-quarters reduction in the maternal mortality ratio between 1990 and 2015.

An evolution of measurements

Not all health data experts were convinced the modelling used in the child mortality study was as accurate and certain as some might like it to be.

In a panel discussion on the measuring child mortality at the Kaiser Family Foundation Monday, Ed Bos, lead population specialist at the World Bank, pointed out that there was a “large difference” between the new study’s numbers and those published in a different study in the same journal three years ago.

Trevor Croft, a principal demographic expert at ICF Macro, said countries have varying levels of data. He singled out Angola as the most obvious case in which the actual numbers might vary widely.

Croft’s overall concern was that some child mortality rate numbers in the study might be a little low and “should maybe be seen as a lower boundary”, rather than the actual estimates.

Lopez, who was also a co-author on the 2007 paper, acknowledged the difficulties and the confusing conclusions one might draw from comparing the results of different studies.

But he sees the modelling used in the current paper as groundbreaking and part of a “rapid evolution of mortality measurements”.

That evolution could have broad impacts for global health. Having accurate data is key to getting countries to agree to financial commitments at meetings like the G8 Summit to be held in Canada next month, according to Kenji Shibuya of the Department of Global Health Policy at the University of Tokyo.

“We know the global health community would like a single number,” Lopez said, but it should not be scared of scientific uncertainty.

He did emphasise the need for transparency and honesty regarding uncertainty over data and projections as important components of any study. He also hoped that countries would take measures to improve the collection and records of data related to child mortality and that more sharing of data would take place between researchers.

By Eli Clifton and Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, May 10 2010 (IPS)

The majority of youth in U.S. cities are no longer white, but there is also a growing disparity in the educational background and incomes of those cities’ populations, says a new report from the Washington-based Brookings Institution.

The report details what it calls the “new realities” of who the U.S. is and who it is becoming. Among those realities, the U.S. – as had long been anticipated – crossed a major threshold at some point prior to 2008 when the under-18 population of its major metropolitan areas became majority non-white. Brookings’ analysis predicts the majority of the general U.S. population will be non-white a little over 30 years from now.

But that growth in diversity – non-white groups accounted for 83 percent of population growth from 2000 to 2008 – was concurrent with a growing gap in education and incomes among groups of city inhabitants.

While the number of U.S. adults with a post-secondary degree had increased by 2008, African-Americans and Hispanics now lag behind whites and Asian-Americans in attaining bachelor’s degrees by more than 20 percentage points.

The report also points out that by 2008, high-wage workers in cities were out-earning low-wage workers by more than five-to-one. While high-wage workers’ earnings went up, the number of residents living in poverty rose by 15 percent from 2000 to 2008.

The 168-page report was released Monday in Washington.

It looks at U.S. cities, but the findings could say a lot about the future of the whole country.

“What we’re proposing in this report is that the trends we’re seeing at the national level are further along in the metropolitan areas than elsewhere. These areas are bellwethers,” said Alan Berube, a co-author on the report and a senior fellow and research director with Brookings’ Metropolitan Policy Programme.

Berube pointed to the speed and volatility of population shifts in the U.S., a country of over 300 million people.

“Across a number of different dimensions this is a country undergoing a dramatic population transformation. Over the last decade our population has grown by 28 million – that’s half the population of the United Kingdom. Our Western European peers would be astounded with our size and growth,” he told IPS in an interview.

The report also says that large metro areas are generally aging faster than the rest of the country, but that this is a complex phenomenon that does not necessarily mean an older U.S. population.

“The difference between the U.S. and Japan and Germany is that they’re aging but they aren’t replenishing their younger ranks. We are, thanks to immigration and past immigration which is now creating new families with children in the U.S,” said Berube.

A recession-caused retrenchment

The data for the report comes mainly from U.S. Census Bureau survey data between 2000 and 2008. Its authors describe their results as previewing “what we will learn from the results of the 2010 Census”.

The brunt of the impact of the economic recession came in 2009, however, so future data will likely be able to better illustrate its impact on many of the aspects discussed in the report.

“But most of these things are locked in. Aging is structural. Increased diversity and educational attainment is largely structural. These aren’t affected by the prevailing economic winds,” notes Berube.

Still, some aspects are.

“I think there are couple trends which we identified, like the growth of outer suburbs and to some extent the income trends, that may turn in one direction or another because of the recession,” he said.

He pointed to a “retrenchment” toward cities and older suburban areas as a result of slowed migration to the suburbs as the economic situation got worse from 2006 to 2009. This was particularly clear in Phoenix, Las Vegas and Tampa.

A ticket out of the recession’s curse: education

“The highest educated places in the U.S. have rebounded more quickly and have been affected less by the recession,” said Berube. “The less educated areas coincide with these Sunbelt cities which built economies around housing. They’ve been hit by reduced migration, some of them are losing residents to other parts of the country and it’s a slow transition and recovery for them as they don’t have the same highly skilled workers as in other parts of the U.S.”

The report paints a picture of a country on the precipice of major changes, changes that will take places in cities first and that will be experienced by today’s youth.

“The pace of change and complexity of U.S. society only seems to multiply with each passing decade,” it concludes. It cautions about responding to that change in ways that will not “sow the seeds of intergenerational, interracial, and inter-ethnic conflict. Understanding – from the ground up – who Americans are, and who they are becoming, is a critical step toward building constructive bridges before they become impassable divides.”

Excerpt:

As oil seeps into the environmentally and economically critical Gulf of Mexico following an explosion on a rig there two weeks ago, some groups are saying this catastrophe should mark the end of offshore drilling for oil – and be a “clarion call” for moving away from fossil fuels.

The crew aboard the motor vessel Poppa John train to deploy fire-resistant oil-containment boom off the coast of Venice, Louisiana, May 3, 2010. Credit: U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Patrick Kelley.

And some in Washington are beginning to listen.

Instead of “doubling down” on fossil fuels, the U.S. should be pursuing a green economy, said U.S. Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, speaking outside the U.S. Capitol building Tuesday. “Now we should all know that offshore drilling is not too safe to fail and never has been.”

Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, compared the oil spill to a “decapitated fire hydrant”.

“What we don’t know is how many times do we need to have this conversation” about oil spills in places like the Gulf of Mexico, the Arctic and the Amazon, Brune told reporters Tuesday.

On Friday, Brune declared that the spill marked “rock-bottom in our fossil fuel addiction”.

“We need to use this as a teachable moment to jumpstart the clean energy economy…to use it as a clarion call,” said Margie Alt, executive director of Environment America.

Oil began spewing out of a well below the Transocean Deepwater Horizon oil rig, leased by U.K.-based BP, on Apr. 20. It is now estimated to be dumping 5,000 barrels of oil a day into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Efforts to stem the flow have so far come up short and it is unclear whether – or when – any of the current plans to stop the leak will work.

As people scramble to stem the oily tide on the Gulf Coast, the mood of many in Washington seems to be a sense of betrayal.

“For some time we’ve been told by the oil industry that it can’t and won’t happen…but unfortunately it did happen and has happened before, not only in our country but across the world,” said Menendez.

He repeatedly pointed to the Montara spill that occurred in the Timor Sea off Australia last August. That leak continued until early November.

But in an interview with National Public Radio Tuesday morning, BP CEO Tony Hayward reiterated how unlikely a spill of this magnitude was.

“Whether it was supposed to happen or not, it did happen,” countered Menendez. “They weren’t too safe too fail, not in the gulf and not in Australia…That’s two major spills in two years.”

Aside from its impact on people’s lives, the spill is also already impacting the public discourse.

Offshore drilling has been a hot topic in U.S. politics the past couple years. As gas prices rose in the summer of 2008, some touted green solutions like increasing the amount of energy derived from solar and wind. Others, like then-Republican presidential candidate John McCain, called for an expansion of fossil fuel extraction and supply, chanting the slogan “drill, baby, drill”. And surveys in recent months have found that about two-thirds of U.S. respondents support offshore drilling.

Senator Frank Lautenberg hopes they now recognise the dangers attached to such a practice.

“When we said offshore drilling was a hazard, they said ‘drill, baby, drill’. When we said it takes just one spill to devastate our coastlines, they said ‘drill, baby, drill’,” he said Tuesday.

What is happening now, he added, is an “environmental nuclear bomb”.

At least one prominent politician has already taken a lesson from the gulf spill. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger decided to terminate a plan that would help fill his state’s budget deficit by selling permits to drill for oil off the coast of the city of Santa Barbara.

He cited the images from the gulf spill as the key factor in his decision.

Santa Barbara experienced an oil spill of its own in 1969 after a blow-out on an offshore oil rig six miles off its coast. That spill, appropriately enough, was a key catalyst for the early environmental movement, the same movement that seems to have rallied and found a unified voice behind the damages now occurring in the gulf.

By Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Apr 29 2010 (IPS)

Though some conservative politicians and activists in Washington remain unconvinced of the need for action, the U.S. military is taking the effects of climate change increasingly seriously.

Addressing a crowd of about 400 people gathered to hear about the significance of climate change to U.S. national security Wednesday, Nathaniel Fick, CEO of the Washington-based think tank Centre for a New American Security, pointed out how the first event CNAS hosted on this topic drew only about 50 attendees in June 2008.

“Natural security issues are clearly taking hold, growing in importance, reaching new audiences, and becoming more mainstream. And rightfully so,” said Christine Parthemore, who directs the think tank’s Natural Security Programme, which analyses the interrelationship of natural resources and national security.

Wednesday’s event launched two new reports from CNAS examining this relationship. These join a growing body of reports by civil society and government alike on the importance of climate change to military operations – and the importance of militaries in addressing and responding to aspects of climate change.

The impacts from extreme drought, heat waves, desertification, flooding, and extreme weather events like hurricanes are all expected to continue to escalate as a result of climate and are cited in CNAS’s report as reasons why the military needs to be prepared for a climate change-impacted world.

The 105-page report, titled ‘Broadening Horizons: Climate Change and the U.S. Armed Forces’, says the effects of these environmental events will be amplified by existing socio-political factors. “Countries and regions of strategic importance – from Afghanistan to the Arctic, China to Yemen – are likely to confront major environmental pressures on both their societies and ecosystems,” it says.

Counterinsurgency expert and CNAS non-resident senior fellow David Kilcullen also pointed Wednesday to such phenomena as desertification leading to humanitarian situations like mass migrations. “These changes are happening now and they’re impacting national security issues now,” he added.

Due to increasing humanitarian crises, including the January earthquake in Haiti, the role of the military has moved far beyond combat, said Rear Admiral Philip Cullom, who heads the U.S. Navy’s task force on energy issues. The acceleration of climate change will only exacerbate those crises.

“Due to the scale of natural catastrophes, we are facing the militarisation of humanitarian relief” since militaries are the only institutions with the capacity to deal with disasters of such massive scale, Cullom said.

And even on a practical, day-to-day level, adapting to climate change will impact the armed forces. Transportation of fuel in combat zones is treacherous and requires personnel and money that could otherwise be used elsewhere.

The U.S. military has not been blind to this mountain of reasons why they should take steps to both address their preparation for the impacts of climate change and their own contributions to these impacts.

In February, the U.S. Department of Defence released its Quadrennial Defence Review and, for the first time ever, identified climate change as a having an impact on its operations around the world.

“While climate change alone does not cause conflict, it may act as an accelerant of instability or conflict, placing a burden to respond on civilian institutions and militaries around the world. In addition, extreme weather events may lead to increased demands for defence support to civil authorities for humanitarian assistance or disaster response both within the United States and overseas,” it said.

The report also laid out how the military is addressing climate-related issues, both in its own operations – in terms of reducing the military’s reliance on fossil fuels, for instance – and in helping develop energy efficient and renewable technologies.

The Pentagon sees energy security – “assured access to reliable supplies of energy and the ability to protect and deliver sufficient energy to meet operational need” – as a strategic priority, and one which greener energy can help it secure.

A report released last week by the Washington-based Pew Project on National Security, Energy and Climate commended the U.S. military for its clean energy programmes. It pointed to the Department of Defence’s goal of getting 25 percent of its electric energy from renewable sources by 2025, the U.S. Air Force’s goal of meeting 25 percent of base energy needs with renewable energy sources by 2025, and the U.S. Marine Corps’ 10X10 campaign, which aims to reduce energy intensity and water consumption and increase the use of renewable electric energy.

Along the way to those goals, the U.S. Navy is developing a “green” carrier strike group that will run on alternative fuels by 2016. Last week, they successfully tested their “Green Hornet” jet, which runs on 50 percent biofuel and 50 percent fossil fuel. The “Green Hornet” more directly addresses energy independence that environmental impacts due to the energy and resources required to produce the biofuels, but it does also mean fewer emissions from military operations.

Fort Irwin, in south-eastern California’s Mojave Desert, has been ground zero for many of the Department of Defence’s green initiatives. Most notably, it is expected to become energy independent by 2022, when the military’s largest solar installation is expected to be completed at the base.

But one key difficulty in bringing the military up to date with the realities of a changing climate remains, says another report released Wednesday by CNAS.

National security professionals “currently lack the ‘actionable’ data necessary to generate requirements, plans, strategies, training and material to prepare for future challenges” related to climate change, the report says. “Though the scope of and quality of available scientific information has improved in recent years, this information does not always reach – or is not presented in a form that is useful to – the decision makers who need it.”

That gap in information may have been partly addressed at the event Wednesday. For about 40 minutes, Carol Browner, director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, spoke and then answered questions on a variety of climate change-related issues before the largely national security-focused audience.

Excerpt:

By Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Apr 26 2010 (IPS)

Against the backdrop of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s spring meetings this weekend, numerous groups have chimed in on the need for and direction of a new World Bank energy strategy.

The bank’s review of this strategy, according to which it makes decisions on loans to energy projects in developing countries, is ongoing and is due to be finalised early next year. For now, though, it remains under fire.

Earlier this month, a controversial loan package for a coal-fired power plant to be built by utility giant Eskom in South Africa was approved by the bank’s board of executive directors – with Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Britain and the United States all notably abstaining from the vote.

The countries – and civil society organisations opposed to the coal plant – noted a range of objections, but chief among them were the emissions from the burning of coal, the apparent lack of impact on increasing energy access in southern Africa, the air and water pollution to be caused in the local area, and fears the loan repayment would weaken the rand.

On the other hand, the loan would include small – though relatively large by renewable standards – funds for renewable energy projects in the South Africa. Some analysts also contended it would increase ties between the country and the bank, potentially giving the bank leverage it could later use to move developing economies toward clean energy solutions in the future.

The issue of how and when the bank should use its power to move developing countries squarely on the clean energy path, then, is far from straightforward. But the Eskom vote made one thing clear – a reexamination of the bank’s energy lending in the new, climate change-impacted world is overdue.

The new energy strategy will try to bridge the dangerous gap between increasing energy access and not exacerbating the effects of climate change. As such, energy likely represents one of the most contentious areas of the bank’s lending policy.

It also represents an opportunity for the bank to be a leader in the emerging clean energy economy, say some civil society groups.

This weekend’s spring meetings came in the midst of the first comment period for the bank’s energy strategy review, which stretches from January to May and during which the institution engages in consultations with a variety of groups. Amid the events here this weekend were several on this energy strategy.

Friday, the World Resources Institute hosted a discussion at bank headquarters, and Saturday, the Bank Information Centre, an NGO that focused on influencing international financial institutions, presented its model for how the World Bank’s eventual energy policy should look.

Jake Schmidt of the Natural Resources Defence Council participated in the WRI event. His main message was that “the World Bank needs to be a full part of the solution and not part of the problem and part of the solution at the same time.” Investing in Eskom, he says, undermined the clean energy investments the bank has also made.

The goals of ending poverty and responding to climate change should not be trade-offs, but “solving these issues – which can be trade-offs if you don’t do them right – requires the bank to be innovative,” Schmidt told IPS. He recommends a broader examination of the options available and deeper consultations with the countries receiving energy-related funds.

“The bank needs to ask countries why they need this energy, is it really access for the poor – I think in the case of Eskom, it clearly wasn’t – and then really look at the energy resources in a holistic way it doesn’t usually do,” including energy efficiency and renewables. Only after those options have been examined should it have a conversation on how to meet the gap between the price of renewables and the price of fossil fuels, he said.

“The bank doesn’t do a good enough job looking at the full suite of energy options before making a decision,” he added.

Yong Chen, author of the Bank Information Centre’s report and a sustainable energy expert there, also sees room to reconcile poverty reduction and a transition to clean energy. “Trade-off is the bank’s word,” he told IPS. “We don’t think there is a trade-off.”

His report makes several specific recommendations to achieve its broad goals of increasing energy access from reliable and sustainable sources and transitioning toward zero- or near zero-carbon development. Among them, it would increase financing for both renewable energy systems and energy efficiency by 40 percent annually starting from fiscal year 2011, phase out fossil fuel lending to middle-income countries by 2012 and all countries by 2015, and provide “clean, reliable and sustainable energy services” to 700 million of the world’s poor by 2021.

Prior to this weekend’s meetings, another spate of reports and recommendations were released in the wake of the Eskom controversy.

An Apr. 19 report from the London-based Bretton Woods Project, the Campagna per la riforma della Banca Mondiale and the German environmental group Urgewald criticised the contradictions it found between the World Bank’s energy-related lending and its commitment to combating the impact of climate change on developing country populations.

The authors found fossil fuel lending still plays a “dominant role” in the bank energy portfolio, even with recent expansions of renewable and energy efficiency lending. It also pointed to the way in which projects like coal-fired plants are “locking developing countries into coal-based energy for decades to come” and are neglecting the bank’s core mandate of increasing energy access for those without it.

In a report released a week earlier by the Bretton Woods Project, Christian Aid, Greenpeace and other groups, the authors recommended greater balance in the bank’s energy portfolio “between centralised, decentralised, stand-alone and commodity-oriented energy delivery systems,” a verifiable target to phase out fossil fuel lending to all middle-income countries by 2015 and to all countries by 2020, and internalising low-carbon approaches to supplying energy through “structural, staffing and operational changes.”

Excerpt:

By Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Apr 26 2010 (IPS)

Developing countries will have a slightly larger say at the World Bank under an agreement reached at the institution’s spring meetings this weekend. But some groups are challenging whether the shift in voting shares is as large as it should be – or as large as the bank says it is.

This shift comes as part of a package in which developing countries will also up their contributions to the money used for the bank’s operations, or its paid-in capital. That capital will increase by 5.1 billion dollars, which marks the largest increase since 1988. Developing countries will contribute 1.6 billion dollars of that boost.

The share of voting power allotted to low- and middle-income countries on the board of the bank’s International Bank for Reconstruction and Development will rise from 44.06 to 47.19 percent.

That number, however, may not be accurate, according to some development and international financial institution watchdog groups. At issue is the definition of what constitutes a low- or middle-income country – or “developing” or “transition” economy – and thus whether certain countries should be included within that 47 percent figure.

The classification used by the bank is based on data in the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook report and includes 16 countries which should not be termed either “developing” or “transition”, says the London-based Bretton Woods Project.

These countries are all classified by the World Bank as high-income, it says, and together they hold five of the 47 percent. Sunday, the organisation characterised “the final real share of voting power for developing countries (excluding high income economies)” as just over 42 percent.

“It’s smoke and mirrors to count Saudi Arabia and Hungary as developing countries and then claim a three-percent shift in voting power will give poor countries more say,” Elizabeth Stuart of the development group Oxfam said Sunday. “The World Bank is asking for a lot more money, but it hasn’t got serious about reform.”

Jo Marie Griesgraber, executive director of New Rule for Global Finance, an NGO that seeks to reduce poverty and inequality through promoting stable global financial systems, called the changes announced over the weekend “marginal”. She agreed with the Bretton Woods Project analysis that “the way you get to this 47 percent is by a distortion of numbers or a misinterpretation”.

“We need a really candid examination of the numbers,” Griesgraber said.

The voting reforms were far from unexpected.

In 2008, developing countries were the beneficiaries of a 1.46-percent shift in voting power as well as a 25th seat added to the bank’s executive board, to be elected by certain sub-Saharan African countries. That 25th seat has still not been added on. The voting reforms approved Sunday fulfill pledges made by bank shareholders at last fall’s G20 meetings in Pittsburgh and World Bank and IMF meetings in Istanbul. With the 2008 increases, it amounts to a cumulative shift in recent years of 4.59 percent, the largest change in representation at the bank since 1988.

For his part, World Bank president Robert Zoellick said Sunday, “The change in voting-power helps us better reflect the realities of a new multi-polar global economy where developing countries are now key global players.” In a speech on Thursday, he called the spring meetings a “turning point” for the institution, saying “the World Bank has to change” and expressing hope that the “historic step” of voting reform would be taken.

Individual country winners and losers

The shift will benefit some developing countries – however defined – more than others. China, Brazil and India came out as the major winners.

China, which increased its voting share from 2.77 to 4.42 percent, leapfrogged several European countries to become the new third-largest shareholder in the bank. The United States stays well atop the pack at 15.85 percent, followed by Japan at 6.84 and then China, Germany, France and Britain, respectively.

India’s voting share increases 2.77 to 2.91, making it the seventh largest shareholder in the bank.

The changing world economy has led Zoellick to declare that 2009 witnessed the end of the “Third World”, but that shift is not yet reflected in the voting breakdown.

“The idea of giving the World Bank a lot more capital for emerging economies makes eminent sense to me. But if the U.S. wants a proportional voice it needs to contribute proportional capital,” said Griesgraber.

“It looks like we’ll have a more representative World Bank, with countries like China being given a bigger say, but poor countries are still effectively shut out,” said Stuart. “This reform is all but meaningless for the poorest countries. Sudan is the only sub-Saharan African country that gained any voting share increase. To African countries this isn’t a new World Bank for a new world, as Zoellick calls it.”

Oxfam notes that of the 47 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, more than a third have lost some of their voting share as a result of the reforms and 60 percent have stayed the same. Nigeria and South Africa, the largest regional economies, had the most significant cut in quotas.

Developing countries have long hoped for parity between their voting share and the share allotted to industrial countries. That parity is still possible somewhere down the line. The weekend’s agreements included one to review vote allocation every five years, with what a World Bank statement called “a commitment to equitable voting power between developed countries and DTCs (developing and transition countries) over time”.

But there are three ways to reach that voting parity, says Griesgraber: “One, you don’t tell the truth about the numbers. Two, the U.S. accepts a decrease in its voting share. Three, Europe accepts a decrease in its.”

She sees a lack of political will in achieving either of the last two. “I don’t think any of those are going to easy to achieve,” she said.

Excerpt:

By Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Apr 26 2010 (IPS)

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments Tuesday in its first-ever case involving genetically modified crops. The decision in this case may have a significant impact on both the future of genetically modified foods and government oversight of that and other environmental issues.

The case, Monsanto Co. v. Geertson Seed Farms, revolves around an herbicide-resistant alfalfa, the planting of which has been banned in the U.S. since a federal court prohibited the multinational Monsanto from selling the seeds in 2007.

That decision found that the U.S. Department of Agriculture did not do a thorough enough study of the impacts the GM alfalfa would have on human health and the environment and ordered the agency to do another environmental impact statement (EIS) review.

Though a draft was released in December, “there is no anticipated date” for the final EIS, Suzanne Bond, a spokeswoman with the USDA division charged with regulating GM organisms – the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) – told IPS.

The law under which organic farmers were allowed to challenge USDA’s oversight of the GM alfalfa, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), is what may suffer the most from the court’s eventual decision, which is expected in June at the earliest. The law “requires federal agencies to integrate environmental values into their decision-making processes by considering the environmental impacts of their proposed actions and reasonable alternatives to those actions”, said Bond.

It is also a key legal tool for environmental groups seeking to challenge those agencies’ decisions. The vulnerability of NEPA is a key reason so many such groups have joined the plaintiffs by filing amicus briefs against Monsanto in this case.

The Centre for Biological Diversity, one of those groups, does not normally get involved in GM issues, said the Centre’s Noah Greenwald, but this case “has broad implications for how governments do environmental analysis and when they need to prepare impact statements”.

“The broader implications are why we got in this,” he told IPS.

Doug Gurian-Sherman, who wrote several expert opinions for the earlier cases in lower courts and is a senior scientist at the food and environment programme of the Union of Concerned Scientists, which has also filed an amicus brief, pointed to the need for the type of citizen oversight of the government’s own oversight that is granted by statutes like NEPA.

“The big issue here is how much deference should be given to a regulatory agency and its expertise in doing its job versus how much access or deference should be given to the public in having the ability to challenge the agency in court,” he said.

“The issue here then becomes how amenable is the Supreme Court going to be in terms of allowing citizens to bring suit against an agency that is not doing its job, and that I think is the gist of what this decision may be,” he added.

But the legal implications are only half the story. Also implicated, at least potentially, is the future of GM crops in the U.S. and elsewhere.

In the original court case, organic farmers argued that the genes of the GM alfalfa would be carried to neighbouring – potentially miles away – non-GM alfalfa by the bees that pollinate the crop and that genetic contamination would hurt their ability to market their alfalfa under the label “organic”. This would also preclude them from exporting to countries that prohibit GM crops.

“Consumers may not accept products cross-contaminated with genetically-engineered components and you can test for those and testing is done pretty routinely and therefore the market could reject the contaminated organic crops,” explained Gurian-Sherman.

In addition to this economic impact, they have argued that the planting of the Roundup Ready alfalfa that is at issue here, used in conjunction with the Monsanto-made herbicide Roundup, may also lead to increased herbicide-resistance in weeds.

APHIS largely dismissed this as an issue in its original analysis, says Gurian-Sherman, “even though over the last couple years the incidence of resistant weeds and the economic impacts they’re having largely contradicts APHIS’s analysis.”

Though questions over the environmental and economic impacts of growing GM crops have existed for decades, the issue remains extremely complicated from an ethical and health perspective. Depending on how broad the Supreme Court’s decision ends up being, it could go a long way to deciding the fate of other GM crops.

A case on GM sugar beets is currently ongoing. The court has allowed plantings this year, but has reserved the right to prohibit them in the future. The USDA is in the midst of preparing a draft impact statement for both these sugar beets and a GM creeping bentgrass.

Gurian-Sherman has serious concerns about the agency’s actions on GM crops generally. “There’s been several indications beside this case that USDA has not been really doing an adequate job regulating genetically-engineered seed…As a scientist, having reviewed a number of environmental assessments that the agency has done, in my opinion they’ve often done a very lax, scientifically often unsupportable job in their analyses. It’s not like they’ve been completely negligent, but in my opinion they’ve made a number of errors in either scientific reasoning or in their data or data analysis.”

Since 1992, USDA’s APHIS division has granted non-regulated status to GM plants in response to 80 petitions, according to Bond, including multiple varieties of corn, soybeans, cotton, rapeseed, potato, tomato, squash, papaya, plum, rice, sugar beet, tobacco, alfalfa, flax, and chicory.

Tuesday’s Supreme Court arguments may have a significant influence on how that list changes in the future.

Excerpt:

By Eli Clifton and Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Apr 13 2010 (IPS)

On the second and last day of the largest gathering of world leaders ever in Washington, U.S. President Barack Obama connected the commitments made here on securing vulnerable nuclear materials to the broader goal of a “nuclear-free world”.

U.S. President Barack Obama addresses the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington. Credit: Eli Clifton/IPS

Obama, speaking at the conclusion of the summit, said the U.S. would be working with other countries to help them secure their nuclear materials and prevent the smuggling of such materials – a goal he said all the 47 countries in attendance at the summit shared.

The summit was the best example yet of the U.S.’s shift to a more multilateral approach to foreign policy issues under the Obama administration, say experts – and an important follow-through on ambitious goals laid out by the president a year ago.

“I think there’s huge momentum here. One of the things I’ve been impressed by is them saying they’d achieve this hard thing and then doing it,” Steve Clemons, director of the American Strategy Programme at the New America Foundation, told IPS.

While the summit was meant specifically to address the threat of nuclear materials getting into the hands of terrorists, recent weeks have seen a spike in the White House’s efforts and successes in the broader movement to rid the world of nuclear weapons. Obama and Russian counterpart Dmitri Medvedev signed a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) in Prague on Thursday, a day after the White House released the new Nuclear Posture Review, which forbids the use of nuclear weapons against signatories in good standing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), forswears the testing of nuclear weapons and development of new nuclear warheads, and commits the administration to seeking Senate ratification and the entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Up next is the review conference for the NPT, to be held at U.N. headquarters in New York in May.

The summit that concluded Tuesday may be one more important step toward further actions on the reduction and nonproliferation of nuclear stockpiles at the NPT and future meetings.

“We got the shift in the Nuclear Posture Review, which was productive, and then the START treaty, which wasn’t a sure thing a few weeks ago. Now you have the Nuclear Security Summit and I think it all leads to the NPT review conference in May. It’s an extraordinary few weeks where there’s significant public attention on nonproliferation issues,” said Clemons.

“The president is a man who is very serious both personally and as leader of the U.S. about the obligations assumed under the NPT. Under the [Obama administration] the U.S. is doing our part,” Bruce Blair, co-founder and co-coordinator of Global Zero, told IPS.

“We’re negotiating further cuts and even reaching out to other countries like China to have a dialogue on nuclear weapons and bring them into the fold. It gives momentum to the international obligation under the NPT for the nuclear weapons countries to negotiate in good faith to reduce their arsenals of nuclear weapons,” he said.

The two-day Nuclear Security Summit ended with several key commitments by some of the 47 countries represented here.

Prominent among those are efforts to strengthen international institutions like the U.N. and International Atomic Energy Agency, as well as raft of bilateral agreements between countries. The most prominent bilateral accord was the U.S.-Russia agreement to dispose of at least 34 metric tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium each – enough for nearly 17,000 nuclear weapons, according to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Monday, Obama and Chinese Premier Hu Jintao met and reportedly discussed the possibility of sanctions on Iran, which is thought to have a nuclear programme and which has trade ties with China.

In other commitments made as part of the summit, Kazakhstan agreed to convert a highly enriched uranium research reactor and eliminate its remaining highly enriched uranium and Ukraine committed to removing all such uranium by the next summit, to be held in South Korea in 2012.

It was also notable how much the U.S. engaged with the so-called non-aligned, those states that are not formally for or against any major power bloc. Highlighting this new emphasis in U.S. multilateral diplomacy was a lunch hosted by Vice President Joe Biden at his residence Monday. The list included representatives from 12 non-aligned countries, including Algeria, Chile, Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia, Morocco, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Thailand and Vietnam.

The question now, say experts, is whether the commitments resulting from the summit will be fulfilled and will have the cascading effect toward further action on nuclear weapons many are hoping for.

“We think that the summit marks concrete progress towards the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons. Now that countries have made commitments we’ll be looking for the follow-through. In the U.S. we look to the Senate to ratify the new START treaty as well as ensure there is increased funding for programs that will secure loose nuclear materials worldwide,” Cara Bautista, coordinator of the Campaign for a Nuclear Weapons Free World, told IPS.

Excerpt:

By Eli Clifton and Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Apr 12 2010 (IPS)

One of the largest gatherings of world leaders ever on U.S. soil began Monday with representatives of 47 countries gathering here for the Nuclear Security Summit.

The two-day event is organised around the goal of keeping nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists. Representatives of NGOs, along with experts from academia, held a parallel summit on the same topic several blocks away.

Most NGOs have traditionally focused on the much broader goal of nuclear nonproliferation and reduction of nuclear stockpiles – topics that have been addressed by U.S. President Barack Obama and other leaders in recent weeks but which are not directly being addressed at this week’s talks.

But many of the NGO and academic experts meeting at the parallel summit felt there was a connection to be made between securing vulnerable nuclear materials and reducing the existence of those materials.

They may have a case. The first concrete accomplishment to come out of the 47-country summit came when Ukraine agreed Monday morning to give up its bomb-grade uranium and have its civil nuclear programme operate instead on low-enriched uranium. Ukraine is reported as having enough such nuclear material for several weapons.

Obama laid out the goal of the summit – and parallel summit – in a speech in Prague one year ago: “To secure all vulnerable nuclear material around the world within four years.”

In that speech, he also laid out a strategy for meeting that goal. The U.S., he said, would “set new standards, expand our cooperation with Russia, [and] pursue new partnerships to lock down these sensitive materials.” These past two weeks have seen a flurry of progress toward those actions.

Returning to Prague a year later last Thursday, Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitri Medvedev signed a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). The treaty commits the U.S. and Russia to reduce their nuclear stockpiles by one-third – bringing the total number of warheads possessed by each country down to 1,550.

The day before, the White House released the new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), which forbids the use of nuclear weapons against signatories in good standing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), forswears the testing of nuclear weapons and development of new nuclear warheads, and commits the administration to seeking Senate ratification and the entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

“Securing ‘loose nukes’ is one part of a nuclear security agenda,” said Alexandra Toma, co-chair of the Fissile Materials Working Group, told IPS. “The second part is the strengthening the nonproliferation regime and that’s going to be happening next month. The third part is disarmament which is what we’re seeing in the new START treaty and hopefully the CTBT if that happens next year.”

“It’s a very, very heavy agenda. When you look at the Obama administration four years from now, changing the debate on nuclear nonproliferation will be one of its major accomplishments,” contended Nancy Soderberg, president of the Connect U.S. Fund.

She said the Obama administration’s approach has been welcome. “It’s a huge shift from the Bush administration which pretty much objected to these types of international efforts and felt they could go their own way,” she told IPS. “There’s a growing recognition that you need American leadership to drive the debate and that it’s hard and so it’s not going to happen overnight and it’s all linked in together.”

On the first day of the summit Monday, Obama held one-on-one meetings with many of the world leaders gathered in downtown Washington. The most significant of these meetings was likely with Chinese Premier Hu Jintao, in which the two leaders reportedly discussed the possibility of sanctions on Iran, which is thought to have a nuclear programme and which has important economic ties with China.

In May, the 2010 review conference for the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) will be held at U.N. headquarters in New York. Monday, NGO leaders were not afraid to set expectations high for both that and the current conference, particularly in light of Obama apparent commitment to nuclear issues.

“Obama has really breathed a breath of fresh air into multilateral participation and he’s raised the bar for all countries. By having a summit here in Washington DC he’s forcing many countries all over the world to really focus on this issue and make a personal commitment on behalf of their country to follow through,” Paul F. Walker, director of Global Green USA’s security & sustainability programme, told IPS.

“This will be a big feather in Obama’s cap and a big feather in other countries’ caps as they begin to renew their commitment to article six [of the NPT], in which all the nuclear countries commit to full nuclear disarmament,” he said.

“In the nuclear posture review last week we saw not a huge shift but a good solid step in changing U.S. nuclear policy towards the rest of the world. We saw the START signing and this week we’re seeing the nuclear security summit. So I think this is all part of the momentum going into the NPT review conference,” said Toma.

Excerpt:

By Davison Makanga and Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON/JOHANNESBURG, Apr 10 2010 (IPS)

As the World Bank approved a controversial three-billion-dollar loan for a coal-fired power plant in South Africa Thursday, both the details and the broader impacts of the loan continue to be criticised by community and environmental groups.

The U.S., Britain, Netherlands, Norway and Italy abstained from voting on the loan, thus showing their opposition without taking the stronger, less-diplomatic action of voting “no”. Their concerns were largely environment or climate-related, but there are also numerous criticisms of the possible effect of the plant on local communities and its lack of effect in bringing more reliable electricity to the population.

“Energy insecurity and climate change are two of the most significant development challenges of our time,” Sarwat Hussein, senior communications officer for the World Bank’s Africa region, told IPS in South Africa, pointing out that only one in four Africans have access to energy. “This project is an attempt to achieve energy security and lay the foundations for a greener future.”

But whether the plant, being built by South African utility Eskom in the country’s northern Limpopo region, will achieve either of those goals has been called into serious question.

“The project generally has been purported as a project that will help poor people, and will it? No,” says Michael Stulman of Africa Action.

In a statement announcing the loan’s approval, the World Bank stressed how the loan “aims to benefit the poor directly, through jobs created…and through additional power capacity to expand access to electricity.”

But, Stulman told IPS, “The decision really shifts the burden onto the poor communities.”

This burden would come in the form of pollution, reliance on greenhouse gases and the costs of paying back the loans, he said.

This loan, like most of the bank’s actions, is aimed at decreasing poverty through development. “We know that industrial development does not necessarily mean employment because we have seen jobs drop as we have large capital development projects in the country,” said Bobby Peek, director of the South African environmental justice and development organisation groundWork.

Critics also point out that the plant, Medupi, is already having detrimental effects for the health of those living in the area.

Peek reports illegal coal mining is already underway there and that large amounts of water are going to be – and are being – extracted from rivers. Many of those rivers will face contamination from mercury and other toxicants, as will the air from sulphur and carbon dioxide.

Residents of Limpopo Province filed a complaint Tuesday highlighting these and other concerns with the World Bank’s independent complaint body, the Inspection Panel.

A protest was also organised for Wednesday, in which about 60 people converged outside World Bank headquarters here.

But with Thursday’s vote already on the calendar, opponents faced an impossible battle. Once a loan proposal comes before the bank’s board of executive directors, its approval is virtually a foregone conclusion.

This has not stopped many of the contentious details of the proposal from gaining greater scrutiny over the past couple of days, however.

In one, South Africa’s ruling party has investments in Hitachi Africa, which has been contracted to build a boiler for the Medupi project. Since those contracts predate the bank’s loan – which forms only a fraction of the over 17 billion dollars needed to complete the project – the bank and Hitachi say it can be ensured that no bank money goes to that component, and thus potentially to the political party.

“The Hitachi component is not part of what we are financing. We were not party to awarding a contract, and we are not a party to its payment,” Hussein said.

In another, the fact that the loan is in dollars could make it more difficult to repay.

“This means we have to get foreign currency in dollars,” Peek told IPS in South Africa, explaining that if the Rand weakens to the dollar the size of the loan will increase and that the country will have to depend more on exporting and exporting at cheaper prices.

“It won’t only be a financial debt but a climate debt,” said Stulman.

Climate change is expected to hit developing countries, especially those in places like southern Africa particularly hard.

Coal emits more carbon dioxide per unit of energy produced than any other fossil fuel and the Medupi plant is expected to emit 25 to 30 million tonnes per year.

“Simply put, we are very disappointed by the decision by the U.S. and other executive directors,” said Stulman.

The U.S. Treasury Department issued a guidance memo in December directing U.S. representatives on the boards of multilateral development banks – such as the World Bank – to encourage building demand in developing countries for no- or low-carbon energy sources.

Africa Action and other organisations had hoped this would translate into a vote opposing the loan, rather than an abstention.

“The coal lending guidelines are a good start – but now the bank should adopt them and Treasury must show, at a minimum, that it is willing to act on them,” said Peter Goldmark, director of the climate and air program at the U.S.-based Environmental Defence Fund.

The coal-fired Medupi plant – which many say is one of the most contentious loan proposals in recent history – notwithstanding, the World Bank is also funding numerous efforts to address the effects of climate change and provide support for low carbon projects, largely through the Climate Investment Funds which the bank approved in 2008.

In addition to the 3.05 billion dollars for Medupi, the loan approved Thursday includes 260 million dollars for wind and solar projects and 485 million “for low-carbon energy efficiency components, including a railway to transport coal with fewer greenhouse gas emissions”.

Hussein calls these “important steps to support South Africa’s long term plans to mainstream renewable energy technologies”.

When the external costs on health, communities and the climate are factored in, though, the cost of using coal power will be much higher than that which could be provided by a plan that features a more reliable grid and renewable sources of energy, contends Stulman.

Excerpt:

By Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Mar 29 2010 (IPS)

Decision-makers around the world are in a period of transition when it comes to the future of supplying energy. Even if everyone agrees that a low carbon future is the inevitable solution, there is nothing close to consensus regarding which path to take.

Increasingly, industrial and developing countries find themselves favoring different paths – not only for their own countries but for each other.

These differences were on full display at the Copenhagen climate talks in December. Now, the battleground has moved to World Bank energy projects and investments.

On Apr. 8, the World Bank’s board is expected to approve a 3.75-billion-dollar loan for a coal-fired power plant in South Africa.

Earlier this month, it was reported that the United States was opposed to the loan due to the high greenhouse gas emissions of coal-fired plants and that its representatives on the bank’s board would abstain from voting on the proposal. U.S. officials have since denied that a decision has been made.

An abstention would allow the loan to go forward, while also allowing the U.S. to go on record in opposition to it.

There are plenty of indications of how the U.S. feels, however.

It abstained from voting on a 2.81-billion-dollar loan from the African Development Bank for the same power plant last November.

And a month later, as blocs of countries were clashing in Denmark over climate adaptation finance and technology transfer, the U.S. Treasury Department issued a guidance memo directing U.S. representatives on the boards of multilateral development banks – such as the World Bank and AfDB – to encourage building demand in developing countries for no- or low-carbon energy sources.

Opposing coal-fired power is a somewhat strange position for the U.S. to take. The U.S. has 600 coal-fired plants, which provide more than half of its energy supply. There are around 60 new coal-fired plants in various stages of planning or permitting – even after a record 26 planned plants were cancelled last year.

The U.S. has notoriously failed to agree on limits to its own domestic greenhouse gas emissions, though it did agree to modest cuts in Copenhagen which now need to be approved by the Senate.

And lumped in with clean energy proposals and such controversial ideas as building more nuclear plants, the Barack Obama administration has proposed increased investment in so-called “clean coal” technologies. These are the same technologies that the South African utility giant Eskom says it will employ on the proposed World Bank-funded plant, Medupi.

While the U.S. is favoring one path at home – a slow, industry-friendly one that will ease its economy into a low-carbon future – it seems to be hoping to persuade other countries to favor another, say some developing countries.

Representatives from Africa, China and India responded to the U.S. Treasury’s December guidance with a letter to World Bank president Robert Zoellick.

Their points were several-fold: the U.S. should not be allowed to flex its muscle unilaterally as the bank’s largest donor; the bank’s core mandate is poverty alleviation and economic growth and climate change should only be addressed when it impinges on those efforts; and coal is still crucial to increasing access to electricity and thus those poverty and development efforts.

In agreement with this last point, World Bank Vice President for Africa, Obiageli Ezekwesili, has called Medupi a “transitional investment”.

“There is no viable alternative to safeguard Africa’s energy security at this particular time,” she told Reuters earlier this month.

Certainly, not every country should be expected to take the same path toward a clean energy transition. But does investing in plants fired by coal – which releases more carbon dioxide emissions per unit of energy produced than any other fossil fuel – really best serve people in South Africa and other countries receiving bank funding?

Pravin Gordhan, South Africa’s finance minister, says it does. Citing his country’s widespread poverty and 24 percent unemployment, he argued in a Washington Post op-ed last week that “to sustain the growth rates we need to create jobs, we have no choice but to build new generating capacity – relying on what, for now, remains our most abundant and affordable energy source: coal.”

If new plants are being built, though, and especially if they are being built with money from the World Bank, those plants should be made as low-carbon and sustainable as possible, argue critics of the project.

“The World Bank should be assisting projects that help countries transition to long-term sustainable development, not coal plants that will make the future tougher for the recipient and all the rest of us,” wrote the Environmental Defence Fund’s climate and air programme director Peter Goldmark in response to Gordhan’s op-ed.

For its part, the World Bank website notes that, “Addressing this challenge [of climate change] is part of WBG’s [World Bank Group’s] core mandate of helping countries deal with poverty and move towards economic prosperity.”

It is funding numerous efforts to address the effects of climate change and provide support for low carbon projects, largely through the Climate Investment Funds which the bank approved in 2008.

CIF meetings concluded Mar. 19 in Manila with plans to mobilise 40 billion dollars for projects ranging from solar power development to public transportation.

With projects like funding the Medupi plant primed for approval, though, the extent to which the bank has addressed the climate change challenge remains patchy.

Excerpt:

By Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Mar 26 2010 (IPS)

As details emerge about the backroom politics and contentious votes that led to the failure to protect any of the several marine species up for international protection at a key conference the past two weeks, conservation advocates are looking ahead to influence regional, local and even individual choices in the next round of battles to save the threatened species.

Red and pink coral were among the marine species that failed to win the necessary votes for CITES protection. Credit: Public domain

But all of those species – Atlantic bluefin tuna, red and pink coral, and eight species of shark – failed to receive the votes necessary for those protections.

The conference was seen as a colossal failure by groups that had come to Doha energised by the opportunity to protect some of the planet’s most threatened – but also most lucrative – creatures.

“It is shameful that many CITES governments ignored science in favour of political gain when making decisions on marine species,” said Carlos Drews, head of WWF’s Species Programme. “If CITES cannot set aside political considerations and follow scientific evidence, the implications for conservation, sustainable use of marine species and coastal livelihoods are worrying.”

Much of the blame for the proposals’ failures has been put on Japan – where a single bluefin tuna can fetch 100,000 dollars – and China – where shark fin soup is a highly-prized delicacy. Reports have said that the two countries teamed up to form a formidable negotiating team.

Now, conservation groups and the delegations of countries that had favoured the listings are returning to their conference rooms to draft their next steps.

“This is a significant setback for these marine species, but we view it as only a temporary setback. We will redouble our efforts with other countries around the world to fight for the protection of marine species imperilled by international trade,” said U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Interior Tom Strickland, who headed the U.S. delegation.

“We are in process of taking stock and devising the next steps,” said Karen Sack, deputy director of international marine campaigns at Pew Environment Group.

She says her organisation will likely focus on gaining protections through the regional fisheries management organisations (RFMOs) that set catch limits and on educating consumers and industry.

The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas is the RFMO responsible for the management of tuna – as well as swordfish and some sharks – in the Atlantic. At its meeting last fall, it widely disappointed the conservation community by setting quotas for Atlantic bluefin that many, including the U.S. delegation, criticised for being higher than the science recommended.

Sack hopes governments that support protections will pressure ICCAT more strongly in the future.

“Given that both the United States and the European Union are members of ICCAT and supported strong action at CITES, we would expect them to go to this year’s ICCAT meeting and secure strict science-based decision making on all of the fisheries that ICCAT manages, backed up by stringent enforcement,” she told IPS.

“The EU – which has the largest tuna catch quota and the most purse seine fleets – must step up and push for this ban at ICCAT, in line with its backing for the trade ban here at CITES,” said Sergi Tudela, head of fisheries at WWF Mediterranean.

To some degree, no matter what happened in Doha, the fate of the tuna was going to end up in the hands of ICCAT.

“One of the things people and Japan don’t really see is that CITES can’t manage these species by itself. ICATT is going to have to do its job by cutting the allowable catch,” Bill Fox, vice president and managing director for fisheries at the World Wildlife Fund U.S., told IPS prior to the conference.

A CITES listing, however, would have helped ICATT neutralise international pressure opposing restrictions on fishing and provide additional enforcement mechanisms, Fox explained.

Japan had also made it clear it would have claimed a reservation from a successful bluefin listing, thus allowing it and whatever other countries joined it in filing a reservation to continue to trade in bluefin across national borders.

The reason why Japan feels so strongly about bluefin, though, is the demand in that country for the fish. That demand creates an incentive to overfish, and reducing that demand may be the best avenue for reducing overfishing.

That is the other major front on which the next conservation battles will likely play out – for bluefin and all the species that failed to get CITES listing this time around.

This was the second time the coral proposals were rejected, Julia Roberson of SeaWeb, an ocean conservation NGO. She says that for now they will focus increasing consumers’ awareness of what they are buying and where it is coming from.

“People need to think twice before buying these coral products,” she said, referring to the jewellery and decorative items made from the threatened species of coral.

Roberson said they will also try to help encourage sustainable management practices on the local level and that the proposals may be re-proposed, but that it depends on whether the EU and U.S. want to put it forward again.

“For now there is no mechanism in place to say whether coral was harvested sustainably or not,” she told IPS.

“Some countries may not want to have commercially traded fish species listed on CITES because they are huge importers of fish, but if they want their citizens to be able to keep enjoying seafood and fish meals in the future, they are going to quickly need to change the way they act or our plates and our oceans will all be empty,” warned Sack.

Excerpt:

By Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Mar 26 2010 (IPS)

When U.S. President Barack Obama accepted his Nobel Peace Prize last fall he said, “I’m working with [Russian] President [Dmitri] Medvedev to reduce America and Russia’s nuclear stockpiles.” Three and a half months later, that work has come to fruition.

In a telephone call Friday morning, Medvedev and Obama finalised a successor treaty to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) that expired in December, following reports earlier this week that a deal was imminent.

The accord will continue the gradual reduction of the former Cold War powers’ nuclear stockpiles that has been mandated by a series of treaties since the early 1990s.

It is being hailed as one of Obama’s most significant foreign policy accomplishments thus far and, coming just days after his most significant domestic achievement – health care reform – caps a victorious week for the president.

But like health care, the road to a new 10-year arms reduction accord was longer than expected.

This road began nearly a year ago when Obama laid out his vision of a nuclear weapon-free world in a speech in Prague. It will come full circle on Apr. 8 when a signing ceremony for the new START will likewise be held in the Czech capital, a year and three days after Obama’s speech there.

With the treaty negotiations now in the rear-view mirror, attention will turn to ratifying the treaty and to the implications it may have for a future Russia-U.S. partnership on nuclear nonproliferation.

Both the U.S. Senate and Russian Duma will need to ratify the accord, and in order to reach the two-thirds majority needed for ratification Obama will need the support of some Republicans.

Some in that party had criticised the treaty negotiations, citing their opposition to any concessions to Russia limiting the U.S.’s ability to implement missile defence programmes.

Multiple U.S. government officials said Friday the accord would set no constraints on missile defence. Russia had wanted missile defence included in a new treaty while the U.S. had wanted only offensive systems included, and the disagreement was a large reason the two sides were not able to agree on a new accord before the old START expired Dec. 5.

In its final version, the accord will recognise the dispute over missile defence, but not restrict the U.S.’s ability to build and expand such systems. Russia has reserved the right to pull out from the treaty if it feels threatened by U.S. missile defence systems, such as the planned missile defence shield in Europe.

Secretary of Defence Robert Gates explained, “The reductions in this treaty will not affect the strength of our nuclear triad. Nor does this treaty limit plans to protect the United States and our allies by improving and deploying missile defence systems.”

He said the “prospects are quite good” for Senate ratification.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton likewise expected bipartisan support for the treaty, though she would not set any timetables.

“It’s in America’s interest in the particulars of this treaty and it’s in America’s interest because it puts us in a very strong leadership position to make the case about an Iran, about a North Korea, about other countries doing more to safeguard nuclear materials,” she said.

Officials said the treaty would mean Russia would join the U.S. as a partner in this leadership position.

Obama cited other efforts on which the former rivals have cooperated over the past couple years and, in terms of nuclear nonproliferation, said, “We are working together to pressure Iran to meet its international obligations.”

The breakthrough in the new START negotiations is assumed to have occurred when the two presidents last spoke by phone on Mar. 13.

The accord will call for a reduction in nuclear warheads on deployed missiles and rockets from the 2,200 now allowed to 1,500 for each country. This reduction will take place within seven years of the date the treaty enters into force. It will also lower the limit of the deployed and non-deployed missiles, rockets and bombers that transport the warheads to 800 total.

The original START, signed Jul. 31, 1991, resulted in a 40-percent reduction in the countries’ arms.

The new limits on nuclear warheads represent a 74 percent reduction from that treaty’s limits and 30 percent from the Moscow Treaty of 2002.

The Obama administration is expected to seek further reductions in arms stockpiles later on.

Speaking of the very long-term, Clinton said, “We have a vision, a long-term vision, of moving toward a world without nuclear weapons…So you have to look at this as part of our whole approach toward non-proliferation.”

The signing ceremony for the new START accord will come just days before a nuclear summit to be held in Washington beginning Apr. 12. A review conference of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) is set for the following month.

The Obama administration is expected to use these events to increase pressure on countries that are accused of violating the NPT’s ban on the spread of nuclear weapons. The START negotiations, therefore, are widely seen as directly related to Washington’s efforts to pressure Iran and North Korea to end their nuclear programmes.

For the foreseeable future, though, the vast majority of such arms – 95 percent of the nuclear warheads in the world – are still in the arsenals of the two former Cold War superpowers.

(*Adds news of official announcement, U.S. officials’ remarks, and details on treaty provisions, ratification process and implications for Russia-U.S. partnerships. Story first moved at 06.00 GMT on Mar. 26, 2010).

Excerpt:

By Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Mar 22 2010 (IPS)

On a rainy morning here Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton emphasised the centrality to U.S. foreign policy of addressing the world’s water challenges.

“For the United States water represents one of the great diplomatic and development opportunities of our time. It’s not every day you find an issue where effective diplomacy and development will allow you to save millions of lives, feed the hungry, empower women, advance our national security interests, protect the environment, and demonstrate to billions of people that the United States cares,” she said.

The provision of clean water is, according to Clinton, one of the “root causes” of the more immediate and flashier stories that make the headlines and as such presents an interesting policy challenge – and opportunity.

“Water is actually a test case for preventive diplomacy” where problems are not left to “fester” but are addressed proactively, she said. “It could establish a precedent for early action.”

Her speech was one of a deluge of events in Washington scheduled around World Water Day, which has been celebrated on Mar. 22 of each year since the United Nations created it in 1992 to focus attention on water crises and their solutions.

Eighteen years later, those crises are only becoming more immediate. Glaciers and snow packs in the Himalayas and East Africa are disappearing, as are the rivers and streams into which they feed. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has projected that 75 to 250 million people in Africa will suffer increased water stress due to the climatic changes by 2020.

But climate change is only part of the equation. A booming global population, poor sanitation, and unsustainable agricultural and household water use all contribute to strain the water cycle that sustains life on Earth, putting both the quantity and quality of the planet’s most important resource in danger.

The World Health Organisation says that water scarcity affects one in three people on every continent and that one-fifth of people live in areas where water is physically scarce. Another quarter of the world’s population face water shortages due to a lack of infrastructure to transport water from river and aquifers.

These are not just humanitarian but security matters, Clinton said Wednesday. “And that’s why President [Barack] Obama and I recognise that water issues are integral to the success of many of our major foreign policy initiatives.”

She noted that addressing water shortages and quality is central to ensuring the “stability of young governments in Afghanistan, Iraq and other nations depends in part on their ability to provide their people with access to water and sanitation.”

Among the other specific initiatives that must take water issues into account, Clinton cited the Global Health Initiative, which commits 63 billion dollars over six years to improve children’s health and fight preventable diseases in poorer countries, among other health goals.

The effects of poor water access or sanitation are well-known. A report from the U.N. Environment Programme released Monday said 1.8 million children under five years old die due to a lack of clean water. The report also said diarrhoea, mostly caused by dirty water, kills about 2.2 million people a year and that over half the world’s hospital beds are occupied by those suffering “illnesses linked with contaminated water.”

Clinton also pointed to the administration’s efforts to promote food security, saying that “70 percent of the world’s water use is devoted to agriculture,” and said that addressing water would assist in the U.S.’s efforts to empower women globally. The economic effects of water scarcity most directly impact women and young girls since they are the family members most likely to spend their time collecting and transporting water.

Taken together, the potential impacts of a lack of clean water place the issue at the heart of many other present and potential crises.

Rather than looking at national boundaries, water should be viewed as a regional resource contained by the natural boundaries of aquifers or river basins, Clinton said, adding that better management of some of these river basins could increase people’s welfare enough to pull some of them out of poverty.

And she focused on the key role of partnerships between governments, NGOs, international financial institutions and the private sector.

“As pressing as water issues are now they will become even more important in the near future,” she said. “By 2025 – just fifteen years from now – nearly two-thirds of the world’s countries will be water-stressed…and 2.4 billion people will face absolute water scarcity – the point at which a lack of water threatens social and economic development.”

Clinton spoke as part of an event on safe drinking water and sanitation at the National Geographic Society. Elsewhere in Washington today, roundtable discussions were held at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies to develop new strategies to address water-related issues.

On Tuesday, advocates will gather in Washington to push the U.S. Congress to adopt sustainable water, sanitation, hygiene and child health programmes as part of the second day of World Water Day events here.

On Apr. 23, UNICEF will host the first-ever annual high-level meeting on sanitation and water in Washington, which finance and development ministers from a range of countries are expected to attend.

Excerpt:

By Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Mar 19 2010 (IPS)

This time last year, United States federal legislation on climate change was starting to take shape, seemingly more pressing matters were taking up the bulk of U.S. policymakers’ time, and a major climate conference was looming at the end of the year.

Twelve months later, the scene is eerily similar. The U.S. House of Representatives swiftly passed its bill last June, but the Senate now has four different paths it could take to address climate change – and has yet to move decisively toward any of them.

Likewise, while the economic recession has receded from the top of the Capital Hill agenda, reforming the country’s health care system now dominates debate here. And the follow-up to last year’s Copenhagen conference – in Cancún – awaits in November.

But hope is far from lost, the European Union’s Climate Action Commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, told reporters in Washington Thursday.

As the outgoing Danish Minister of Climate and Energy, Hedegaard was charged with hosting December’s Copenhagen, which has been largely criticised by groups and countries hoping for strong climate action that would halt rising global temperatures. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said global average temperatures should not be allowed to rise more than two degrees.

“Staying below two degrees is a tremendous challenge and when I think about that challenge, I think how are we going to make? But then I remember back to where we were just three or four years back…look at all the progress that’s been made,” said Hedegaard.

Her main message Thursday, though, and throughout her trip to Washington, is how crucial significant U.S. legislation to address climate change is to global efforts – and the domestic benefits it would have for the U.S.

In meetings over the past couple days with her U.S. counterpart Todd Stern – the U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change – as well as other major players here like U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson, White House Climate and Energy Office head Carol Browner and Representative Edward Markey, Hedegaard says she got the sense that they are not sure “what will fly and what will not fly or when” with regards to U.S. climate legislation.

“I definitely get the feeling that if [the legislation] fails this time then it would not come until after the midterm elections,” Hedegaard said. Those elections take place Nov. 2. The Cancun climate conference starts Nov. 29.

When the parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change last met, in Copenhagen, a late push for the U.S. Senate to approve a climate bill before the start of the meeting had fallen short, and this was widely seen as decreasing both the potential effectiveness and the expectations of the conference.

But with Washington focused on health care right now and other top legislative priorities like financial regulation and immigration reform set to monopolise the bulk of legislators’ attentions later this year – and to use up any willingness of conservatives to support President Barack Obama’s proposals – the possibility of going into another UNFCCC meeting without U.S. domestic commitments already on the books seemed entirely real.

“It would be tremendous progress if we could see specific legislation coming out of the U.S. in the near future,” said Hedegaard. But she is prepared to face the possibility of moving forward without that legislation.

She proposes a “stepwise” approach leading into the Mexico meeting that would focus on specific deliverables, so that Mexico can mark “the turning point where we do not talk but actually act.”

Among these deliverables would be making available the funding promised to poorer countries to help them fight and cope with the effects of climate change. The EU, U.S. and Japan promised 30 billion dollars over the next three years as part of a “fast-start” funding package, but those promises have yet to be acted upon. The EU reconfirmed its commitment to providing the funding Tuesday and called on the other rich states to do the same.

“It is crucial for developing countries’ confidence in this process that finance is available by Cancun at the latest,” Hedegaard said. She says the Obama administration seems to share this view.

Back on Capitol Hill, it is far too early to say a climate bill is not possible before Cancún. Details of one of the proposals most likely to gain sufficient support emerged this week.

Senators John Kerry, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman – a Democrat, Republican and Independent, respectively – went over their bipartisan plan with industry groups Wednesday and environmental groups Thursday.

According to reports, the bill would aim to reduce U.S. emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels – about three to four percent below 1990 levels – by 2020 and by 80 percent by 2050. It would also set prices for greenhouse gas emission allowances and increase those prices over time. Less appealing to environmentalists, though, it would include expanded offshore drilling and funding for nuclear power plants.

The Senators say they will formally introduce the bill in mid-April, at which time it will undergo a five- to six-week analysis by the EPA and Congressional Budget Office. Graham has also warned that the increasingly divisive health care debate will cost Democrats some Republican allies they might have had in their push for a climate bill.

If even this compromise proposal fails, the fall-back option for proponents of climate change action would be a bill that does not cap greenhouse gas emissions. This “energy-only” bill would mandate a larger percentage of energy come from renewable sources, but it, too – in addition to doing nothing to directly limit the amount of greenhouse gases U.S. emitters put in the atmosphere – would include expanded offshore drilling.

Hedegaard says the U.S. need only look to the EU to see that it is in their best interest to pass a bill. “If you do this intelligently, it will lead to job creation,” she said. “Today, Germany has more jobs in renewables than in coal and nuclear combined – very different from the way it used to be…We can actually prove that it is good business to do this.”

The question the U.S. needs to ask itself, she said, is “Do you want to be part of this or not? Do you want to be a leader or be left behind?”

For the sake of international negotiations, she hopes the U.S. will choose the former.

Excerpt:

By Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Mar 12 2010 (IPS)

As climate change transforms the acidity and oxygen levels of the world’s waters with devastating effects for some marine species, others are facing an even more immediate threat from human consumption.

To reverse that unsustainable trade, an unprecedented number of aquatic species have been proposed for listing on the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora in order to prohibit or significantly curtail international trade in those species.

Among them are eight species of sharks – sought for dishes ranging from shark fin soup to fish and chips. This Saturday and for the following two weeks, these sharks and a high-profile lineup of other species will be discussed as the parties to CITES meet in Doha.

Recent studies have estimated that up to 73 million sharks are caught each year for the fin trade alone, though it is notoriously hard to gather precise numbers on it.

With a growing and increasingly well-off population – especially in eastern Asia, where shark fin soup is a delicacy – the intensity with which sharks are fished has been increasing. But so has the intensity of efforts to slow this unsustainable practice.

“The fact that we’re seeing more proposals for sharks at CITES is a good sign in that species that need this international attention and monitoring are getting it, but it is also a sad sign of the oceans being in real danger,” said Ellen Pikitch, executive director of the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science at Stony Brook University in New York, who has conducted a number of studies on international trade in sharks.

Since shark products are generally exported from one country to another, a CITES listing could have a huge impact on the threatened species’ recovery.

Sharks have particular biological characteristics that make them extremely vulnerable to overfishing, including the fact that many give birth to live young, while other fish may produce hundreds of thousands of eggs.

They also have notoriously long pregnancies. The spiny dogfish, one of the species up for listing on CITES, has the longest gestation period of any vertebrate at 24 months. Spiny dogfish can also live 100 years or more and do not reach sexual maturity until a decade or two in.

Because of these biological handicaps, said Pikitch, “scientists have been concerned for a long time about the effects of sharks being fished on a large scale –and that’s what we’ve been seeing now.”

Spiny dogfish have small fins and are instead fished for their meat, which has replaced North Atlantic cod – after that fishery was decimated by overfishing – as the main fish for fish and chips dishes in the Europe.

But now, spiny dogfish populations in the northeast Atlantic “are so depleted that they’ve essentially collapsed,” according to Matt Rand, director of global shark conservation at the Pew Environment Group.

The EU, he says, has closed its fisheries for spiny dogfish as well as for porbeagle, another shark fished for its meat and up for a CITES listing in Doha. “Europe has taken all the measures that it can to protect these species in their water but need they action to be taken globally,” said Rand.

Another two of sharks up for CITES – oceanic whitetip and scalloped hammerhead – are threatened by unsustainable demand for their fins while the rest are other hammerhead species that have been included in the proposal as “look-alike species” since their fins are not easily distinguishable from scalloped hammerheads’.

All these sharks have been proposed for Appendix II of CITES, which would still allow some trade in their products but would require export certificates and monitoring to ensure the species’ survival is not being threatened by the limited trade.

The politics of survival

The species currently protected or prohibited from international trade by CITES are mainly terrestrial. Yet the oceans are the last remaining habitat in which wild animals are hunted in large numbers for human consumption, and the international community is beginning to recognise the need to navigate the heated political waters of regulating trade in the wildlife found there.

All the marine species up for CITES listing – the eight sharks along with red and pink corals and Atlantic bluefin tuna are often exported from the countries’ waters where they are fished. CITES, therefore, has a unique and key role to play in securing these species’ recovery and survival.

But it will not be smooth sailing at Doha.

Pikitch recalled how previous proposals on porbeagle and spiny dogfish were discussed but ultimately failed at the last CITES meeting in 2007 at The Hague.

Conservationists are more optimistic this time around, but convincing the two-thirds of the 175 countries that are party to CITES – the threshold needed for a listing to pass – will still be a difficult task.

Some countries will be particularly difficult to get on board.

“I think it’s very clear China and Japan will not support protection for these shark species,” said Rand, though he says “there’s a lot of education that’s been going in China.”

On Tuesday, the Maldives announced it was making its territorial waters a shark sanctuary and banned all imports and exports of shark fins. The timing was conspicuously close to the start of the CITES meeting and was seen as giving an extra boost to advocates of limiting trade in sharks.

The Maldives join Palau, which took the same step in September when they announced a ban shark fishing in their waters, creating what Rand described as a “sanctuary the size of Texas where sharks are free to roam.”

“There’s a lot going on for global shark conservation right now and I think it’s really picked up significantly in the last year,” he said.

Palau has been at the vanguard of this movement and the only country that has openly been a proponent of all the sharks CITES proposals.

The U.S., too, has been beginning to take a stand. The Shark Conservation Act passed the U.S. House of Representatives last March and is currently awaiting a vote in the Senate.

It would prohibit U.S. fishing vessels from having any shark fins on board that are not naturally attached to a shark carcass, thus banning the practices of slicing off a fin at sea and throwing the carcass back. It would also take measures against trade with countries that do not have similar a law.

The U.S., which has the largest exclusive economic zone off its coasts, has also helped lead an effort to implement similar measures at the regional fisheries management organisations (RFMOs) that regulate fishing in international waters.

Much of the reason for an uptick in shark conservation may be economic. Recent studies have found sharks are worth more alive and wild than dead.

According to the conservation group Oceana, reef sharks in the Bahamas have been estimated to be worth 250,000 dollars in tourism spending and only 50 dollars when caught.

A 2006 Australian government study found that 25 percent of the spending by visitors to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia is directly attributable to the opportunity to see sharks. And a study from James Cook University, also in Australia, found that a gray reef shark in the Maldives was worth 3,300 dollars a year in tourism, as opposed to 32 dollars when sold by a fisherman.

But the justification for protecting sharks goes deeper than economic costs and benefits. As an apex predator, sharks are critical for maintaining the health of the oceans and the heath of the populations of fish and other species that are a major part of human diets.

As human population expands and fish stocks are overfished, sharks have been increasingly targeted as sources of protein and income. The way that targeting will cascade down the food chain is still unkown.

Excerpt:

By Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Mar 6 2010 (IPS)

The vast majority of the species protected by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES, live on land, but as marine species come under increasing pressure from unsustainable fishing and a range of climate change-related threats that focus is beginning to shift.

Some countries are seeking a ban on commercial trade in bluefin tuna, estimated to be a 7.2-billion-dollar-a-year industry. Credit: Public domain

The parties of CITES meet every two and a half years to assess the treaty’s effectiveness and vote on adding or removing species from its lists – lists which dictate whether and the degree to which threatened plants and animals are protected from commercial trade.

The next meeting will begin next week in Doha, Qatar, and go from Mar. 13 through 25. On the agenda will be a record number of proposals to protect marine species.

Trade in one of those, the Atlantic bluefin tuna, is estimated to be a 7.2-billion-dollar-a-year industry.

Wednesday, the United States reiterated its support for listing the threatened tuna under Appendix I of CITES, which would ban all international commercial trade in the popular sushi and sashimi fish.

Thursday, a Japanese government official announced his country would not comply with a ban on trade in Atlantic bluefin. Four-fifths of the harvest is shipped to Japan where a single fish can be sold for as much as 100,000 dollars.

“If worse comes to worst, Japan will have no choice but to lodge its reservations,” Japanese Senior Vice Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Masahiko Yamada was quoted as saying Thursday.

CITES is made up of 175 member countries – including the U.S. and Japan – which have voluntarily joined the treaty and are now legally bound by its provisions.

However, parties can file a reservation within 90 days of a species’ listing which allows them to not be bound by the provisions relating to that specific species. By filing a reservation, then, Japan could keep purchasing bluefin from other countries who also refuse to comply with the ban.

Spain, Greece and Malta – which all have major tuna-fishing industries – have also opposed a ban on bluefin trade. France, another major tuna-fishing country, supports a ban but only after an 18-month delay and only for a limited period of time. Italy has expressed support for the proposed ban.

Gerry Leape, a senior officer at Pew Environment Group, says it is unlikely that one of these European tuna giants would choose to not comply with the bluefin listing in order to continue to export the fish to Japan, since they would have to follow the EU’s decision.

EU officials were meeting Friday to discuss their position and are expected to reach a decision within the next week. The European Commission and European Parliament have already come out in favor of the ban, as have Germany and the United Kingdom.

Moreover, says Leape, reservations are “serious political statements that you decided not to follow the rules.”

For its part, Japan already has reservations on eight Appendix I species – all of which are whales or dolphins – and three Appendix II species – all sharks. Trade in Appendix II species is legal but is tightly controlled to make sure it does not hurt a species’ survival.

“Japan as a government has a history of opposing listing of marine species on CITES appendices,” says Bill Fox, vice president and managing director for fisheries at the World Wildlife Fund-U.S. He says it is “disappointing but not unexpected that they’d oppose” listing bluefin.

Fox says that historically it “has been difficult to get support for any commercially significant fish in CITES.” Over the past year, though, people in the marine community have been looking more to CITES to achieve their conservation objectives, he says.

A political fight for survival

An international ban on Atlantic bluefin trade was first proposed by Monaco last July. Like bison on the U.S. Great Plains, the Atlantic bluefin tuna were once the marquee species of Mediterranean and Atlantic waters, where they raced at speeds up to 100 kilometres along 1,000-metre-long migration routes.

But their numbers have dropped precipitously over the past several decades – and by 60 percent during just the last 10 years.

In October, scientists at the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna, or ICATT, found that bluefin populations had declined 72 percent in the eastern Atlantic and 82 percent in the western Atlantic over the past 40 years, during which time industrial fishing operations have significantly ramped up.

During the last decade alone the eastern population has been depleted at two to three times sustainable rates while the western population’s decrease has more or less stabilised – albeit at an extremely low level.

This is suspected to be due to enforced and sustainable quotas in the Gulf of Mexico and eastern Atlantic waters and a lack of such science-based management in the eastern ocean and Mediterranean. The CITES ban on international trade would apply to both western and eastern stocks.

The scientists recommended that ICCAT ban fishing of the species at its November meeting in Brazil, as did some country delegations, including the U.S.’s.

But the talks concluded with an agreement that would reduce the Atlantic and Mediterranean bluefin tuna catch for 2010 to 13,500 metric tonnes – lower than 2009’s 22,000, but far from the U.S.’s hoped-for 8,000 or lower.

Activist groups were outraged and U.S. officials expressed disappointment, but it was not clear whether the U.S. would continue to pursue a complete ban on trade in the species.

Their position was made clear this week, much to the satisfaction of those who have watched bluefin stocks dwindle dangerously close to commercial extinction.

Now, there’s “a chance” the CITES listing will be approved, says WWF’s Fox, but it’s going to be a tough battle.

The international ban on Atlantic bluefin trade was first proposed by Monaco last July. In order for it to be approved, it will need two-thirds of the parties to CITES to vote in favor of it.

“We’re excited about the U.S. decision to commit to a position of leadership,” says Leape. “While it’s still a big test to get the two-thirds vote, having the U.S. on board is huge.”

Fox points out, however, that “one of the things people – and Japan – don’t really see is that CITES can’t manage these species by itself. ICATT is going to have to do its job by cutting the allowable catch.”

“It’s important to note that nations jointly manage stocks through regional fisheries management organisations – RFMOs [such as ICCAT]. Nations – members of RFMOs – are the only ones with the power to implement management and conservation of tuna stocks,” Mike Crispino, spokesman for the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation, explained in an email. “Too often, lately, one nation blocks consensus, thus blocking progress.”

Fox says there are two ways in which a CITES listing will help ICATT, which has faced criticism for allowing too generous quotas, do its job: by neutralising international pressure opposing restrictions on fishing and by providing additional enforcement mechanisms.

Amongst the over 40 proposals on the agenda, the CITES meeting will also discuss the listings of eight species of sharks and several corals.

Excerpt:

By Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Mar 2 2010 (IPS)

As the 11th anniversary of the Mine Ban Treaty entering into effect came and went Monday, the United States remained one of only 37 countries to have yet to sign on to the agreement.

The U.S. does, however, comply with many of the provisions of the international treaty, which prohibits the use, stockpiling, production and export of anti-personnel mines.

According to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, the U.S. has not used anti-personnel mines since 1991, has had an export ban in place since 1992 and has not produced them since 1997. It is also the world’s largest individual contributor for mine action and victim assistance programmes.

But advocacy groups say this is not enough.

“The last 11 years have shown that the Mine Ban Treaty is working,” said Steve Goose, arms division director at Human Rights Watch. “Deadly antipersonnel mines are no longer viewed as a legitimate weapon of war, and it is time for the U.S. to recognise that reality with a decision to sign on to the treaty.”

The question now is why the U.S. has not signed on to a treaty it seems to support in deed, if not in word, and why, if the U.S.’s actions do for the most part line up with the treaty’s provisions, are advocacy groups so concerned with having the country’s name on the dotted line.

The answer to both questions seems to be spillover. If the U.S. were to join the international treaty, conservative U.S. policymakers fear, the action would cede some sovereignty to the international community, setting a precedent that may lead to further supranational oversight.

From the other angle, the NGOs pushing the U.S. to sign feel that if the U.S. were to join the treaty, other countries would be pushed to join as well – or at least no longer be able to point to the U.S.’s non-compliance as a justification for theirs.

“There are countries that won’t join the treaty because they can hide behind the U.S. and some of those counties that haven’t signed on. And some of these countries may be more likely to use landmines,” explains Zach Hudson, coordinator of the U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines, a coalition of individuals and groups.

The list of non-signatories includes Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran and Israel.

There are other reasons that groups like the USCBL are still pushing, a decade later, for the U.S. to officially come on board.

“The strongest reason is that, while they’re not being used, the U.S. currently maintains a stockpile of 10.4 million landmines,” says Hudson.

He wants to make sure that those mines are never used. Becoming a party to Mine Ban Treaty, also known as the Ottawa Treaty, would require destruction of stockpiles of anti-personnel mines within four years.

He says that it is also important for the U.S. to live up to its principles. He cited Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize speech in December, in which the president rejected the kind of “exceptionalism” that the President George W. Bush had employed to argue that the U.S. should not be constrained by the laws, treaties and other international conventions that bind other nations.

Signing onto the landmine treaty would be an “easy way to demonstrate that the U.S. is serious about becoming part of the international community,” Hudson says.

So why has it not? That’s the question his organisation would like to have an answer to, he says.

The misgivings of conservative policymakers and military heads regarding international treaties could be part of the answer.

“That’s probably one issue,” he says, “and that the Defence Department doesn’t like taking orders from the international community or civil society generally.”

In the late 1990s, then-President Bill Clinton used the landmine-studded Korean Demilitarised Zone to justify not signing on to the treaty when it was first opened for signature. He said this policy was likely to change at a future date once alternatives to antipersonnel mines became available. Clinton set a goal of joining by 2006.

But the George W. Bush administration then conducted a review of U.S. landmine policy which resulted, in February 2004, in what USCBL calls “a major rollback of U.S. progress on the issue.”

“If the U.S. has not used landmines in 19 years, then there are clearly other alternatives,” contends Hudson, and past arguments that landmines are necessary for military operations no longer hold water.

Goose likewise contends it will not “tie the hands of the U.S. military. Some ask how the U.S. can join when it is at war in Afghanistan and Iraq, but both those nations are members of the treaty and are already obliged to reject any use of antipersonnel mines.”

Ultimately, he and other activists would like the Obama administration to conclude that there is no reason why they should not sign on to the treaty. That is one possible outcome of an ongoing Obama administration review of U.S. mine policy.

“We want review aimed at joining the treaty and finding out whether there are reasons not to,” says Hudson.

He hopes the process is “timely and inclusive” and that all perspectives, including those of NGOs, NATO allies and legislators, are taken into account.

Every member of NATO except the U.S. has signed the treaty, though Poland has not yet ratified it. It is expected to do so in 2012.

In November, the State Department announced that the review had concluded with a decision not to sign the treaty, but following international outcry the State Department insisted the next day that the review was still ongoing.

There have been hopeful signs from the administration for disarmament and human rights activists as well, however. For the first time ever, the U.S. sent an observer to a meeting of the parties to the treaty in Cartagena in December.

But the overall trend is not so rosy for those who would like to see these and similar weapons banned. The Convention on Cluster Munitions reached the number of ratifications it needed to go into effect last month, but the U.S. – along with other top cluster munitions-users Russia and Israel – has also not signed on to that treaty.

Excerpt:

By Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Mar 2 2010 (IPS)

Neoliberal economic ideas have grown increasingly dominant over the last 30 years. During that same time, the spread of HIV/AIDS has reached an epidemic crescendo.

This is more than a coincidence, argues Rick Rowden, author of the new book “The Deadly Ideas of Neoliberalism: How the IMF has Undermined Public Health and the Fight against AIDS.”

Rowden, who is a senior policy analyst at ActionAid, has long been critical of the way in which the restrictive spending policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have, in his view, set up a framework in which public health priorities go underfunded in the countries which receive aid from these international financial institutions.

This argument is detailed in his new book and last week he made his case at the IMF itself.

“The development that is needed has been pursued by the IMF and World Bank over these last decades in a way that has led to an inability of countries to invest properly in health…and the consequences of that have unfortunately been felt by the people on the ground in those countries,” Rowden said in a panel discussion at the Fund’s headquarters here.

The problem seems to be the amount of space available for funding health priorities like combating AIDS under the public spending and inflation restrictions imposed by the Fund on the countries to which it lends.

The IMF’s development strategy has historically tried to encourage economic development through a neoliberal strategy that limits countries’ public spending for fear they will go too far into debt or that it will impede the development of the private sector. But Rowden says this philosophy is flawed and is a real hindrance to the developing world – both in their fights against AIDS and their general economic development.

“I think there was this mythology in neoliberalism where if you just got government out of the way business would flourish…but public investment is essential for long-term economic development,” he said.

He credits subsidies and public research policies for helping rich countries beef up their domestic companies and their economies, but these policies in which government is directly involved in the private sector are inimitable with the tenets of neoliberalism.

“What neoliberalism has done is create a false dichotomy between governments and their domestic companies,” Rowden said, explaining that neoliberalism has imposed a “divorce” between government and private firms in which “companies sink or swim.” He contends this relationship should instead be one in which companies and countries “rub each others’ backs.”

His critique of the IMF clearly goes beyond the institution’s impact on the spread of HIV. He argues that the spending and inflation limits it imposes directly impact the ability of countries to invest in researching better ways to combat the disease as well as to limit its impact on their populations.

But the international financial institutions (IFIs) appear increasingly open to criticism and new ideas, as evidenced by the Fund’s hosting Rowden last week.

Peter Berman, lead economist of the Bank’s Health and Nutrition Department, felt that “the broad attack on neoliberalism is a bit out of date… I think we’ve moved on in many ways.” Even countries that claim to adhere to neoliberal policies don’t actually all have the same policies, he noted.

Berman does not think “the world we’re living in is a world where the IMF and World Bank are imposing their will on countries.”

For his part, Rowden says he is “glad to see some new thinking coming out the IMF recently.”

AIDS killed two million people in 2008, according to the most recent United Nations estimates, released in November 2009. An estimated three-quarters of those deaths were in Africa. Another 31.1 to 35.8 million people were living with HIV or AIDS that year – between 20 and 24 million of those in Africa.

Sanjeev Gupta, deputy director of the IMF Fiscal Affairs Department, represented the Fund at last week’s discussion. He cited multiple studies, mostly to demonstrate that the IMF has spent significantly on health issues.

He argued that countries’ health budgets are domestic decisions. “If countries want to emphasise health, that should be reflected in their budgets,” he said, pointing out that countries generally allocate almost twice as much for education as for health. “I don’t know why, but that is the fact,” Gupta said.

Rowden contended that Gupta was largely missing the point of his argument, which is that “the tax base of developing economies is not growing, not that the IMF is not giving enough for health. The main question is why can’t domestic companies expand and contribute to the tax base. Are countries going to be dependent on aid forever? Show me how the tax base is going to expand.”

This tax base is crucial to funding public investment in health and elsewhere, but, he says, it is constrained by IMF restrictions on inflation and budget deficits.

He elaborated on this point in a December exchange on the IMF website: “The concern over such policies is that their degree of restrictiveness unnecessarily undermines the ability of domestic industries to generate higher levels of productive capacity, employment, and GDP output – and thus, tax revenues – than otherwise could be the case under more expansionary fiscal and monetary policy options.”

This means less revenue for everyday government expenditures as well as for long-term public investment.

“It is easy for the IMF to say, ‘We don’t tell countries not to spend enough on health’,” he said Tuesday, “but the problem is deeper.”

For him, it is the basic models of economic development that underlie IMF lending.

“What I would say to health advocates is you’re going to need a different approach,” Rowden said, explaining that it is not just about increasing the health budget but scaling up public investment as a whole. “If you want countries to really achieve any health goals over time…you need to ask what’s up with the model; where has it gone wrong?”

“Neoliberalism isn’t causative in the AIDS epidemic, but it couldn’t have come at a worse time” as far as public health is concerned, noted Health GAP Co-Chair Brook Baker.

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By Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Feb 28 2010 (IPS)

As the war over health care continues in Washington and a war of a bloodier nature heats up in Ciudád Juárez and elsewhere in Mexico, top U.S. and Mexican officials are hoping to reduce both pressures on the health system and the ongoing bloodshed.

A three-day conference at the U.S. State Department concluded Thursday with a joint acknowledgement by the two countries of the crucial need to reduce drug demand and intensify prevention and treatment efforts.

“We are building a health system that prepares communities to prevent illicit drug consumption and promotes a healthy society,” said U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

But south of the U.S.-Mexico border, violence related to drug trafficking has ravaged society, and both countries have made it clear that emphasising the demand front of the war on drugs does not necessarily mean deemphasising the campaign against suppliers.

Nor is demand the only aspect on which the U.S. and Mexico will step up their cooperation.

It was reported earlier this week that U.S. drug enforcement officials will begin to work more closely with Mexican troops to combat the northward flow of narcotics and the violence it has bred south of and along the border.

Reports originally said U.S. agents would be embedded in Mexican law enforcement units. At the conference here, though, Mexican and U.S. diplomats said Wednesday that that was not the case and that not only would such a move jeopardise Mexican sovereignty but it would be illegal under the country’s laws.

The U.S. will, however, play a larger, though still indirect, role in ground operations as it will expand its intelligence sharing operations in Mexico and provide technical advice.

The reports on such expanded coordination this week “have not been that clear,” according to Maureen Meyer, associate for Mexico and Central America at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), though “we have seen the intention and statements the past few months looking for ways to expand that intelligence sharing.”

Meyer says the clearest sign of the level of coordination between the U.S. and Mexico in the trafficking war is the establishment of a joint office in Mexico City in which enforcement authorities from both countries will work to address mutual threats and monitor programmes established under the Mérida Initiative, the agreement under which the U.S. and Mexico cooperate on fighting drug trafficking and other trans-national crimes.

She sees this as “part of a broader rethinking that the U.S. is doing” with regard to Mexico trafficking policy.

The necessity of this rethinking is not hard to see.

So far, 2010 has been particularly bloody in the affected regions of Mexico. Trafficking-related violence is estimated to have taken 1,400 lives in the first two months of the year.

In an especially chilling incident, 13 teenagers and two adults were reportedly gunned down at a birthday party in the Juárez neighbourhood of Villas Salvacar Jan. 31 when hitmen for the Juárez cartel ambushed a birthday party instead of the rival gang they had expected to find.

This is only one incident in an escalating turf war in a city flooded with a reported 8,000 troops and police.

But the incident may serve as a wake-up call for policymakers to broaden their rethinking and look for new, less militaristic ways to combat trafficking.

This week’s meeting in Washington on demand reduction continues the Barack Obama administration’s efforts to acknowledge the role of U.S. demand in fuelling drug violence and trafficking in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America.

This shift in Washington’s tone on drug policy was kick-started last March when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted, “We know very well that the drug traffickers are motivated by the demand for illegal drugs in the United States and that they are armed by the transport of weapons from the United States.”

The “Declaration of Drug Demand Reduction Cooperation” announced at the close of this week’s meeting continues the effort to address that motivation at the source. Whether it can be successful in itself, though, is still an open question.

“It’s important to make more progress than we have made [in demand reduction] and there’s certainly plenty of room for improvement, but I don’t think either government should suffer the illusion that the U.S. is going to see a dramatic reduction in the scale of the market – even with treatment and prevention,” said John Walsh, Senior Associate for Andes and Drug Policy at WOLA.

In the plan laid out Thursday, the U.S. and Mexico would prioritiae such actions as providing more and better addiction treatment, intervention and prevention as well as the broader goal of developing communities that “develop a culture of lawfulness.”

It also underscores cooperation between the neighbouring countries and looks ahead to the National Drug Control Strategy that Obama is expected to unveil later this spring. This strategy would also prioritise demand measures like treatment and prevention, among other aims.

In Mexico, though, the bodies are piling up. Drug-related violence is estimated to have claimed over 17,000 lives since Mexican President Felipe Calderón escalated the anti-drug trafficker fight after taking office in 2006.

Killings tied to the trafficking are a daily occurrence in some places. The website Stopthedrugwar.org, which tracks the violence, tallies just this week’s body count at 137 as of Thursday evening.

In Juárez alone, there were 2,670 homicides last year, very few of which have led or will lead to a court case. The arrests that do occur are clouded by accusations of human rights abuses by the soldiers detaining them, including accusations of torture, illegal detentions and beatings.

Ahead of U.S. college students’ upcoming spring holidays, the U.S. State Department advised U.S. citizens Monday to avoid travel to the Mexican states of Coahuila, Durango, Michoacán and Chihuahua, of which Juárez is the largest city.

New ways of tackling the issues are emerging, however. At a meeting in Mexico City last week organized by the Colectivo por una Política Integral hacia las Drogas, politicians, academics and activists discussed alternatives to current strategies, focusing largely on harm reduction strategies and moving away from “prohibitionism”.

This came as the United Nations’ International Narcotics Control Board’s annual report, released Wednesday, criticised some Latin American countries for moving to decriminalise certain drugs. Mexico decriminalised possession of small amounts cocaine, heroin and marijuana last year.

Moves like these, says the report “undermine national and international efforts” to combat drug use and trafficking.

In Washington, the Marijuana Policy Project criticised the conference here for not acknowledging what it sees as the “obvious solution” to cartel-related violence – decriminalising marijuana in the U.S.

While actions such as decriminalisation still seem unlikely, the Obama administration does seem to be open to new ideas on how to reduce drug trafficking.

According to WOLA’s Meyer and other reports, the U.S. will move away from a focus on providing hardware and equipment to Mexican troops and police and instead try to strengthen Mexican institutions and governance.

“Cooperation should go beyond the issue of drug trafficking and look at institutional weaknesses that Mexico will have to address regardless,” including corruption and increasing the accountability of officials, said Meyer.

Meanwhile, the president is asking Congress for an additional 310 million dollars to help fund Mexico’s counter-narcotics efforts next year under the 1.4-billion-dollar Mérida Initiative.

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By Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Feb 22 2010 (IPS)

Following a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama and a summit last week, human rights activists from a range of countries released a plan of action Monday according to which the United States can lead the way in safeguarding human rights.

The recommendations are the outcome of discussions that followed the 2010 Washington Human Rights Summit late last week. At the summit those fighting, both on the front lines and behind the scenes, for human rights and more responsive democracies in 27 countries gathered in Washington to discuss what they saw as a widespread escalation of assaults on human rights.

“The decline is global,” said William Taft IV, chairman of Freedom House, in opening the conference. “And it’s accompanied by enhanced persecution of political dissidents and journalists.”

Delegates from Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Venezuela, Uganda, Zimbabwe and elsewhere presented their experiences in their own countries to summit participants as well as their expectations of what the U.S. can and should do to protect human rights.

In addition to the economic recession, noted Taft, “we have also had a political recession and we think the governments of the world have not fully focused on the growing political recession that is underway in the world today.”

After meeting with the Dalai Lama earlier in the day, Obama met with the human rights defenders at the White House on Feb. 19. In the closed meeting, the president was reportedly urged to further align U.S. counterterrorism policies with human rights standards.

In a statement following the meeting, Human Rights First President and CEO Eliza Massimino said, “The United States has an obligation to support their courageous work, and that begins by setting a strong example here at home – closing Guantanamo, bringing terrorist suspects to justice in civilian trials, and ending the practice of indefinite detention.”

Human Rights First co-hosted the summit with Freedom House.

“The President pledged that his administration will continue to strive to live by the universal standards we champion, highlighted his commitment to engagement that extends to civil society and everyday citizens, and reiterated his support for a broad view that recognizes the crucial link between development and human rights,” said a White House press release on the meeting.

The delegation also reportedly met with National Security Advisor General James Jones and other senior national security staff.

The Obama administration’s record on human rights issues has been largely mixed so far. The U.S. reversed a previous position and joined – with an eye toward reforming – the troubled United Nations Human Rights Council in May, but human rights groups have complained that many others of former President George W. Bush’s controversial policies – such as keeping the Guantanamo prison open – have not been reversed.

In an essay in Monday’s issue of the journal Foreign Affairs, for instance, Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth says “empty promises” and an “incomplete reversal” have characterised Obama track record on human rights so far.

“When it comes to promoting human rights at home and abroad, there has undoubtedly been a marked improvement in presidential rhetoric. However, the translation of those words into deeds remains incomplete,” Roth writes.

These concerns were partly addressed by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labour Michael Posner in a Thursday panel discussion at the summit.

“We have lots of problems in our own society,” he acknowledged, “not the least of which are the national security issues that we’ve talked about and that I feel strongly about, including the treatment of prisoners.”

Posner said he believes in a single human rights standard for all countries, saying it is “important that we do the right thing in our own affairs and that we lead by example.”

The plan of action released Monday largely focuses on the U.S. role in promoting human rights in other countries, however, rather than addressing work that may need to be done at home.

Among the specific recommendations, the human rights defenders call on the U.S. to create a strategy for promoting freedom of expression “in countries where it is under threat” as well as to “fulfill its pledge to make Internet freedom an international priority.”

In a major speech last month, U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton made internet freedom a new and important part of U.S. foreign policy as she called on Chinese authorities to investigate the security breaches that had triggered Google’s decision to end its cooperation with Chinese censorship of its search engine results.

Posner also mentioned the relatively new issue of internet freedom Thursday. Governments are “freaking out,” he said. “They don’t quite know how to deal with it.”

The summit’s recommendations also emphasise the role of civil society organisations and the need for the U.S. to support their work in promoting human rights and democracy. It calls on the superpower to “not acquiesce to the demands of other governments to vet or restrict U.S. foreign assistance to CSOs.”

“There are many countries that are staying up late at night to figure out ways to limit the activities of NGOs,” Posner acknowledged.

The U.S. has been criticised for agreeing to allow the Egyptian government to have veto power over which NGOs in Egypt get money from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Roth, likewise, terms this an “acquiescence” and cites it as one of several instances in which Obama “has not publicly criticised U.S. allies in the Middle East that violate democratic principles, nor is there any evidence that he has privately encouraged these authoritarian governments to move in a more democratic direction.”

The plan of action also calls on the U.S. to actively support the work of human rights defenders internationally and the building of democratic institutions.

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By Matthew O. Berger
WASHINGTON, Feb 17 2010 (IPS)

Just over a year after it was opened for signature, an international treaty banning cluster bombs received the final two ratifications it needed to become international law Tuesday.

Burkina Faso and Moldova ratified the Convention on Cluster Munitions to much praise from human rights and victim advocacy groups. The treaty will become international law Aug. 1, when use, production and trade in cluster munitions will be banned and deadlines for stockpile destruction will be set.

States that have used cluster munitions in the past will also be obligated to provide support for communities affected by the use of the munitions and to assist in clearing contaminated land.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon pointed to the quick turnaround between the treaty’s adoption and its ratification as evidence of “the world’s collective revulsion at the impact of these terrible weapons.”

The treaty process was started in February 2007 when 46 states agreed to start drawing up a cluster munitions-banning treaty. The eventual convention was available for ratification starting in December 2008 and has now, 15 months later, reached the threshold needed to enter into force.

“The short time it took to reach this milestone shows that governments have a strong desire never to see these terrible weapons used again,” said Steve Goose, arms division director at Human Rights Watch and co-chair of the international Cluster Munition Coalition.

Cluster munitions explode in mid-air to release dozens – sometimes hundreds – of smaller “bomblets” across large areas. Because the final location of these scattered smaller bombs is difficult to control, they can cause large numbers of civilian casualties.

Bomblets that fail to explode immediately may also lay dormant, potentially acting as landmines and killing or maiming civilians long after a conflict is ended.

Children are known to be particularly at risk from dud cluster munitions since they are often attracted to the shiny objects and less aware of their dangers.

“Cluster munitions are unreliable and inaccurate, said Ban, adding that “they impair post-conflict recovery by making roads and land inaccessible to farmers and aid workers.”

The U.S. has historically been one main users of cluster munitions, but it – along with other key powers like China, India, Israel, Russia and Pakistan – has refused to sign on to the treaty.

The George W. Bush administration actively opposed the treaty, saying cluster munitions served an important military role.

It was hoped that the Barack Obama administration would shift this position, and legislation to ban most cluster munitions use by the U.S. military, the Cluster Munitions Civilian Protection Act, was introduced in Congress in less than a month after he took office.

But a year later, that legislation has stalled in committee and it is unclear where Obama stands on the issue, though the president did sign a law in March 2009 banning the export of all but a tiny fraction of U.S. cluster munitions.

The most recent large-scale employment of cluster bombs was in the Russia-Georgia war of August 2008, which Human Rights Watch has called the first known use of the controversial munitions since the Israeli attacks on Lebanon in 2006.

During the last 72 hours of the 2006 conflict, Israel reportedly fired over 1,800 cluster rockets containing 1.2 million submunitions. For the two months after the official cessation of hostilities, casualties were still being recorded at the rate of three or four people killed or maimed per day.

“Every signatory needs to ratify, and those who haven’t signed need to come on board to keep more civilian lives and limbs from being needlessly lost,” said Goose, pointing out that over half the world’s states have agreed to seek ratification.

“In light of this new international law, it is especially important for former users of the weapon – such as the United States, Russia and Israel – to re-examine their positions, which put questionable claims of military necessity above the well-documented humanitarian damage cluster munitions cause,” he said.

“Cluster munitions are already stigmatised to the point that no nation should ever use them again, even those who have not yet joined the Convention,” he added.

Even with over half the world’s countries onboard, without the U.S.’s involvement, the treaty covers less than half of the world’s cluster munitions.

“If the U.S. moved in it would ban more than half of the cluster munitions used in the world,” Lora Lumpe, legislative representative at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, which houses the U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines, told IPS following the introduction of the legislation a year ago.

Furthermore, she explained, by signing on the U.S. could put pressure on the other large-scale users of cluster bombs which have also not signed onto the treaty, such as Russia and China.

“I’m confident that if there was a policy review that included the full range of U.S. interests at stake, they would see that there is no need to hold on to the threat of these munitions that most of the rest of the world has banned,” Lumpe told IPS at the time.

“The cluster munitions treaty is the most important disarmament treaty to be developed since the landmine ban entered into force more than ten years ago,” said Ed Kenny, Handicap International’s senior programme officer for advocacy, referring to the 1997 treaty banning landmines on which the cluster munitions treaty was modeled.

Following negotiations involving governments that were in support of a ban as well as the International Committee of the Red Cross and the U.N., the convention was signed onto by 107 states in Dublin on May 30, 2008.

The 30 countries amongst these who have ratified the treaty include both those where cluster munitions have been used and those who have stockpiles of the munitions – as well as one country, Spain, that has already completed the destruction of its stockpiles.

The next step following the treaty’s becoming international law in August will be a meeting of the states who have ratified it in Laos in late 2010.

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